Work Text:
The muses sing that Azula - empress, saviour, thunderbolt of the armies of the Caldera - was born amid vast portent. That the banners of the loyal clans shadowed her crib, and dragons heralded her coming; that ten thousand benders raised flame to the sky in praise amid the salute of the fleet and the acclaim of the soldiers.
In reality, she, firstborn of a second prince, came into the world in the Lesser Jasmine Pavilion of the East Wing of the palace at Caldera. It was a spring day, those handmaidens privileged to attend upon Princess Ursa recalled, and Agni smiled in gentle aspect upon it. Beyond the birthing bed, a subtlety of hibiscus floated across the gardens Zoryu had planted. When it was done, the child was swaddled in the crimson-and-gold of the court, that royal red reserved for one family alone, and borne out to receive the blessings of the High Sage, the well-wishes of her mother’s household - and the judgement of her father.
Not even that tisane of ceremony surrounded Kuei, for all his titles and the ancient glory of his storied line. His mother died in the making of him, and his father was three days gone already, struck down by plague. Spirit-cursed, whispered some, a blight of a princeling. But Long Feng, Grand Secretariat to the throne - for all generals had scoffed and aristocrats laughed at the appointment of some ink-fingered bureaucrat to such a post - forbade such talk around Kuei, and made sure those who cared for him were loyal, and cheerful, and knew that dissent, much like the war, ought have no place in the raising of a crown.
Azula’s earliest years passed in a way common for a girl of her station, with a parade of wet nurses and maids. Princess Ursa was overcome with a great melancholy, and could not look to her child - not that it was the expected custom that she would. The closest member of her family, rather, was her cousin, Lu Ten. He had ten years advantage on her, and took to her care with a seriousness little else could match. Azula’s seventh word was ‘L’ten’, and thereafter the two were often seen about the palace. The library was especially common, and Azula learned to read with an utterly focused studiousness, with such heed to her tutors that they praised her to the Fire Lord himself.
Kuei read, too. He had a smaller court, only a handful of men and women, and his suite of rooms within the Hidden Palace at the heart of Ba Sing Se was a warren compared to the great estates of the Fire Nation. But what is a cage to an animal which knows not what freedom is? The boy was happy. Joo Dee, a slight woman with black hair and the faintest scar on her lip, was his tutor and his nursemaid. He half recalled, in the way children did, that his wet nurse had perhaps also been called Joo Dee. He asked that of Long Feng, who he more than once had mistaken for his father, and he said that they had been sisters, and that his wet nurse had gone back to the provinces.
Further west even than those provinces, Azula bent for the first time. It was the fifth year after her birth - late, by Ozai’s standards - and she had been playing at swords with her cousin, and she had dropped her stick, and fire had burst in its place. Once it did, it could hardly stop. Like a spigot loose at the base, flames danced for her. They clustered at her fingertips, leapt with her smiles, pooled in her wake. Lu Ten, in the end, threw her in the duck pond to put her out. She bobbed up to the surface, laughing.
Kuei, when he was seven years of age, performed a recital - the Lays of Fen Guli, all three thousand and six verses, for he was precocious and learned and proud of his achievement. Long Feng was not. He did not say it. In fact, he was fulsome with praise, for to serve a scholar-prince, a poet-king, would be a fine thing. But Kuei had spent his life with but the barest handful of people, and he knew that Long Feng was lying. From the pinch about his eyes, and the slightest tightening at the corners of the mouth. Long Feng was lying to him.
It would not be the last time.
On her sixth birthday, Azula received a present: two girls, Mai - a lady of the clan Saowon, and Ty Lee, seventh daughter of a Calderan city merchant. The three became inseparable with the ease children carried. Palace surgeons noted approvingly that Ty Lee’s ebullience and Mai’s reserve would have a moderating influence upon the princess. They noted with rather less approval the scrapes and bruises which came from scrambling over walls and through hedges. Playing soldiers, they said, and Ty Lee laughed and said they were playing Rangi and Kyoshi, only for Azula to tell her to shut up because adults got upset about that sort of thing.
Increasingly, though, it wasn’t only playing. Lu Ten had been given a commission, and sooner rather than later he would be departing for the war across the sea. Azula visited him at the barracks of the Royal Guard and watched the men spar, the women bend. She asked a hundred questions with the forthrightness of a child never told she couldn’t. None of them refused her, and whenever she could cut from her classes (the boring ones about the difference between the Second Mistress of the Royal Tea Service and the Fourth Lady Secretary to the Queen Mother) she would, and make her own lessons in the dust and fire and clanging steel of the home of the Fire Army’s might.
