14

Pohuai Stronghold was a two-days' trek from the town. I had only twelve hours' disadvantage over them, unless they had ridden through the night. Remembering our time together, I doubted Hui would have the energy or the discipline to push through the night.

In those long hours, foot ahead of foot, headed down a path of certain pain, I tried to calm my fixated mind.

Hui-the brother I hadn't expected. The only sibling I had ever known and for a time cut so brief. Why should it be now that we were reunited? All my years wondering the Earth Kingdom and, after the war, the whole of the world. Always, I asked myself why agony and loneliness followed me, year after year, village to colony to kingdom to the absolute nowhere of unclaimed Air-Nomad land.

Soaked in self pity. I should have spent my years better occupied, but over the last months my worldview had pivoted. I didn't intend to forget the past. Indeed, it was my many experiences with Zuko over the three years of our companionship that compelled me to find him. But there were certain things I had to let go of to move forward. Absolve myself of certain misjudgments, mistakes.

Like leaving Hui behind after two years on the sea.

Like abandoning him knowing exactly what awaited him and that I was the only person that could have stopped it.


That first afternoon, freed from my claustrophobic bedroom, my father demanded my obedience. Hui had followed us through the long hallways and out into the open air. As my lungs savored every sweet breath, I saw his catch in his throat. He had just admitted to hating our father, as I did, and here I was caving to him. I didn't know what this promise meant at the time. The cost it would have.

When I was returned to my room, the door remained unlocked. A tub was rolled in, clean water and soap for bathing in. The months rolled off of my skin and darkened the steaming water. I ate dinner outside of my room. Not in the soldiers' mess hall, but in a private dining room reserved for my father, Hui, and myself.

"Well," Zhu Ri said as I took my first bite of delicately poached salmon and lemon rice, "is this the difficult transition you imagined?" He drank from a glass of wine and I noted a glass of my own next to my plate. I took a sip, pinched my lips at its acidity. "Well," my father repeated, the sudden boom of his voice reverberating along the glass in my hand, "is it?"

I swallowed hard. Didn't look at Hui, who had been reluctant to acknowledge me.

"No," I finally replied.

Our father settled and we ate in silence, though he kept his eyes on me all the time. Feeling the searing of the wine in my throat from that first sip, I drank more. Welcomed the dizzying heat.

"Your posture and silver work are deplorable, but there will be time to fix that before," and he finished his wine before he delivered his blow. "Before your first appearance."

Only then did Hui and I lock eyes. His stare told me little except what I already knew: that my cell of a bedroom had been a better confinement than what was coming for us.


The governess who schooled me in the ways of women, as she called them, boarded our ship on a fog-spilled morning in First Lord's Harbor. It was the closest I had come to my so-called homeland in all my life, but it would be another year before I first set foot on its soil. The women, I won't credit her by giving her name. I will call her Cao.

Cao was born in Capital City, below the shimmering walls of the Royal Palace. She had never been on the sea before, but like all things she claimed her high class endowed her with, her grace was too steadfast to be rocked by the waves.

She taught me about silverware and good posture and how to speak to men, and women to a lesser degree. She taught me to recite poetry but not to read it. "Art lives in your heart, not your mind. You do not win people—your husband or your house guests, the ladies of the court or your neighbors—with intelligence. You win them by touching their souls. And by reciting the eighty-eight lines of the Maiden and the Platypus Bear." Cao knew much about class and grace and men and shaping young girls. She knew nothing of strife, genocide, of hiding day and night in a dead corn field while the villagers who reared you were burned alive.

She did get one thing right, though. In a battle of the heart and mind, people always resort to their intuition, the core of their pain and hope for the answer.


One year after Cao left the Capital, she returned with a proper girl on the verge of becoming a woman. Ten days short of her fifteenth birthday, the girl was introduced to the Fire Nation court at a ball celebrating the thirteenth birthday of the Crown Prince, the sole son of the Fire Lord. The girl was remarked as a surprising beauty, considering the soiling of her blood, and her exotic green eyes were taken as a sign of charity, the one moral so cherished and yet so rarely enacted on the people living in the Harbor City, where the lower classes of the Fire Nation dwelled.

The girl's father was, too, considered charitable for having saved his only two living children from lives of insidious squalor in a foreign land. His son, who was nearing seventeen, was finally enrolled in the Fire Nation military, with a station on his father's own ship (though as the son and daughter knew, the son had no combative training and his service was in title alone). The father, who had served the Fire Nation military for thirty years and commanded the seas for over a decade, gained only respect and admiration as his children flourished in a world delighted to welcome them.


And that peace, as our father called it, lasted two months.

Before that, I was given a room in my father's capital estate and carted to every social gathering eager for fresh young meat. It didn't take a month or a week or a day or even, really, an hour following my introduction at the Crown Prince's birthday celebration for the words husband and marriage to hover above my head like a swarm of hornets. First, it was implied that my good nature and giving ways would be a wise match for the Wang family's oldest son, who were second cousins to the royal family. Then it was the Lu family, wealthy from their military innovations over the full course of the war. Then, finally, there was the unexpected chatter. About how the young prince had gaped at the new maiden, turned flush at the sight of her. How though she was two years his senior, wouldn't he need a warm heart and steadying hand to lead him now that his mother was stripped from his life?

