Near the tree line I found a man sitting alone reading a scroll. He was middle-aged, lean from travel, with ink stains on his fingers and a satchel at his side that he kept one hand on. His robes were a cut I didn't recognize from any of the four temples. I sat down near him and waited until he looked up.
"It's a good festival this year," I said.
"It is." He went back to his scroll.
"I haven't seen you at the Southern Temple's camp. Are you traveling?"
He looked at me over the scroll. He had the patient expression of a man who was used to being approached by children and waited them out. "I travel, yes. Is there something you need?"
I didn't have a way to ask what I wanted to ask. I couldn't say do you know Khandro? or have you read the writings? or are you one of them? to a stranger at a festival. If he was Guiding Wind and I asked the wrong way, he'd disappear. If he wasn't, he'd wonder why a nine-year-old was asking about a renegade movement that most Air Nomads considered a footnote in a history they preferred not to read.
"I'm just looking around," I said.
"Then I hope you find what you are looking for." He smiled and went back to his scroll. The smile was friendly. It told me nothing.
Not this one either.
The kites came at sunset.
They were cranefish shapes, paper and silk stretched over frames of thin wood, painted in every color the Air Nomads had pigment for. They had no strings. That was the point. A thousand airbenders on a meadow by the sea, each one holding a kite aloft with nothing but bending, the wind passing through their hands, up through the frame, holding it there by will alone. The youngest kids worked in pairs, two benders sharing one kite, their movements out of sync enough that the kite wobbled, dipped, and sometimes dove straight into the grass. The older novices sent theirs up solo. A girl about my age had hers climbing in a slow spiral, turning in circles that got wider as it rose. A boy from the Northern Temple sent his straight up so fast it shrank to a red dot against the darkening sky.
The kites layered above the meadow at different heights. The lowest were just overhead, close enough that I could see the silk catching the last of the sun and going translucent, the wooden ribs showing through like bones under skin. The highest were so far up they were just colored specks. In between, hundreds of cranefish turned, climbed, crossed paths, and banked away from each other. Above all of them the bison circled in their own patterns. The bison might have been following the kites or the kites might have been following the bison. There was no way to tell.
The sun was on the water. The sea was orange and gold. The light came up from below the kites, catching the undersides of the silk, and for a few seconds each kite had its own shadow on the kite above it, shadow-cranefish layered over paper cranefish layered over real bison in the real sky. The horn player who had been standing at the cliff's edge all day played one long note into the wind that went out over the water and didn't come back.
I stood in the meadow with no kite in my hands and no strategy in my head. The horn note held. The meadow was just a meadow. The kites were just kites. The light on the water was the kind of thing that happens once and you either see it or you don't.
Then the horn note ended. The sun dropped below the water's edge. The kites began to come down.
Dorje found me on the cliff after dark. Most of the crowd had moved back toward the campfires. The meadow was lit by firelight and stars.
"I watched you during the kites," he said. He sat down next to me on the cliff edge and let his feet hang over the side. "But wait, first — I found out about the bison with the scar."
"Really?"
"Yeah, I met this kid from the Northern Temple, Tenpa, and asked him about the bison with the scar and he goes, oh, you mean Pema? She got into a fight with a sabertooth moose lion when she was three. The moose lion got her across the face and she just picked it up and threw it off a cliff." He was grinning. "So I went and looked at her up close after. She stared at me until I walked away. Tenpa says she does that to everyone."
"A three-year-old bison can't throw a sabertooth moose lion."
"Well, I saw the scar, and I saw the look she gave me, so I'm going to trust Tenpa on this one." He pulled his knees up and looked out at the water. "Anyway. The kites."
"What about them?"
"You know how you always look like you're doing math? Like even when we're eating or walking somewhere, you've got this face like you're working something out in your head?" He idly picked up a rock from the cliff edge and tossed it over the side. We didn't hear it hit. "During the kites you didn't have it. You just looked like you were watching the kites."
I pulled my knees up. The grass was cool and damp. The sea was making the sound it makes when there's nothing between you and the water except rock and air. Somewhere behind us a group was singing. One of the old hymns, the ones without words, just sustained notes that overlapped and built on each other until the harmony was thick enough to feel in your teeth. The bison liked those songs. I could hear them rumbling along.
"I met a girl from the Eastern Temple," I said. "She's been digging through their archive looking for the same kind of stuff I found in ours."
"Can she do compression?"
"I don't think she's tried."
"You should teach her."
"How's yours going?" I asked.
"I hit it from fourteen feet yesterday. Three out of five."
"That's up from eleven."
"I know." He grinned. The gap where he'd lost a molar was visible even in the dark. "When we get back I want to try it from twenty."
"You're not ready for twenty feet."
"I know that too." He was still grinning.
We sat on the cliff listening to the singing, the sea, and the bison breathing. Behind us, a thousand people were settling into the grass for the night, rolling out blankets near the fires, children falling asleep against their parents, monks and nuns from four temples sharing a meadow like they had shared it every year for longer than anyone alive could remember.
I lay back in the grass. Dorje lay back too. He fell asleep in about three minutes because Dorje could fall asleep anywhere, a talent I had never had.
The singing had stopped. The fires were burning down. The tide was coming in below the cliff, a sound like slow breathing, regular enough to be mistaken for something alive.
Yeshi had found forty scrolls missing from the Eastern Temple. Somebody had taken them a long time ago, and nobody she'd talked to even knew they were gone. I needed to get to her camp before her group left in the morning. She was the first person I'd met at another temple who was pulling on the same threads I was, and I didn't want to lose track of her.
The grass was cold under my back. Somewhere in the dark a bison was snoring with a sound like a bellows with a leak in it. I closed my eyes and started planning the morning.