Kuei spent his days with his scrolls and his teachers. He certainly knew the difference between a mistress of the tea service and a lady secretary, and a deal more besides. But he hid it from Long Feng. At first, only because the Grand Secretariat hadn’t seemed to like his recital so there wasn’t any point in showing more of what he was doing. But as he watched, he thought more and more of the wisdom of his course - he was twelve years old, and not a fool, and Long Feng’s falseness rang truer every moment.
The same was true of Joo Dee, by a different measure. He noticed how she bade him goodnight with the same words every single time. So he interrupted her, and she stumbled like a clock with sand in its gears, like a train derailed. She was always placid, up until - when they were alone - he poked her with a needle, and her flash of anger was worth more than a dozen rote embraces. Her routine shifted, and shifted, and by slow degrees broke apart. She ruffled his hair. She sung, low and lilting, and her voice had nothing of Ba Sing Se and everything of the world.
It was dusk in the Caldera, and Lu Ten and Azula were sitting - alone, for once - by the duck pond. He was leaving tomorrow, for Ba Sing Se - just ‘Sing Se’ in army slang - for the home of the enemy and the last battle. His hands smelt like boot polish.
“You’re coming back,” Azula said, and it was not a question.
“Of course I am,” and he smiled easily. “I’ll bring you a flower from the palace gardens. I’ve heard - “
“I don’t want a flower.”
“A stone, then, from the tallest - “
“I don’t want that, either.”
He laughed, because his cousin always made him laugh. His sister, in every way that mattered and a thousand ways it didn’t. “What should I bring back, then?”
“Peace,” she said, and her eyes were bright as spear-points. “And yourself. Alive.”
On his fourteenth birthday, Kuei began to sit the throne and hear petitions from his people. He was not yet of an age to rule in his own right, Long Feng said - and the way he said it meant more than the words - but it might prove useful. There were stories of famine and wildfires in the outer provinces. A great blaze had engulfed Gaipan, it was said. Women and men in rags came before him, and threw themselves upon his mercy, and he gave them coin and salve and incense.
All of them were arranged by Long Feng. Kuei knew that. He didn’t doubt their plight, for it was a realer thing than every piece of golden jewellery and emerald finery he could muster. But they were lying when they spoke, even so. He asked if they had been caught up in raids, by pirates or daofei, and they shook trembling heads and cast eyes to the Dai Li guards and every explanation for the horrors screamed false.
He knew not what the truth was, and he dared not ask them more directly. There was something rotten within his kingdom, his people, his court. All he could do was watch.
Azula made good use of the years Lu Ten was gone, for all she missed him. Her skill with fire grew, precise and white-hot. Blade and spear, by lesser degrees, but enough to understand how her soldiers fought. And they would be hers, because even when Lu Ten and Uncle Iroh subdued the Earth Nation there would be daofei and brigands and sea-thieves to battle. She wargamed, with cadets of the staff college and on her own with ink pot and brush and map for company, trying to trace her cousin’s path up the Baiyi River, and then the investment of Sing Se’s walls. Chips of jade and carnelian re-enacted the battles of ancient past - see, here, how General Sahani turned King Bumi’s flank; how Tao Beifong, Marcher Lord of Gaoling, cut his way to the Mo Ce by earth and steel and grim determination.
She also gained a brother, to go along with the new learning. Zuko, twelve years her junior. He was born in the same perfumed place she was, and greeted with the same ordained ceremony; for Ozai was pleased to have a son, and more in love, she thought, with his potential than her reality. She was given him to hold, and looked at the scrunched up face and gummed shut eyes and passed him to a nursemaid as soon as she could. There were, after all, far more important matters to attend to.
Just after Kuei’s fifteenth birthday, a vast earthquake struck Ba Sing Se. At least, that was what Long Feng called it. But there had been a whole chain of disasters in the past year, and the spirits were not so cruel. Besides, the men and women in lacquered armour and green tassels - regular Earth Army, not Dai Li - taking position in the palace told a different story. His city was under attack.
He wanted to sally forth, a hero of old, as in the lays of Fen Guli when King Fohen had ridden against Chin, traitor and warlord, squanderer of Kyoshi’s gift and inheritor of Jianzhu’s perfidy. But he could not bend, and he could not fight, and Long Feng had shackled him with chains of parchment and ceremony and ritual so that even now, even as the Outer Wall had been breached - what else could it have been, to bring the foundations of the world crashing apart? - he could scarcely leave the palace, let alone the Inner Ring.
