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The farmer gestured wildly with the straw hat in his hand. “And I’m telling you, most of it gets confiscated for the governor’s silos! I have to set the price based on the grain I have leftover!”
“How can you keep raising prices when there’s an ocean of rice sitting behind his walls?” The peddler was beside himself. “For Yangchen’s sake, I can see the roof of the storehouse from here!”
“Te hasn’t opened the silos for over five years! You might as well consider that food eaten by the spirits!”
Lao Ge pushed Kyoshi along. Apparently, they were not here to offer solutions to people who needed them.
She knew what he was trying to prove, that Te’s impending death was justified. “Reserving food for an emergency isn’t foolish or corrupt,” she said.
“No, but secretly selling your reserves for off-the-books profit is. To enrich himself, Te has traded away the grain he’s collected every year since he was appointed governor. He’s persisted during bad harvests, when his citizens have gone hungry enough to abandon their homes. Most famines are man-made, and he is on the verge of making one.”
Lao Ge kicked a pebble at a shuttered window. There was no response to the noise. “Tell me, has Jianzhu ever failed his people in this manner?”
Kyoshi was forced to admit that Yokoya had only grown and prospered since Jianzhu planted his flag there. The townsfolk she’d seen in Zigan had the sinking, harried look of men and women running out of time. They weren’t starving yet, but they would be soon. She recognized the weight of hunger on their shoulders, the same one she felt on hers as she went from door to door in Yokoya after being dumped there, rejected in turn by every family, her options dwindling.
She knew intimately what would happen next to the villagers. How their humanity would break down as starvation and helplessness took over. How it felt to watch death encroach a little closer every week. It had taken an intervention by Kelsang to save her from that fate.
Now Lao Ge was claiming to be that mercy for Zigan, for hundreds of people instead of just one girl. She had no reason to call him wrong.
It was a long, serpentine hike up the hillside to their encampment. She noticed the Flying Opera Company preferred elevated positions—maybe her mother’s influence seeping through. It made perfect sense in this context. The rocky terrain hid them from view, and from this high up they could see the layout of Te’s palace as clearly as a well-drawn map.
The governor is tactically incompetent not to have scouts monitoring these passes, Kyoshi thought, before noticing the strange mix of Rangi and Lao Ge that had rubbed off on her.
Lek looked up from stoking the campfire. “Did you get the rice?”
“We got sweet potato.” She tossed the burlap sack to the ground. “Rice is . . . an issue.”
“I’m sick of sweet potato,” he groused.
Kyoshi ignored him and climbed higher to the flat outcropping where Kirima and Rangi lay on their stomachs, surveying the palace. They’d come to a temporary truce over their mutual appreciation for intelligence gathering. Casing a joint was pretty much the same thing as planning an assault.
She sat down behind them, unnoticed.
“We’re looking at a traditional siheyuan design dating back to the Hao line of Earth Kings,” Rangi said to Kirima, fixated on the complex below. It was ancient compared to the mansion back in Yokoya. There were four courtyards instead of two. And instead of being walled by rooms in continuous, smooth construction, it appeared as if more than a dozen houses of varying sizes and heights had been placed end to end along square patterns drawn in the ground. The ancient owners must have grown in wealth over time, adding more and more extensions haphazardly, a far cry from the singular vision Jianzhu had in constructing his own home.
It was still obscenely extravagant, especially when compared to the declining village of Zigan. One of the courtyards held a gaudy turtle-duck pond that was too large for its surroundings. Kyoshi knew that was a new trend in imitation of the Fire Nation royal palace.
“There’s overlapping fields of view for the guards in each of the high points,” Rangi said. She pointed at three lumps of roof on the closest edge. “We have to assume they’ll be fully manned. So, coming at the best angle, that’s three sentries we’ll have to deal with on the approach.”
“Lek can drop two of them from a distance, but the third would have time to sound the alarm,” Kirima said. “How do you know so much about old Earth Kingdom architecture?”
“In the academy we studied how to attack any kind of fortification,” Rangi said. “Walled Fire temples, Earth Kingdom stockades . . .”
Kirima looked at her carefully. “Polar ice walls?”
“Yes,” Rangi said without hesitation. “Preparedness carries the day. There was even a plan for Ba Sing Se, though I’d pity the troops who carried it out.”
The Waterbender set aside the comments made toward the other nations. “Mok will want to attack the south gate directly,” Kirima said. “If we time our approach with his, we could assume the sentries posted on the other walls will divert toward him.”
Rangi frowned. “That’s a killing field.” The ground south of the complex was hard-packed dirt strewn with fieldstones the size of a man’s head. “A few Earthbenders in Te’s guard could cause massive casualties.”
“I don’t think Mok cares,” Kirima said. “I don’t know what poison Wai’s been pouring in the ears of his men, but they’ve turned into fanatics. He’s going to breach the walls with sheer numbers.”
Kyoshi shuddered to think of the slaughter that would follow if the daofei succeeded. She’d never heard of a siege where the attackers didn’t repay the cost of victory in blood.
“We have one last option,” Kirima said. “We still don’t know which building the prison cells are in, or under. Capturing the entire palace might be the only way we get enough time to search for the person we’re trying to free. So instead of trying to penetrate the compound, we simply take out the watchmen on the south wall, open the gate from the inside, and let Mok stroll right through.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Kyoshi said.
