“Gah!” Kirima launched herself to her knees and nearly fell off the outcrop. “How are you so stealthy on those giant hooves of yours?”
“Servants have to be quiet.” Kyoshi appraised the pair of benders, who were probably more alike than either cared to admit. She needed some wisdom in a hurry. The conventional sort, not the turned-around mind games of Lao Ge. Right now, these two women were her best sources.
“We have to talk,” she said to them.
The last hours of daylight were devoted to more training. The training never ended. The training would invade her dreams. She was certain the next Fire Avatar would be born with her muscle memory imprinted in their little fire-baby limbs.
“Let’s go already!” Wong shouted. “You’re the one who wanted to learn dust-stepping.”
“Are you sure about this?” Kyoshi said, justifiably nervous. “When I saw the rest of you do it, you started on solid ground and worked your way higher. That seems a lot safer.”
She perched on a rock column, one of many that studded a ravine. The distance between each pillar was at least twelve feet. On the far side of the gully, Wong waited for her.
“Practice should be more difficult than the real thing,” he said. “The goal is to reach me without slowing down. If you stumble you have to go back to where you started and try again. You’re doing it three times.”
Kyoshi peered down at the ground below. There was nothing that would break her fall on the hard stone floor. “Can I at least use my fans?”
“I don’t know,” Wong said. “Can you?”
She pulled her weapons from her belt. The heft in her hands was comforting as she spread them open. She had the thought that maybe if she flapped hard enough, she could take to the air like a bird.
“Either shoot or go hungry,” Lek called out.
She should have just went for it without hesitating. Now she’d drawn an audience. The entire group, including Lao Ge, watched from various seats around the camp.
Precision, she thought to herself. Timing. Precision. Timing.
She leaped into thin air. In the same instant, pebbles and dust rose from the bottom of the ravine, stacking on each other, solidifying into a rigid structure that only needed to support her weight long enough for her to take her next step. She felt the ball of her foot land gracefully on the miniature, temporary stalagmite, the fragile tower of earth.
Then she crashed right through it. She dropped like . . . well, a stone.
In her panic Kyoshi let go of her fans and reached for the column with her hands, a drowning victim ready to pull the entire lifeboat under the surface with her. She struck the side and bounced off, scrabbling for the top of the column with her fingers but unable to find any purchase. Her back collided with the formation behind her, sending her pinwheeling face-first into the bottom of the ravine.
She lay there, a smear along the ground. Two thuds sounded, her fans landing after her. She had a distinct feeling, mostly becaus
e she was still alive, that someone had earthbent the ground under her to be softer, covered the rock with a layer of sand. Her guess was Lao Ge.
“Zero,” she heard Wong call out. “Start over.”
Every attempt at dust-stepping failed. Painfully. It was so bad that Rangi relented and let Kirima try teaching her to use water as a support instead of earth. That meant Kyoshi still ended up sprawled on the ground, only wetter.
“Maybe you should sit the mission out,” Lek said after a particularly brutal fall. For once he was speaking out of genuine concern instead of taunting her.
“I don’t think she can,” Kirima said. “The only decent plans we came up with require all of us working together.”
“I think there’s ways we can make use of Kyoshi’s raw power,” Lao Ge said. He hadn’t offered any opinions on the matter until now. “She may be a hammer on a team of scalpels, but sometimes a brute-force approach is necessary. I’ll babysit her on the raid.”
Kyoshi almost had to admire the way the old man spun events into the patterns he desired, a weaver looking at raw flax and seeing the cloth it would become. “Maybe that would be for the best,” she said. “We can keep each other out of trouble.”
Each night, Kyoshi looked at the moon growing fuller, as if it were gorging on her dread. The date of the raid drew nearer and nearer, and the mood around camp turned grim. Roles had been determined, rehearsals walked through using props of nut shells and loose coins laid on diagrams traced in the ground. The gnawing in Kyoshi’s stomach had little to do with hunger, and cold sweat kept her awake no matter her distance from the campfire or how close Rangi slept near her.
On the bright side, the two most useless members of the group being paired up gave Kyoshi and Lao Ge plenty of time to talk in private.
“Haven’t you wondered why Mok’s goal isn’t to kill Governor Te?” Lao Ge asked, moments after he ordered her to sit and meditate with him.
The thought had crossed Kyoshi’s mind. “He knows you’re going to do it?”
Lao Ge laughed. “And I used to believe you didn’t have a sense of humor. No, the reason is that he has the same piece of information I do. Palaces built in the Hao period often had an iron saferoom hidden in their depths. In case of an attack, the lord of the manor would flee there and lock himself behind impenetrable metal doors. The vaults had supplies to last a month, which was more than enough time for reinforcements to arrive. Mok knows trying to kill the governor would be a waste of effort.”