So instead, he sat as he always had, buffoon and captive and soon to be killed, he thought. Joo Dee was with him, through a long day and a longer night. Fires burnt in the street below, and something - a bender, a war-engine - thumped in the distance.
She said, “Niri.”
“Sorry?” for he knew not how to be impolite, even here.
“My name,” and her tone was a gentle wonder. “That’s my name. I… only just remembered.”
“Niri,” he said, and in the midst of the dark and the slaughter and the frantic war on the streets below: she smiled.
The fire fell back from Ba Sing Se, up the Baiyi. The great expedition recoiling to the islands upon a bow-wave of rumour and fear. General Iroh had abandoned it, said the whisperers in court. It was night when the ships docked at the Great Gates, and no parade met the soldiers, no hail for returning heroes as they tramped up the road from the port.
Nothing. Save Azula.
She held a lantern aloft, looking for Lu Ten in the endless files of soldiers. They staggered past in their thousands. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, but limped on, bloodshod, drunk with fatigue. Pox-marked faces and lousy beards shone in the golden light as the daughter of an undeserving nation welcomed its armies home. The word spread through the ranks - the princess is here, Lu Ten’s princess, the princess Azula - and though they were too tired to cheer they all saw her, a lonely speck atop a bleak hill in the dimness and the wind and the rain. They saw her, and they remembered.
And as for Azula? She watched unit after unit go past, colour after colour, staring into each face, while water slicked her brow and a gale tore at her cloak until dawn crept spidery legs above the horizon. Looking for her cousin, waiting for her cousin, until the very last of the rearguard, the end of the serpentine column, had passed.
For Lu Ten was fallen beyond the seafoam, in some corner of a foreign field that would be forever Calderan, and he would not return by that or any other road.
Kuei had five days with Niri. She told him everything she could remember. Of the war, how she had fled the armies of both nations, her son on her back and her daughter in her arms and her home burning behind her. The journey to Ba Sing Se. Then it became confused, but she knew she had been taken. That her mind had been stolen from her like everything else had. That Long Feng and the Dai Li were to blame, and that she had spent a decade not even understanding that.
On the sixth day, she disappeared.
On the seventh, she came back, and Kuei said - when they were alone - “Niri?” and Joo Dee asked, politely, who that was.
Azulon died. Ursa left. Ozai took the throne. Events happened around Azula, but she paid them little heed. Lu Ten was dead. The war had killed him.
She did not despair, of course, because she was of Sozin’s blood and Zoryu’s legacy, but she wanted to understand why. She spoke to soldiers, and she read reports - mountains of them - and drew conclusions far different to her newly-crowned father. No matter the tactics on the day, the campaign had been lost before it began. The assault down the Baiyi River had left the army far from its home, suspended upon wire-taut lines of communication, enmeshed in a hostile country. The very concept of conquering Ba Sing Se by force of arms was a wild hope. The idea that the Fire Nation could hold it - could push further east, to the ocean, and compel by flame and sword the whole kingdom of the enemy to its knees - was an utter fantasy.
The war could not be won. Not as Iroh and Ozai and Bujing and Mung wished it to be.
That did not mean it ought not be fought.
Kuei threw himself into research, too. He was never alone except to sleep, and sometimes not even then. He didn’t know what Long Feng had wrenched from Niri before he changed her. He hadn’t been killed, at least, nor imprisoned any more than he already was. So there was a freedom, and he would use it while he could. He snuck scrolls from the shelves and read scholarly texts hidden behind spirit-stories. All for one purpose. To understand what the Grand Secretariat was doing. And to break it, for good.
Azula was crown princess, for all her father hardly cared for her - she had overheard him, once, telling a courtier that she was Iroh’s brat in all but name - and that title brought responsibility and opportunity. She was fourteen when she attended her first meeting of the military cabinet, grey-haired generals speaking to the shadow on the Phoenix Throne. She watched, and she took notes, and she said not a word. Not when Gong said that the families of dissidents should be exterminated to the third degree. Not when Mung called for higher taxes and more levies. Not when Bujing sent the 41st Division to be slaughtered at Lan Shain.
And if she and Mai and Ty Lee spoke of what she heard afterwards? Well, that was their business, and theirs alone.
