Chapter Ten: Dragon's Eyes

Yuzhen and Anzu had spent three days and nights in the ice chamber, getting to know Zuko and Mai, taking their meals with Zuko and Mai, passing the time playing cards and Pai Sho with Zuko and Mai, when Yuzhen finally plucked up her nerve and knocked on the ice wall outside Katara's room. This time she didn't announce herself or wait for an answer. She just pulled back the curtain and went inside.

Katara sat on a fur-draped ice slab, apparently her bed, mending a tear in her raiding parka. Her room, like the one Zuko and Mai shared, was sparely-furnished, only the bed and a few shelves and straw baskets for her things. A lantern cast a halo of light around the bed, leaving the rest of the room in shadow.

Katara glanced up from her mending just long enough to register Yuzhen's presence. "What do you want?" she said icily.

So much for pleasantries. "I'd like to know why you've been avoiding Anzu and I all this time. Have we done something to upset you?"

Katara snorted. "You are royalty, aren't you? Everything is about you."

"So this is what you always do? For all the years you've lived down here with Zuko and Mai, you've spent all day every day holed up in this room, coming out only to eat and raid the city?"

Katara's needle stopped moving. For a few moments, she was silent, staring at the mending in her lap. She would have been pretty, Yuzhen thought, with her intense eyes and skin the color of milk tea, if she weren't so haggard. Perhaps she had been pretty, once.

"When Sozin's Comet came," she said, her voice sounding hollow, almost disembodied, "we thought we knew what we had to do. Aang was supposed to take down Ozai, my brother and our friends went to attack his airships, and Zuko and I were going to reclaim the Fire Nation. But when we arrived, there was no one there to reclaim it from.

"We realized our mistake too late. By the time we reached the Earth Kingdom, the fleet had moved on, the Wulong Forest had burned to the ground, and the people I cared for most in the world were dead. There was nothing left but ashes.

"I know you had the purest intentions in coming here. I know you didn't choose your family or your lot in life. I know Zuko and Mai trust you, and it's not that I don't. But the fact remains that every breath you and your beloved little sister breathe is a breath that should have belonged to my brother, or my friends, or Aang. Your existence is our mistake. So forgive me, Princess, for not being eager to get to know you."

Yuzhen felt flattened, all the breath crushed out of her lungs. It took what seemed like a long time for her to begin breathing again, and even longer for her to speak. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

Yuzhen approached the bed and sat gingerly on the pelt a few feet from Katara. "I know I can't possibly understand what it's been like for you," she said, daring not look at Katara as she spoke, "but I do know how it feels to be unable to save someone you love."

"Oh?" Katara said tonelessly.

"I was raised by a nursemaid called Song. She was the kindest person I've ever known, and more a mother to me than my mother was or cared to be. But when I was six, she vanished. One morning I woke and couldn't find her anywhere. Mother told me she had tired of me, and gone home to her village.

"It didn't make any sense, but what could I do? Time passed. I stopped weeping for Song, though I never stopped missing her. When I was ten, my brother Zuwei was born, and since the servants who attended to him were forbidden to bond with him, I did. He was a sweet-natured baby – always happy to see me.

"But he wasn't like I remembered Zhian being as a baby. He didn't sit up or roll over until he was a year old. He didn't seem to know his name. Mother and Father suspected he was slow-witted. I think I know why now, but...it doesn't really matter.

"One night, I woke to the sound of footfalls in the corridor."

Something drew Yuzhen out of her bed, though she could easily have slid back into sleep. Something guided her feet into her slippers, out of her bedroom and down the corridor. Something dark. A sense of foreboding.

She pursued whoever had passed her bedroom just closely enough not to lose them, too far to tell who it was. She hesitated a moment before following them through the main doors in the entrance hall, but only a moment.

She saw it happen. As she pulled open one of the heavy, ornately-molded palace doors, as she began to descend the half-moon steps, she saw Mother standing at the edge of the stone terrace, arms extended over the lava pit. She saw what Mother was holding: a blanketed bundle about the size of a sugar sack, from which peeked her baby brother's sleeping face.

And then he was gone. That was how Yuzhen knew it wasn't a bad dream. In her nightmares, things always happened in slow motion, but Mother dropped Zuwei quickly.

"Zuwei!" Yuzhen's scream didn't seem to startle Mother. She just stood there, straight-backed, gazing down into the pit, as Yuzhen tore across the terrace and fell to her knees at its edge, nearly tumbling over herself. When she looked up, her vision misty with tears, she saw the lava reflected in Mother's eyes.

"Mother," she whispered, but said no more. What more was there to say?

"He would have brought shame on the royal family," Mother said. "Those who are not fit to be Princes and Princesses of the Great Empire shall not be allowed the privilege."

"So you had to kill him?"

"What are you talking about?" As Yuzhen climbed unsteadily to her feet, Mother turned to face her, her expression like a gust of cold wind amid the heat that rose from the lava. "Zuwei fell ill and died during the night. There was no helping it."

Yuzhen had always known Mother to be distant, calculating, even cruel when it suited her, but it wasn't until that moment – not when she took Zuwei's life, but when she looked Yuzhen in the eyes and pretended she hadn't – that she saw her as a monster. "That's what you're going to tell Lily and Zhian, isn't it?" she said. "What you would have told me, if I hadn't seen you." Suddenly seized by righteous anger, Yuzhen shoved her face up into Mother's. "What else have you lied to me about?"

Mother sniffed. "Don't embarrass yourself, Yuzhen."

Breathing hard, tasting her tears, Yuzhen watched Mother stroll back across the terrace toward the palace doors. The dark something from before returned, twisting her thoughts into a shape she didn't recognize at first. "Did you lie to me about Song?"

Mother said nothing, kept walking.

"Did you do something bad to her? Hurt her?" Yuzhen felt as if she were being strangled by invisible hands. "Did you kill her, too?"

Only then did Mother stop, and look back over her shoulder, and her eyes were wild. They looked like Yuzhen thought a dragon's eyes would look, had there been any dragons left in the world. "I caught that peasant tramp trying to lure Father into her bed. She thought she could outwit me, thought she could take what's mine. Death is the only fitting punishment for such treachery."

"I yelled at her back as she went inside – told her she was mad, Song would never have done such a thing, she would never have wanted Father." The warmth of tears on her cheeks surprised Yuzhen. "But what difference could I have hoped to make?"

Yuzhen could feel Katara watching her, passing no detectable judgment. When enough time had gone by that Yuzhen thought perhaps she had worn out her welcom, insomuch as it had ever existed, Katara spoke.

"My mother was killed when I was very young. For years I grieved her loss, and raged against the injustice of her murder. But I was naïve. I don't grieve or rage now. Now, I feel nothing." Yuzhen turned her head to meet Katara's eyes, and in them saw something like what she'd seen in Mother's eyes that night on the terrace – something mythic, something feral. There was a dragon in Katara too. "You should have learned to do the same. You'd have lived longer."

Yuzhen swallowed. "What?"

"Ozai and Azula will find you, and they'll kill us all. Zuko and Mai are letting you live in your fairy-tale world for the moment, but they know it as well as I do. Not that I resent you for it. I'm not afraid of dying." Katara smiled grimly. "I've been dead for a long time now."