Three years before the Great Comet. Earth Kingdom countryside.
The canal had been leaking for six weeks before the village headman asked for help. By then the water had crossed the bank and drowned most of the east field's millet, three feet of standing water on the wrong side of the embankment, and the cut that carried the canal had gone soft at the edges from years of nobody bothering to maintain it. Khandro stood in the mud with his robes tucked into his belt, watching Dechen drive a wooden stake into the bank while two farmers packed clay around it. The sun was still low. His knees ached from the cold. They did that every morning now.
"Higher on the left," Khandro said. Dechen adjusted and drove the stake in three hits. She was nineteen, eight months with the Guiding Wind, recruited out of the Western Temple after she told her training master that meditation retreats did not count as community service when the community in question had no food. The master disagreed. Dechen packed a bag. She was better with her hands than her bending.
The headman watched from the path above with his arms crossed. His name was Huian, and he had a mouth that pulled to one side when he was thinking, which was most of the time. He had been headman for twelve years. In the eleventh the governor raised the tax assessment by forty percent, and Huian walked to the next village to ask if they had gotten the same letter. They had. So had the village after that.
Khandro had heard about it from a grain merchant in Gaoling. The merchant's concern was that three villages going under meant three fewer buyers at his autumn stall. Thirty years of listening to people talk had taught Khandro that useful information arrived from selfish motives about as often as generous ones.
"That should hold until the dry season," Dechen said, climbing out of the mud. She wiped her hands on her robes without looking at the stains. "The real problem is the headgate up at the diversion. The stones are cracked. If you get a heavy rain before you can refit them, this whole bank goes again."
Huian pulled his mouth to one side. "Where would I get new stones, though? We haven't had an earthbender in this village for years. The quarry's three days east and the governor controls the road."
"Two of my people can cut them from the ridge south of your upper field," Khandro said. "Tomorrow morning, if you can spare a cart."
The headman looked at him. It was a look Khandro had seen in a hundred villages. "How long are you staying?"
"Until the headgate is sound. After that, as long as you want us."
Huian unfolded his arms. "I'll have the cart ready at first light."
He walked back toward the village. Khandro watched him go and started thinking about stone.
The camp was in a copse of elms about a quarter mile from the village, far enough for the farmers to have their privacy but close enough that Khandro could smell their cooking fires mixing with his own in the evening air. Twenty-six people lived in this copse, and everything they owned fit on the backs of three bison or in the packs they carried themselves, bedrolls, cook pots, ink, paper, and the texts they taught from. Khandro had been carrying some of those texts for longer than most of his people had been alive.
The youngest was Thupten, fifteen, from the Northern Temple. He had been with the Guiding Wind for four months and had not spoken at an evening discussion yet. He sat at the edge of every conversation with his whole body tilted forward, listening with such intensity that Khandro sometimes wanted to tell him to sit back before he fell over. The oldest was Khandro. He felt it in his knees when the weather changed and in his lower back every night when he lay on ground that was never quite flat enough. He was fifty-two years old and sleeping in a field. His knees had opinions about this.
Zimu lifted his head when Khandro walked past the meadow where the bison grazed. He was Khandro's bull, dark brown with a pale belly, and he had been carrying Khandro since both of them were young. He breathed at Khandro as he passed, one long exhale through his nostrils, and Khandro put his hand on the bison's face without stopping.
Meditation happened on the meadow grass while the dew was still on it. Khandro sat at one end and breathed, and the others followed his rhythm or found their own.
Dechen took eight people to the canal after meditation. Six more went up to the terrace where a farmer's wife named Fen was teaching them to graft fruit trees. Fen wanted literacy lessons in exchange, which was the kind of trade the Guiding Wind was built for. The rest of the group stayed in camp mending clothes and copying texts. Khandro spent the morning moving between all three, checking the canal work, catching a grafting cut that would have killed the branch, and sitting with Thupten on a breathing exercise.
"You're holding the exhale," Khandro told him.
"I thought that was the whole point."
"You're holding it with your throat. Hold it with your diaphragm. The difference is whether you're trapping the air or keeping it."
Thupten tried again. His shoulders dropped. The exhale came out slow and steady instead of pinched.
"Better. Do that forty more times and then come find me if your ribs hurt."
"Will they hurt?"
"Probably. You've been breathing wrong for two years."