It took him a year, but he managed it. Stolen lore and smuggled herbs and a dozen feigned hangovers - let Long Feng think him a wine-soused non-entity obsessed only with hedonist impulse, let him lower his guard - alchemised into one moment. Niri-who-was-Joo-Dee had been twisted to obedience and didn’t protest when he smeared the ash on her forehead and lit the incense candles around her and spoke in tongues which had been old when Kyoshi was young.
Joo Dee closed her eyes. Niri opened them.
There was a limit to what could be learnt in the Caldera, and a sharper limit yet on what could be done. So, the obvious solution - leave.
Azula was fifteen and a half when she read in a ledger that the 39th Sei’naka (Lady Rangi’s Own), shipping out for the front at Niala, had lost its colonel to bloody flux. She was in her father’s throne room within the hour, upon bended knee, asking for the honour of command.
He thought himself invisible behind that curtain of flame, but she knew what he was thinking with the careful patience of someone who had spent a life studying it. Doubt at her youth. Hope that he might rid himself of his troublesome heir warring with the fear she might make a name for herself. Irritation at being addressed at all and a reluctant pleasure that she had seized the opportunity.
It was a throw of the dice, and only the first in a string of them, for even now her plans were running long. But it was the most crucial. Fate, at a bottleneck.
He said yes.
Fate flowed free.
Kuei managed to free another Joo Dee - not wearing that name, but imprisoned within her mind all the same. She was called Ake, and it almost went wrong - she resisted, when she realised what was happening, before the ritual had taken effect and the spirits had been called to purify the world of Long Feng’s evil. She was younger, a farmer from Chameleon Bay. She’d fled to Sing Se ahead of Earth Army requisitions, and taken shelter, and been imprisoned.
He offered her coin and a path from the city - with Niri on his side, he could manage that at least.
She’d laughed, fire burning in hollow eyes, and said she wanted revenge instead.
That, Kuei thought, could be arranged.
Azula’s troops landed at Yu Dao and shipped up a tributary of the Baiyi to the staging post at Shu Bo, and thence marched to invest the Earth Kingdom garrison at Shaizing. The 39th were an odd regiment. Half were stalwarts from the Sing Se campaign, grey-bearded grumblers who knuckled their brows whenever she passed, for they remembered her own salute. The other were new recruits, scarce older than Azula. Younger, in nine cases. Azula got to know every man and woman under her command. She dined with the officers and met with the sergeants and she was utterly scrupulous as to their care - her soldiers were doing their duty to the nation; and the nation owed them its loyalty in return.
Shaizing was held by an understrength battalion of the Earth Army, an outwork of the great fortress-city of Niala. Its walls were tattered, its men bedraggled and poxed and ill-supplied. An easy victory, to blood the infantry and whet their appetite.
Azula did not take it.
Rather, she went forward under a flag of truce. She spoke to its ranking officer, and told him - for the sake of your command, surrender. There is nothing worth dying for in Shaizing. Surrender, and you shall be treated with every civility. Upon my word as a princess and the legacy of my dynasty. In Agni’s name, if you do not, there shall surely be such an effusion of blood as to damn me, and you the more.
Three hours later, soldiers of Omashu and Gaoling and Ba Sing Se filed out from Shaizing under the honours of war, colours at half-mast, drums beating the slow march. They stacked arms as the 39th’s band took up the tune, pipes calling out across the field.
“Sir, I am your relief,” Azula said to the Earth Kingdom commander, the ritual formula passed down through the centuries.
“Your grace, I am relieved,” he replied, stiffly, and yet in it was the promise of a new world coming forth to be born.
To destroy Long Feng - and he had to be destroyed, of that Kuei was certain - was no easy proposition. He had woven his tentacles deep through Ba Sing Se, filling the void left by a strong Earth King (and oh, if he had been a different man Kuei might have rectified it). His power was subtle and gentle and beguiling - until it turned, without warning, into a deadly trap.
Ake suggested simply killing him, but he was a powerful bender in a way none of them were. Poison? He had food-tasters by the score.
So, it would be a long campaign, the three of them decided. To unpick his tapestry of power one thread at a time, so slowly that he would not notice until the weave fell apart.
He was manoeuvring to appoint a new Minister of War. That would be a fine target. All through that year, Ake and Niri, resplendently anonymous behind shields of service, gathered intelligence. They stoked rumours. Kuei made some off-hand remark at a dinner, where he was far less drunk than the guests thought, about Long Feng’s candidate. A small step. But not a useless one.
