Kyoshi got up and moved to the next cubical platform of the quarry, and then the next. Without dust-stepping, it was slow going. She had to clamber up and down the height changes. She didn’t want to wake the others with noisy, orthodox earthbending.
The old man stood at the mouth of the marble seam with his back turned to her. Sometimes she wondered if Lao Ge wasn’t a shared hallucination. Or an imaginary friend exclusive to her. The others could have been humoring her, nodding and smiling every time she talked to a patch of empty space.
“I thought you would come to me in Hujiang,” he said. “I suppose you had other priorities on your mind.”
Kyoshi bowed, knowing he could tell if she did. “Apologies, Sifu.” But in her thoughts, the unease ballooned. If he had a problem with Rangi, then . . .
Lao Ge turned around. There was a smile in his eyes. “You don’t have to forsake love,” he said. “Killing’s not some holy art form that requires worldly abstinence. If anything, that’s lesson two.”
She swallowed around the block in her throat. She’d been full of bluster the first night she went to him in secret. But she’d been so used to false starts and stymied progress that continuing their con
versation felt like foreign territory. More doubt seeped into her cracks.
“Lesson two should scare you to the bone,” Lao Ge said. “You can take a life before the sun comes up, eat breakfast, and go about your day. How many people might you pass on the street who are capable of such callousness? Many more than you think.”
Jianzhu certainly was. He’d pulled her alone to safety, leaving Yun behind in the clutches of that unholy spirit. That was the moment he’d marked his once-prized pupil as having no further use, the way a dockworker might paint an X on a crate of cargo fouled by seawater. Total loss, not worth the recovery effort.
And then there was what he’d done to Kelsang.
“Fancy yourself different?” Lao Ge said, noticing her stillness.
She could still feel Jianzhu’s hands gripping her. “I won’t know until I try,” she said.
The old man laughed, a single bark that pierced the night. “I suppose you’ll get the chance soon. In the heat of battle, you can excuse the act away well enough. Fling an arrow here, hack away with a sword there. You and your victim are just two of many, acting in self-preservation. Is that how you want to deal with your man? With chaos as your shroud? Do you want to shut your eyes, hurl an overwhelming amount of death in his direction, and hope he’s disposed of when you open them?”
“No,” she said. Remembering what she’d been robbed of, what she’d never get back because of Jianzhu, brought a surge of conviction. “I want to look him in the eye as I end him.”
Lao Ge reacted as if she’d made a saucy quip, pursing his lips in amusement. “Well, then!” he said. “In that case, during the raid, you and I are going to split off from the others. We’ll head farther into the palace than anyone else. And we’re going to assassinate Governor Te.”
“Wait, what?” The certainty she had regarding Jianzhu caused her to mentally stumble at the mention of another target. It was as if she were the lei tai fighter throwing an all-or-nothing punch at Rangi, who’d deftly turned her momentum against her. “Why would we do that?”
“For you, it’s practice,” Lao Ge said. “For me, it’s because he’s my man. Listen. Governor Te is brutally incompetent and corrupt. His people go hungry, he skims from the Earth King’s taxes to enrich his own coffers, and in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t have a good policy for handling daofei.”
“Those aren’t excuses to murder him!”
“You’re right. They’re not excuses—they’re ample justifications. I guarantee you that many citizens have suffered immeasurably from his greed and negligence, and many more will die if he is allowed to keep breathing.”
Lao Ge spread his hands wide as if to embrace the world. “Te and his ilk are parasites leeching strength and vitality from the kingdom. Imagine yourself as the predator that keeps the land healthy by eliminating the sources of its weakness. It was said of Kuruk that he was the greatest hunter that ever walked the Four Nations, but from what I know, he never made man his quarry. I’m hoping you can be different.”
The idea of becoming a beast free of thought and culpability was supposed to help, but it made her shudder instead. “What gives you the right to decide?” she asked. “Are you part of another brotherhood? Are there more people like you? Is someone paying you?”
He shook his head, dodging her questions. “Doesn’t everyone have the right to decide?” he said. “Isn’t the Avatar a person like me? Someone who shapes the world with their choices?”
She was going to protest that no, the Avatar had the recognition of the spirits and Four Nations, but she found her tongue tied in the wake of his argument.
He gripped his forearms behind his back and gazed across the canyon. “I would declare the lowliest peasant is like the Avatar in this regard. All of our actions have an impact. Each decision we make ripples into the future. And we alter our landscapes according to our needs. To keep her crops alive, a farmer uproots the weeds that nature has placed in her fields, does she not?”
“People aren’t weeds,” Kyoshi said. It was the best she could manage.
He turned to face her. “I think it’s a bit late to claim the moral high ground, given what your aims are.”
She flushed hot in her cheeks. “Jianzhu murdered two of my friends with his own hands,” she spat. “He doesn’t deserve to get away with it. If you took him out for me, instead of targeting some random governor, I could reveal myself as the Avatar.” I would be safe.
Her resolve was wavering left and right. Not a minute ago she was yowling about doing the deed herself, feigning a hard soul, and now she was begging Grandfather to make the bad man go away.
Lao Ge smirked. “No one in this world is random. I don’t care to kill Jianzhu. He’s competent, and he surrounds himself with competent people. I wish the Earth Kingdom had a hundred Jianzhus. We’d enter a new golden age.”
“And yet you’re not trying to stop me from ending him.”