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Chapter 22: Exchange
Fear and cold—cold and fear.
Those were the two things on Ursa's mind, as she sat once again on a pile of furs on a bed of ice.
It was not the same bed of ice as just days before, not even the same cave. Had it been another time, Ursa might have thought the place beautiful. Ahead the cave mouth opened up to the sky, now orange with evening, casting everything it touched in its warm glow, while behind expanded an enormous cavern, a series of caves like honey combs dotting the stoney wall, many with whispering waterfalls pouring from their mouths to the giant lake below.
Beautiful—yet also dangerous. The ice bed on which they waited hung suspended just on the edge of a sheer drop to the lake, held in place only by the icey grips Nukka had formed to either side of the tunnel wall like a bridge. Just beneath them rushed a raging river, ending in an enormous waterfall that plunged so deep that Ursa could barely make out the white foam where it met the underground lake in the darkness. And that was to say nothing of Nukka's other preparations—the giant ice spikes she had pulled, one by one, just at the base of the waterfall, until they formed a deadly bed like the teeth of an ancient trap.
There they waited for night to arrive. The girl had spoken little, and while Ursa didn't know the exact order of planned events, they weren't hard to guess. Zuko would wait at some predetermined point outside, and then Nukka would likely take Ursa to the cave entrance—from the familiar formations Ursa had glimpsed outside, she would guess they were somewhere near the lake Zuko and his friends had waited for the waterbenders a month ago—and signal him, demonstrating that she had Ursa captive. Then they would retreat back here, to the ice shelf above the precipice, and wait for him to arrive. To deliver what Nukka had demanded.
Ursa's heartbeat quickened. She might be about to see Azula and Zuko again, the both of them together, for the first time in so long. But if Zuko handed over Azula, there was no doubt in Ursa's mind what would happen then.
So, the fear. Cold and fear. Fear and cold. Growing with each passing moment that pulled them closer to nightfall—Ursa didn't know what would happen, or what she could do to stop it.
"The moment the moon rises, we go," Nukka said tersely. She was kneeling beside Ursa, keeping a hold on Ursa's wrists, which she had tied once again with the leather cord behind her back. In her other hand she gripped a Water Tribe knife. She glared out toward the cave entrance, where the sky was beginning to darken with dusk. "Don't try anything funny. If he does everything right, you live."
Ursa didn't reply. There was nothing she could say, to make the girl change her mind. She would do anything to protect Azula if she had the chance, but she had a feeling the girl would also do everything possible to ensure that was a chance she didn't get.
The exact time of day was impossible to tell, but from the red and purple of the sky outside, Ursa would guess they were less than an hour from night. She licked her dry lips. If she was going to try to act, it would have to be soon. Perhaps—
A shadow appeared in the entrance, a silhouetted outline standing just on the edge of the stone shelf beside the river.
Nukka, as her eyes flickered up, reacted instantly, seizing Ursa by the wrists and hauling her to her feet with surprising strength. She dragged Ursa backward, until they stood just with their backs to the precipice over the waterfall, pressing the Water Tribe knife to her throat.
"Who's there?" the girl hissed. "Show yourself!"
The figure took a step forward, closer to the cave entrance, and though the dying sunlight behind still made the face impossible to discern, Ursa would have known that shape anywhere.
"Zuko," she breathed.
Nukka snarled, pressing the knife so hard that Ursa felt a trickle of something wet cold against her windpipe. "Treachery!" the girl hissed. "I warned you what would happen—"
"Wait!" Zuko cried, one hand outstretched. He stepped forward, and as he did a second dark figure appeared, just on the edge of the cave. A dark mass with head bent, shoulders hunched.
"Please. I—have what you want." He stepped forward again, and this time as he passed into the dimmer shadow of the cave, Ursa could finally make out his face, expression grim with guilt and desperation, along with the mass he tugged behind him. Azula.
A strange metal contraption had been affixed to her face, like a muzzle for a rabid ox-dog, with a metal bit set between her teeth and belted leather straps around her head. Her arms had been pulled behind her back, and Ursa heard the jangle of chains. Another set of chains bound her feet, the chain long enough to allow her to walk, but too short to grant her full range of firebending.
For an instant, Ursa couldn't breathe. She had seen horrible things in her day, as wife to Ozai and witness to the goings on of the Fire Nation royal court. But this was something else. Something sick rose in her throat, threatening to choke her.
Zuko took another step forward, into the deeper shadow of the cave. "I'm here," he said in a measured voice. "Alone. We knew you had to be somewhere near the lake—I couldn't afford to wait until the full moon. I didn't know if you would try to doublecross me."
Nukka's hand clenching Ursa's wrists behind her back tightened slightly, but it was now clammy and slick with sweat.
"You should have waited," hissed Nukka. "Until the appointed time."