On the solstice, General Fong marched from Niala with seventy thousand men and women to challenge the Fire Nation. The two armies met on the plains outside Hajian, beneath a staring sun, wallowing in choking dust. Flights of arrows and bolts against walls of flame. Earth Kingdom tanks crawled like centipedes towards I and II Corps’ trenches - Fire Nation artillery blackened the sky with shot - cavalry swirled and eddied about the flanks.
Azula and the 39th were placed in reserve. Zhao had put it to her bluntly. That she was a child and had no place in the war. That her failure at Shaizing - a garrison ripe for the slaughter and yet all still living - showed she lacked the spine to do what had to be done.
Best she be kept from the battle. Behind the lines. Out of the way.
Which, as it happened, granted her the opportunity she was looking for.
Just after noon, the Rooster District Volunteers - cream of Fong’s army - broke through the Fire Nation positions and seized Yu Mai hill. From it, they could dominate the whole battlefield and unhinge at least I Corps. Women and men of the 27th Saowon and the 11th Lahaisin had been holding Yu Mai. Those that were not dead flooded back, fleeing the earth and the end.
Into that breach, Azula placed the 39th.
She wore her crown, as Lu Ten must have done, and held high the flag of her regiment and the banner of her dynasty. A harbour in a storm, the routing troops gathered around it, and from those shattered fragments there amid dust and blood and smoke she reforged them. Calling upon their ancestors and their leaders and the memories of battles won, Azula led them forward.
The Earth Kingdom troops were exhausted from taking the hill, and their reinforcements had not yet arrived. By the time they even realised they were under attack, that the overstretched Fire Nation had somehow mustered a reserve - it was over. The blue fire came for them and they broke like shattered glass. Scattered bands held the line and died in place, roasted alive, speared by lightning, slashed down headless.
Above the slaughter, the colours of the 39th Sei’naka danced on the mocking wind.
Kuei and his allies - they laughed, when they called themselves that, but what other name fit? - lost the fight for the Minister of War. But they had galled Long Feng, and forced him to expend favours for a position he thought free for the taking. Better yet, it had, by subtle degrees, exposed those at court not yet broken to the will of the Grand Secretariat. Small bands, and scattered loners, but from them Kuei could weave something worth having.
Azula had not stopped at Yu Mai, but rather - with the Earth Kingdom’s forward echelon put to flight - charged on down the hill, and the entire 22nd Division had followed, and the rivers had run red with Earthen blood for three days. A victory, a signal victory, greatest since Pohaui.
Admiral Zhao did not see it that way. The 39th had disobeyed orders. The 39th had broken formation. The 39th had dared the fate of the whole army on the arrogance of a princess.
Words were had. An Agni Kai was declared.
In the grass and the dust, Azula’s blue fire triumphed again, and sent Zhao sprawling, and from the ashes of his authority rose the phoenix of hers. The soldiers acclaimed her, and the officers saluted, and there - sixteen years of age, half a child yet - Crown Princess Azula took command of all the armies of the south.
Yet within that victory was a more personal defeat. Mai and Ty Lee, retainers since childhood, fell out with her. No one knew why, what had been said within the walls of the marquee. Ty Lee disappeared from history; some said she had run away to join the circus, of all things. Mai, as befitted a lady of her station, returned to the Caldera. She said not a word of reproach as to the Crown Princess, which was only to be expected, but let the court whisper as it would.
When Kuei was eighteen, Long Feng tried to give him a concubine. The woman was beautiful, and apparently experienced, and she didn’t have the tell-tale signs of being controlled like Niri or Ake had. Yet she was Long Feng’s creature all the same.
It would fit the buffoonish reputation he had cultivated to say yes and to bed her. Yet just because it might be fitting, that did not mean it would be right.
He sent her away. Long Feng tried a boy the next night. He sent him away too, and the message was received.
Azula asserted control in a flurry of orders. XI Corps was detailed out to Hodana. III Corps detached, under General Mac, to occupy the now defenceless Niala. Naopung Island, gateway to West Lake, was seized by Colonel Sato’s marines in consort with elements of the Mo Ce Striking Fleet. By the time her note to the Caldera that she had taken charge reached Ozai, too much had been done to remove her.
Therein her first rebellion.
Her second was quieter, and mattered far more. A month after the Agni Kai, she met with the elders of Koduro, a coastal town. It was a modest place, and in earlier times the best they might expect from a Fire Nation army would be high-handed disrespect. At worst, slaughter. So it was with surprise entire that Azula received them in her headquarters personally, and served them tea by her own hand, and laid out her policy - that she would no longer imprison earthbenders. Rather, she would pay them. And more than that; there would be an end to requisitions, to sword and flame and scrip. Those under her command would pay real money for food, or go hungry. By her royal will, it would be so.