He left Thupten on the grass and walked. The path went along the canal, past the upper terrace where the grafting crew was finishing for the morning, down to the road and back. Thirty years of walking to think and he was not sure anymore which one started first.
By evening the farmers had gone home and the light was orange through the elms. Dechen had built a fire in a pit lined with river stones and two of the younger members were cooking rice in a pot hung from a frame of green sticks. The steam smelled like grain and woodsmoke. Khandro sat on a log near the fire, and the conversation started as it always did, with someone who had been thinking about something all day and could not hold it any longer.
"So," said Pemba. He was seventeen, wide-shouldered, from the Northern Temple. He had left two years ago after his training master refused to sign a petition about a border dispute with the Earth Kingdom. Pemba had gone to bed angry, woken up angrier, packed his bag before dawn, and flown south until he found people who agreed with him. He asked good questions. His problem was that he answered them himself before anyone else had a chance to.
"The governor," Pemba said again, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "We fix the canal, fix the headgate, teach the village to read. And next season the governor sends a new assessment and takes everything we helped them grow. What have we accomplished?"
The fire crackled. Dechen, sitting to Khandro's left, was absently pulling a splinter from her thumb. She did not look up.
"Let me ask you something," Khandro said. "Say we all go to the governor's compound tomorrow morning. What do you think happens?"
"We scatter his guards. They are tax clerks holding spears they have never used. We open his records and carry them to the villages between here and Gaoling so the farmers can read the numbers themselves."
"And after that?"
"The villages see what he has been taking from them and they refuse the next assessment."
"And what does the provincial magistrate do when a district stops paying?"
Pemba opened his mouth. He closed it.
"He writes to the governor asking why the revenue has stopped," Khandro said. "The governor tells the magistrate that Air Nomads raided his compound. The magistrate brings it to the Earth King's court, and the court has been looking for a reason to move soldiers into this province for three years because there is a copper deposit in the hills north of here that several ministers would very much like to reach. You have handed them the reason. Within a week there are soldiers on this road, the copper belongs to the court, and the governor is still sitting in his compound."
"You cannot know that is what would happen."
"Perhaps not. But something very like it has happened before. Sozin lists the Guiding Wind in his official correspondence under the same heading as pirates, as destabilizing elements. He has been building that argument for longer than you have been alive, Pemba, and he is waiting for the day one of us hands him the proof."
Pemba sat back. His mouth was set in a line.
"You asked a fair question," Khandro said. "You deserve a proper answer. Let me tell you a story. It concerns me, and it concerns the reason we are sitting in this copse and not in a governor's compound."
Pemba looked at him for a moment. "All right."
Khandro looked at the fire. He had told this story before. The telling did not get easier with practice.
"When I was about your age I could do something with air that most masters at the Southern Temple could not. I could make cyclones. The real ones, where the air turns for a hundred feet and the trees come apart. The elders loved the bending. They were less fond of the boy, because the boy had questions, and the questions had nothing to do with bending."
He idly pushed a piece of elm deeper into the coals with his foot.
"I traveled, as all Air Nomads do. I went to the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes, the Fire Nation. I saw the same thing in every nation wearing different clothes. There was a woman in an Earth Kingdom river town who sold her daughter's wedding silks to pay a tax debt. The debt belonged to a man who owned three ships and had never stood on the deck of one. I sat in that woman's house and watched her fold the cloth for the last time before she carried it to the assessor."
Khandro let the silence hold for a moment.
"I brought those stories home to the Council of Elders. There were five of them in a room with silk hangings and a view of the valley. I told them that people were suffering, that the world outside the temples was being picked apart by men with money and soldiers, and I asked them what the Air Nomads intended to do about it. Elder Sangye, who was very old, very kind, and who had never in her life missed a meal, looked at me and said that impermanence is the nature of all things."
He was quiet for a beat. Then he said, "Impermanence is a fine teaching for a woman who has never gone hungry."
Pemba was watching him. His jaw had unclenched. His hands were loose on his knees.
"I left the temple with some anger and no plan, but I could not sit on a mountain and call that peace. I found others who had seen what I had seen. We went to the river towns and the factory districts, worked beside the people there, helped them build what they needed, and did not raise a hand against anyone. In ten years the Guiding Wind became something that mattered. Nobles from the Earth Kingdom renounced their titles to join us. People with wealth gave it up because they believed the work was worth more than the name."
He picked up a stick from beside his log and turned it in his hands. The bark was rough under his fingers.
"And then I met Zeisan."