Even that night, I felt dread rippling across me. Before I heard the talk of matchmakers, I saw in every spotless glass and overfull plate and powder-caked cheek the work of my father. In what world could I be welcomed in a place like this? He had worked hard to get me here. Why? I asked, though I already knew the answer. It was the only reason men like him did anything in the betterment of another.

Power.


Two months after my introduction to the court, two events changed my trajectory. The Crown Prince, who at thirteen years and two months had arrogantly spoken against his father in a critical war meeting, was maimed and sent into exile, though I wouldn't learn of this until I was an exile myself.

Second, I shamed my own father in a way he struggled to forgive. In the two months following my entry into court, it became apparent to me and to Hui that Zhu Ri intended to wed me to the young prince or, at the very least, a close relation of him. But, in order to dispel the already-forming rumor about his plan, he returned me to his ship and sailed me to a colony led by an especially wealthy governor whose son, it was said, had an eye for uncommon girls.

The boy was a wretched, spoiled ass, and so when he went for my skirt I whipped him with fire. The fire Hui and I had practiced, in secret, ever since I was first freed. The one thing absolutely forbidden by Zhu Ri and the customs of the court.

Everything my father had worked for, gone in an instant.

He negotiated with the governor, and I was returned to our ship, no arrest, no punishment. Maybe because he was thinking over his punishment for me, or maybe because he liked to let me sit in my anxiety, he didn't visit me those first few days. My dinner was sent to my room, and though my door was never locked, no visitor came my way. No bath water. No laundered clothes. Nothing but the twice daily delivery of my meals. Even Hui didn't come to me.

What I said, about trusting your heart in the face of a battle-there was a moment, after my assault on the governor's boy but before the guards or his father or my father came. There was a minute where the boy was concerned only with his burnt clothes and singed hair, that I could have escaped. Snaked through the busy streets of the colony. Made my own way. But something told me not to.

I trusted my heart and where did it land me?

After four days passed, in the middle of the night, my door opened. The lanterns in the hall flickered out. Even in the pitch dark, I knew my father's silhouette. Heard his calculated breath and arched back.

He didn't say anything. Before I was vertical he wrapped one hand around the meat of my neck, pressed the other hard into my back, guiding me to stand. There was something in his silence, his sparseness of movement that quieted my anger. Convinced me the best thing was to follow him. Not put up a fight.

He pushed me through the halls like this, his hands in their same position, and as we passed windows I saw it was a starless, moonless night. Thick clouds blotted out all light and left the sea a reeling, black mass.

When we ascended the stairs, I didn't worry, at first. Then we passed one flight, then two, then four. He ushered me to the control room, where he told the night captain to leave us, and he put out those lights, too.

From this height, to see the mixing of the ocean and sky. To have no grounding for where our world ends and that above begins, paired with the roll of the waves. It is enough to make seasoned sailors sick. My stomach tremored, head swam.

His hand, which had stayed at the base of my neck, snaked upward. Fingers knotted in my hair. We pushed forward, past a door exiting onto a gallery, a balcony framed by a steel wall. The air was unbelievably cool. Like the dip before a storm. My breath, it kicked up. I didn't mean it to.

"Do you think there aren't more of you out there?" He removed his fist from my back and pointed, away from us, into that unmovable void. "Do you think I won't replace you?" His hiss reared against my ear and the heat of his breath whirled across my face. "That," he pointed again, "is my domain. This," he tightened his grip on my hair, "is my domain. You live because I chose you out of all the others." With one thrust, he pushed me forward, away from his hands, against the steel wall. Like I had exited a tunnel, the roar of the tides and swell of the air rushed back to me. I reeled over the height. The instability of metal.

Before I could steel myself, he rushed, turned my back to the wall, and took my jaw in his hand.

"Should I find another? Start over after all this time?"

I couldn't speak. I couldn't move. He had pinned me hard against the thin barrier. My breath stopped.

"If nothing else, I can always make more of you."

And I didn't feel his hold on my waist or the tremble of the air before it raved. I only saw the light, glorious, reflecting in his eyes before it hit us. One great blast, cast at a short distance.

Hui, it turned out, had followed us.

I didn't worry whether he had meant for it to hit both of us, to send Zhu Ri and me tumbling from such a height to the iron grave below. What mattered is that in our flight, I freed myself from Zhu Ri's grasp, rent the air beneath my feet into an inferno and slowed my descent to a less-fatal fall. When I could stand again, before the siren came, I approached him, quieter than I had ever seen him. His eyes closed, as if he had died in his sleep rather than from gravity's pull. I looked up, saw Hui's dark figure on the balcony. I waved to him. Jump down. But he didn't. Instead, I saw the lights of the control room return. The night captain and more men, surrounding Hui. Instead of fleeing, he stood his ground. Instead of helping him, as the siren blared and the deck flooded with red, I ran to the ship's edge, found no lifeboat awaiting me and, with one last glance at Hui, I jumped.


The crown of Pohuai Stronghold peaked between the trees before the dusk of my second day. I debated whether to approach at night or meet them at the crow of dawn. I remembered our last night together. Hui and me. All that darkness. I decided that if we were to face each other again, this time with our true selves, it might as well be in the cool press of the night, and so I trudged forward.