The elders left that meeting wholly disbelieving.
They were right to be so - and yet Azula made it happen regardless.
Kuei spent a winter and a summer chewing at the foundations of Long Feng’s power. By rumour and influence and bribe and secret, two seats on the Council of Five answered to him. The Badgermole Throne held a plurality on the Merchant Committees, and the Guildmaster of the Assayers was no longer beholden to the Dai Li.
It was hardly a rigid level of control. None of them knew they reported to the Earth King - Kuei made sure to underline his uselessness, that he was a drunken, carousing sot - and the whole matter was engineered to seem merely a temporary alignment of interests. But it was a defiance, and it was growing.
Azula rampaged down the coast and did in one year what had not been managed in ten. Partly, it was military talent. The victory at Ayuka, an attack in oblique order, put ten thousand Gaolingers in the dirt. Four days of fighting before the walls of West Shuzo broke the armies of Omashu and sent them scurrying back to their mad king. At Irisi, Sei’naka pikes and Saowon archers smashed the dregs of Gaipan’s freedom fighters.
But much and more was her newer, lighter touch. The peasantry were not seized by patriotism, by loyalty to some gilded court in far off Ba Sing Se. The war had ground on too long for that. If the Fire Nation would not burn their crops and steal their homes and imprison their daughters; if the Fire Nation could offer peace and coin, good work and a decent meal, then it could be lived with. More colonial recruits came to the banners, and detachments and vedettes once pinned down on internal security were recalled to the field armies.
Of course, it was done with the greatest obeisance to the Fire Lord and fatherland. Azula would have nothing less. Why, the great gold coins from the mint at New Yokoya showed her father upon his throne in glory.
The fact that coppers - which passed through far more hands - bore her face went largely unnoticed by the Calderan court.
A plague came upon Ba Sing Se, ripping through Rooster District and into Crow District.
Kuei went to his people.
It was a calculated decision. Ake had said it was a risk, and time was better spent positioning within the palace. But Niri had counselled him to do it. The nation must know its king.
He stole out in the dead night, avoiding ritual, with only a handful of loyal guards - not the Dai Li, but those Army troops who could be trusted. He went among the sick and the dying uncrowned, with aid, and half of them didn’t recognise him. More than half.
Yet enough did, and their whispers spread, and the myth grew.
Kuei was back in the palace by dawn. Long Feng knew he had left, of course, and was wroth - hidden, but in patchier style than he had before. Kuei assuaged him with stories of a walk in the fresh air, a turn about the Inner Ring with Joo Dee; who could say he was not safe, with her by his side?
Azula returned to the Caldera on her nineteenth birthday. For three years, gone from her homeland. For three years, master of the armies across the Earth Kingdom. There were rumours at court she meant to quash, and a proposal to put before her lord father which was best done in person.
She marched to the palace. Stained by the light of foreign suns, the nobles said. Bearing still the dust and stink of a baser place. Mai avoided her. Yet the soldiers saw her truly, as they always had ere since Lu Ten’s day, and the people of the city hailed her name, their warrior princess.
She knelt before Ozai in the grand, echoing throne room. Zuko, a brother as much as Ursa had been her mother, watched from a corner. She presented him with the fruit of the victories won in his name and for his glory; half a hundred cities fallen to the Fire Nation; two dozen princes and lordlings of the Earth Kingdom captured upon the field; gold in heaps and silver in store. He was pleased with her, then, but she thought it more the obsequiousness of the display than the talent of its creation.
No matter.
There, upon a floor of black marble, she begged the leave of the Phoenix Throne to march up the Baiyi. To strike once again towards Ba Sing Se. For Ozai to do what Iroh had never managed, and topple King Kuei from his undeserving throne.
The Fire Lord assented.
Long Feng heard whispers on the wind, a fresh Fire Nation advance in the offing. He scraped the alleys and the gutters of the kingdom he thought he ruled for recruits and threw them forward. A vast army under the green banner.
The last one, too.
There was no war in Ba Sing Se. That was an established fact, true as the bones of the world. Yet the Council of Five and the merchants and the assayers looked to the conflict all the same. The creature of living flame which named itself Azula had unhinged their entire western position. Had exhausted even the eternal city of young men and women. If Long Feng’s great effort were successful, it would secure his power for a generation.
