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She looked down to see Lu Beifong delivering a curt bow. Despite age confining him to a seat on the other side of the crowd during the concert, he’d appeared in front of her like he’d stolen the secrets of dust-stepping from the Flying Opera Company. The old man must have wanted a transaction. Only business could make him so positively spry.
“Master Beifong,” Kyoshi said. She nodded slightly. Lu was as high up in the Earth Kingdom hierarchy as a person could get without being a king, so this encounter was probably within the rules of decorum. “It’s . . . good to see you. How are your grandchildren?”
A large flying boar symbol had been embroidered onto Lu’s robe in an attempt to conform to Fire Nation clan customs, but it fell short in tastefulness. With his bony fingers, Lu picked a loose silk thread off the sewn animal and scowled. Somewhere, a tailor was going to lose their job.
“Numerous and unpromising,” he said, flicking the thread to the ground. “What I wouldn’t give for a talented leader to be born into my family, or a child with a good head for numbers. I would take a halfway-decent Earthbender at this point. With the way things are going, the Beifong name threatens to slide into obscurity.”
“Would that children were fit to their parents’ needs,” Kyoshi said, the words coming out like ground glass through her teeth. Lu and the other sages only knew that she was an orphan and were content to leave it there. The tap of Rangi’s toe against the back of her foot let Kyoshi know that she was likely turning red and betraying her anger. This is why I need the makeup, she thought.
“Yes, well put,” Lu said. He gestured to another Earth Kingdom man by his side. This person was younger, in his forties, and had obviously tried to coordinate his green-and-yellow outfit to complement Lu’s. “This is Governor Shing of Gintong Province.”
Lu’s hanger-on from the Earth Kingdom didn’t bother with niceties. He pushed closer impatiently, nearly jostling a waiter trying to serve small vials of plum wine. “Avatar, I have a grievance. The misinformation you sowed among my people during your last visit to my lands has damaged the workings of law and order.”
Kyoshi picked up the way Lu’s eyes flashed at her. Good leaders do not stir the pot. They do not cause disruptions. The old sage valued stability above all else, and several of Kyoshi’s recent escapades in the Earth Kingdom did not fit his definition of conduct becoming of an Avatar.
Kyoshi sorted through her mental notes. Gintong Province was close to Si Wong, a dusty scrubland that was relatively unproductive and difficult to grow crops on. But that didn’t mean someone couldn’t try to exploit it.
“Ah,” she said. “Governor Shing. Now I remember. You were buying land at distressed prices from peasants who couldn’t till their fields because of daofei raids, forcing them to later work for you as indentured laborers on the farms that used to be theirs.”
The exactness of her terms surprised the older men. She wasn’t supposed to say such unpleasant facts out loud in polite company. She was supposed to allude to them, dance around the matter, peck at it like a small feeding bird.
“Hmph,” Lu muttered. “That’s a tad different from the way you phrased it to me, Shing. You told me you were paying good money to keep your lands free of bandits.”
“I took care of the daofei in the area,” Kyoshi said. “And once I finished, I told the farmers that I considered ownership of the land reverted back to the state it was in before the Emerald Claws first set foot in Gintong. I undid the problem and its aftershocks both.”
“I had binding contracts on those lands!” Shing said. “I purchased them legally! I have the documentation!”
Kyoshi thought for a moment. Here was where an Avatar of ol
d, skilled in diplomacy like Szeto and Yangchen, might offer him something in return to soothe tempers and save face. But she couldn’t bring herself to try to imagine fitting compensation. Why exactly did Shing, a powerful man, deserve to exploit a catastrophe and become richer at the expense of his citizens?
She found the words marching forth from her lips with ease. “Well, Governor, if you value business terms so much, I can send you a bill for pacifying your province. Given the results, my cost would be the equivalent of supplies and wages for a medium-sized army. I’d need the payment immediately, in a lump sum.”
Behind her, Kyoshi heard the nose snort of Rangi trying desperately not to laugh. Shing looked like he needed to suck on a wood frog. “These are the tactics of an urban racketeer!” he shrieked. “When they said you were a criminal, I didn’t believe the rumors at first, but clearly—”
“Shing!” Lu snapped. “Mind how you speak to the Avatar. We are not in our homeland.”
The Governor of Gintong wilted at Lu’s rebuke. There was an uncomfortable pause. The nearby crowd watched with barely hidden glee as the noisy Earth Kingdom folk had it out with each other.
Lu sighed and shook his head. His hunch seemed to have taken on a steeper angle. “I’m afraid I must retire early from the festivities,” he said. “Old bones and whatnot. It was a delight, everyone.”
He shuffled back toward the garden entrance of the palace. Shing followed a few steps behind, somehow looking much worse for wear than the elderly man. Kyoshi could easily see Lu cutting Shing loose from the Beifong circle of influence after tonight, not out of any moral obligation, but for being a bad investment who’d gotten on the Avatar’s wrong side and embarrassed the Earth Kingdom outside its borders. She might have just ended the man’s entire career.
Once they were alone again, Rangi cleared her throat and leaned in. “As much as I love watching you verbally set people on fire, be a little more careful. That same conversation between two Fire Nationals could have ended with an Agni Kai.”
Kyoshi knew she wasn’t kidding. The Flying Opera Company used to tease Rangi mercilessly about honor and other Fire Nation values back in the isolated depths of the Earth Kingdom, but that was when she was the only Firebender for hundreds of miles around. Here, Kyoshi and Shing were the odd ones out. The stifling atmosphere made it easy to believe that no interaction was too small to have meaning.
“This isn’t a game,” Rangi reminded her. “This is a garden party. There are stakes.”
“I’ll do better next time,” Kyoshi said.
“Good.” Rangi mustered herself. “Because here comes my mother.”
THE HEADMISTRESS
Hei-Ran’s arrival was preceded by a hush through the nearby crowd. Lower-ranked nobles parted to let the woman who’d taught their daughters pass through. Some of them gave her crisp salutes, a reminder Rangi’s mother had also been a high-ranking military commander at one point. She returned the gestures with glances and nods.
Kyoshi swallowed hard. Even without the complications of her early Avatarhood, this was a reunion with someone designed from the ground up to pass judgment and cull the unworthy from her presence.