"I have what you want," Zuko said again. "Please."
Ursa finally found her voice. "No, Zuko—" Her words echoed in the void that yawned between them, all the fears that had been building in her chest rising to a panic. "No, you must know what she's planning! Zuko, my son, I'm begging you, please—"
A hand abruptly clamped over her mouth, cutting her off. The knife that had been at her throat was suddenly at her back, between her shoulder blades.
"How can I trust you?" the girl asked, tone harsh, yet it was not a rhetorical question—she wanted to know.
Zuko pulled Azula to stand ahead of him. Azula made no attempt to resist, watching Nukka and Ursa with an expression impossible to read.
Zuko glanced at Ursa briefly, before his eyes fell away in shame. "I…" he began. "I wasn't going to do it. How can I call myself a better Fire Lord than my father—if I don't even take care of my own family?"
He breathed. "But, if I'm going to lose someone in my family no matter what, I—can't lose my mother again. Azula is the one who helped me see that."
He looked up, with eyes full of pain, but resolve. "So, you get what you want. No tricks."
The point of the knife dug into Ursa's back, the hand over her mouth clamped hard, tense. Ursa could almost imagine the girl's mind racing, trying to figure out how she could safely make the exchange, and ensure she could get away though the watery tunnels, as she no doubt planned, without the advantage of bloodbending.
"We wait for nightfall," she said at last. "Then we make the change."
Zuko and Azula were now standing just on one side of another river, which cut across from a side tunnel, on the opposite side from Nukka's ice shelf. Zuko shook his head vigorously. "Then you would be able to betray me, and take me too. Besides, if we wait that long, my friends will come. They're not here, just like you asked, but they're circling the skies above, ready to act if they're afraid something's gone wrong."
He continued, "If you can make an ice bridge, then make it, and I'll have her walk across to you first. Then, when you have her, you can send over my mother. That's as much trust as I'm willing to give you."
Nukka wasn't the laughing sort, but a dry hiss that almost could have passed for one escaped her mouth. "And she'll just—walk over to me? Like that?"
"She will." Zuko hesitated. "She wants me to do the horrible thing, the ruthless thing. That's why she's been doing all of this—she wants me to be like the rest of my family. So she'll come to you."
Nukka was silent for a long moment, no doubt churning through her options. At long last, she let go briefly of Ursa's mouth, and with a sharp snap of her hand, a crude ice path froze over the rushing river water, starting from the ice platform welded to the rock to the stone where they stood.
The moment her mouth was free, Ursa was shouting again. "No, Zuko, Azula—please—it's not worth it. My fate is already decided. Azula, the moment she gets her hands on you, she'll—"
But then the girl's hand was pressed over her mouth again, so tight she could almost feel the skin around her jaw bruising. She tried to shout again, but there were no words, only muffled sounds of desperation, voiceless and unhearable.
"You better hope you can trust her," hissed the girl at Zuko, as Azula stepped onto the narrow ice path, her chains jangling with each movement. "Even if I don't kill your mother right here, there's a sheer drop right behind us. If she falls, she dies—I've made sure of it."
"No tricks," Zuko said again in a measured voice. He hesitated, then added, "On my honor."
Azula made her way forward, step by step, until at last her foot touched the ice sheet.
Nukka let go of Ursa's mouth again, just for an instant—and she pinched her fingers together.
An ice spike erupted from the ice platform just at Azula's feet, but before Ursa even had time to shout a warning, Azula sidestepped it casually, looking, even with the horrible contraption over her nose and mouth, almost bored.
Azula jerked her head in Ursa's direction, then at the ice path. She met Ursa's eyes briefly—and even though she was cooperating with Zuko to give herself up, her eyes were as cold as they had been when lightning had been playing about her features, ready to bring death.
Ursa tried to understand what Azula's real plan here might be. Might she try to kill Ursa again, once she was close enough? Still with some hope to fill Zuko with rage at the horror, the senselessness of it—but, that almost seemed too simple. And, chained as she was, the girl would probably kill her before Zuko could react. Surely Azula would find that unsatisfying.
Ursa didn't know what Azula's aim was, whether it involved getting out alive or not, but she couldn't let things go far enough to find out.
As all the girl's focus went to Azula, watching her every move intently, the knife against Ursa's back slid down a little, falling to her lower spine. The hand, which had shifted from holding Ursa's mouth to grip Ursa's bound wrists again loosened ever so slightly, ready to push her forward.
Ursa jerked both her hands up—the blade sliced across the side of her wrist, but in the same moment cleaved the leather cord in two. She spun and, as the girl stood, momentarily frozen in surprise, hand briefly limp on the knife, Ursa reached forward and ripped it from her grasp.
Twisting the knife around to grip it by the hilt, Ursa lunged. She didn't want to kill the girl—but the girl would kill Azula, just the moment she was able. She couldn't let that happen.