If he lost, then the continent entire would surely fall to fire and to ash. So too, of course, would he.
And no one knew this better, nor hid that knowledge more securely, than Earth King Kuei.
Azula was not blind, and she was not deaf. Two hundred and twenty three thousand Earthen soldiers moved against her, a ponderously slow spear-thrust, a mob-at-arms rolling west with the Baiyi. Against them, she had but one hundred and sixty eight thousand women and men under arms.
More than sufficient.
Orders snapped out with focused intensity. General Mac’s Army of the Centre - III, IV, and VIII Corps - were detailed to march for Osuni, on the north bank of the Baiyi, across the river from the foe. General Sato was entrusted command of IX Cavalry Corps and sent swinging south, through the scrub-lands, there to press upon the Earth Kingdom garrison at the Serpent’s Pass.
And as for Azula?
Her Army of the Baiyi, one hundred and three thousand strong, the striking fist of the nation, marched with drums beating and colours flying towards the Yufao Valley, and their destiny.
Kuei fell ill mere days after Long Feng’s army left the capital. He wasn’t sure if it was poison - his tasters had not been suborned, but the Grand Secretariat had secret draughts aplenty which might evade them. Or perhaps it was just a spring flu. He shivered in his bed, and knew the fate of his country and the dominion of its tyrant were being decided in far-off fields and sent up a prayer, however reluctant - however agonised - for Azula’s triumph.
She knew not of it, but she intended to answer it, all the same.
Mac made good time towards Osuni - too good, and she reined him back. Another three days. Give time for the fleet to get into position. Sato sealed off the pass as instructed, and Azula made sure the Earth Kingdom knew of it - an artfully lost message in a code they had broken.
Whoever Ba Sing Se had placed in command was not a fool, but his army was as clumsy as it was brittle. It needed a victory to blood itself and IX Corps was isolated and Azula, at the head of the Yufao, was still days away. The Earth Kingdom believed they had caught the princess’ host scattered, disorganised, frittered away.
With steady inevitability, it swung southwards and began to move against Sato and her corps.
Medicine found its way to Kuei, eventually or in no time at all - he could not be certain, for the hours blurred. Niri and Ake were with him throughout, but there was little they could do.
In the end, it was a new servant - a grey-eyed girl with a ponytail - who produced it. She said it was something her great-grandmother had made, a nun at one of the Air Temples. That she knew it was not her duty to care for the king, and she meant no disrespect, but he had been very kind to her and she knew she had to repay him.
At Niri’s command and with Kuei’s assent, she entered his personal service the next day.
Two days after the earthen troops turned south, the jaws of Azula’s trap snapped shut.
She led her Army of the Baiyi in a forced march north-east along the Yufao Valley. They moved fast, shucking baggage and camp followers, supplied by steam-launches labouring against the river current. It was a rapid progress, and a loud one, and the Earth Kingdom knew of their coming.
This was an opportunity, their general thought. Azula had realised her mistake in leaving IX Corps exposed, and was now advancing to its relief - despite the fact that General Mac and his Army of the Centre was on the wrong side of the Baiyi. The Earth Kingdom would take advantage of Azula’s rashness and crush her against the hills. Let the Fire Nation dance and flit across the surface like their namesake. It would not change a thing.
It was a good plan, well conceived, taking advantage of the strengths of the earthen army and the positions of Azula’s troops.
But for one thing.
General Mac was not on the wrong side of the Baiyi.
At Azula’s order, he had fallen upon the earthen cavalry division shadowing his movements and set it to panicked flight. Then, coordinating with the newly arrived Mo Ce fleet which had steamed up the Baiyi he - under the cover of night and the shroud of victory won - moved all seventy five thousand spears at his command from the north bank to the south, burning the earthen supply lines as he went.
Enveloped, without food and with water running dry, unable to manoeuvre for fear of a simultaneous attack on the front and rear, the Earth Kingdom army - the largest and last host they had ever assembled - surrendered with barely a bolt fired.
Long Feng was beside himself with fury. He hid it in public, but Linh, the grey-eyed serving girl, had heard him shouting at Dai Li functionaries and Army officers.
Kuei made use of it.
Couriered by Ake, who scented the Grand Secretariat’s blood and itched to drive the blade home, propaganda pamphlets began appearing in the city. There is a war, they said. Long Feng has brought it here. He is sending your daughters and your sons to death and captivity for nothing. An end to him, in Oma and Shu’s name. An end to him, in the hope of peace and the name of freedom.