Nukka threw herself sideways at the last moment, avoiding the blade by inches, then spun on her, eyes blazing. She raised her hands, tentacles of water shooting from the surface of the ice, either to subdue or end her—
Flame burst to life in a protective ring around her, turning the water to steam, and Ursa looked up in time to see Azula. Azula still stood in the same place on the ice, eyes disinterested.
However, something had changed—both hands, which should have been bound behind her back, were in front of her in a firebending form, and the chains, cuffs too wide, lay on the ice a short distance away, while her feet were spread apart in a wide stance, the chain link between them broken, if it had ever been properly secured at all. As Ursa watched, Azula reached up behind her head with one hand and, in a single efficient movement, the muzzle fell from her face, like the old scales of a komodo rhino, clattering to the ice.
Nukka stared with wide eyes, her face the the color of ash, before her lips curled back from her teeth in a roar of fury. Her eyes fell on Zuko, who was starting forward on a blast of flames, face tense and desperate, but with no surprise.
"TRAITOR!" she screamed, just as Azula launched herself forward, tightly controlled blast of flame already at her fingertips. "I WARNED YOU, FIRE LORD!"
And, just before the flames could reach her, the world tilted.
The ice sheet on which they stood sheared free from the cave wall, yawing forward like the deck of a ship in a storm. Yet it didn't completely come free—as it twisted sideways, the long edges caught the stone on either side, lodging it there above the waterfall.
But Ursa was too close to the edge. The ground vanished beneath her, and she was suddenly falling. Falling through the dark, and cold.
She gazed upward at the tilted ice sheet, hanging there precariously over the driving waterfall. Felt racing up behind her the deadly ice spikes, which she knew lay in wait for her.
In that moment, a thousand memories seemed to blaze through her mind. The tears of joy in Ikem's eyes when Ursa recognized him, even through his changed face. Kiyi, eyes shining as Ursa handed over a new finished doll. Zuko, still a boy, nestled beside her before the pond in the royal garden. Azula, sitting still for once as Ursa combed through her long dark hair.
It struck her that, for once, Zuko and Azula had been working together. He had never meant to give Azula up to die. The thought filled her to her very soul, bringing a peace and contentment beyond any she could have ever known, here at the end.
As an afterthought, it also occurred to her that Azula had now won, more completely than she had probably ever expected herself. Ursa would be gone. And with Azula's arms and feet unbound, she would be in no danger from Nukka—the moon had not yet risen, so still time to do away with her. And then Azula could escape into one of the many watery tunnels that were so much like a maze, where Zuko or perhaps even Toph could never hope to find her. Would Azula finally be happy? At least a little, for a little while?
Ursa let all the last tension drain away from her. Her only regret now was that she had not had the chance to tell her family she loved them, one last time. And for the pain they would feel, all over again.
However, as the ice dangling above the waterfall shrank away, she was surprised when a dark head appeared over the edge. Long dark bangs on either side of a beautiful, perfect face.
As Azula watched her in her final moments, the coldness in her face was unchanged, the disdain in her eyes.
Ursa tried to smile, to form the words I love you, one last time. But the air was too cold, whipping around her too fast, and her mouth wouldn't move.
As Azula watched her, her arm appeared over the edge of the precipice. Sweeping sideways, as though sweeping dust from an old forgotten portrait.
Ursa stared up as an enormous, circling wave of blue flames ripped down the side of the waterfall, turning the watery spray instantly to steam. For a moment Ursa thought the flames aimed for her, to finish her before she reached the bottom. Perhaps because Azula wished that much to do the deed herself, or perhaps out of mercy, to serve Ursa a proper Fire Nation end, she wasn't sure.
But then the flames were shooting past her, forming a perfect hole around where she fell, with absolute precision. In spite of their cold color, they blazed hot around her, like a summer's day, chasing away the cold. A hiss whispered against the roiling waters below—like melting ice.
Ursa stared up at the face above in disbelief. Azula's expression hadn't changed, still with the same distant contempt.
Then Azula's eyes widened. Her head bent forward, teeth clenching.
A second head had appeared above Azula's. The blue eyes burned cold with hate, and through the semi-transparent shelf of ice Ursa could just make out the dark outline of something long and sharp protruding from Azula's back.
For an instant, Ursa seemed to hang suspended in the air an eternity, staring upward. She blinked, as something burned in her eyes. Then the last of the blue flames went out, plunging the cavern once again into darkness.
A/N: Shorter chapter, but an important one. I feel like so many of the edits here were on the setting—caves with waterfalls are fun, unless you keep changing your mind or forgetting details and end up defying the laws of physics.
We're getting down to the wire now, next chapter should be going up later this week. Once again, if you have a moment, let me know what you thought, and hope to see you in the next one!
Posted 9/15/23