The Dai Li cracked down hard, of course. But they weren’t looking in the right place, and the clumsy brutality and creeping fear of their presence only fanned the stirrings of discontent.
A similar story was unfolding in the Caldera. Leaflets were going out among the people extolling Azula’s victory, the glory and the honour of it, and demanding answers - why was it the war cabinet failed where the princess succeeded? Why is it that courtiers gossip and bicker about affairs and wines and marriage alliances while the nation is embattled? And why, it asked, was Ozai still upon the throne when every triumph accrued to his name was the work of his daughter?
The Fire Lord was wroth with this. Whoever was writing knew the court well, and picked out the gossip of the day with pinpoint, unerring accuracy. So he had three suspects, all minor nobility, hung. To encourage the others. It did not stop and it did not help.
Azula was not led astray by the rumblings from home, and the court knew she could hardly be recalled given what she had done.
Despite her elimination of the Earth Kingdom field force, she did not repeat Iroh’s mistake and spear up the Baiyi, across the lakes, to the walls of Ba Sing Se. Rather, she spent a year consolidating. Gaipan was brought firmly into the fold. The Serpent’s Pass was stormed amid fire and blood. Gaoling capitulated - Lao Beifong, grandson of the great general and unworthy of his legacy even if his daughter might grow to be - signed the instrument of surrender. All across the west and the south, ink blots of Fire Nation hegemony were swept and brushed into the calligraphy of imperial rule. Only Ba Sing Se, the mountains of Asina, and the Chameleon provinces remained under the green flag.
They would not for long.
It was a frenzied winter in Ba Sing Se. The Dai Li were stretched gossamer thin, keeping the people in check. The Army was understrength, demoralised, scrabbling to hold even a stretch of the Outer Walls. Nobles were fleeing eastwards, another every day.
Long Feng was trapped between two fires. He wished to depart, to retreat to a high fastness away from the promise of Azula’s coming and the threat of a rebellious mob. Yet all his power was tied up in the city, and all his legitimacy was centred about the Earth King. And Kuei refused to leave.
Rather, he remained within his palace, as seemingly unaware as he ever was. Niri and Ake and Linh freed another four Joo Dees in those months, the first in years, the first time there had been enough time and space and security to manage them. The conspiracy grew, and there was a fever on the streets, and it would have to break. Soon, it would have to break.
Azula’s advance on Ba Sing Se, when it finally came, was the best planned offensive in a century of war. Two hundred and four thousand soldiers, including fifty nine thousand auxiliaries from the Earth Kingdom, in five separate columns. Two war fleets, one constructed over the cold months from scratch to seize control of the East Lake. Landings upon the Ba Sing Se shore were the largest amphibious assault in decades, tens of thousands of soldiers on a dozen invasion beaches in the first wave.
Logistics were key. By weight, her ships carried more rice than naptha. Mobile bread ovens, borne on palanquins of earth by contracted benders, went forward with the troops. Quartermasters down to the battalion level sent enough reports and returns to blacken the sky. It was not the parlous lunge, the daring blow which had killed Lu Ten and maimed an army.
Rather: inexorable. Unrelenting. Unstoppable.
It was afternoon on the forty second day of the offensive, and Azula’s army was but twenty six miles from the Outer Wall. Kuei had asked Linh if she might bring him a cup of tea and a treatise on Zoryu II from the library - with most of Long Feng’s cronies abandoning him or the city or both, the deception of incompetence was less necessary by the hour.
Instead, she brought him a letter, written in a strong, clear hand.
He read it with careful attention, and answered.
Dusk. A message, for Azula’s eyes only, bearing the seal she had given away five years before. She read it, smiled, and folded up the note waiting on her desk and gave it to a staff officer. Immediate dispatch, it said. Highest priority. Brook no delay and tolerate no resistance in the execution of your orders.
Kuei could not issue orders in the same way. But he could use his influence, and he did. Niri was sent to the garrison at the Jade Gate, whose commander was a friend of hers, to implore him to stand aside this evening. Ake spoke to the Assayers, who spoke to the guardians of the crossroads, and the printers of sedition. New messages began to circulate. Stay low. Stay quiet. Await the word. The king and the people rise with the coming of the dawn.
At just past midnight, the 1st Keosoho Dragoons and the 14th Sei’naka Lancers fell upon Ba Sing Se like lightning from a clear sky. The gate was unbarred. The road was empty. A girl in a hooded cloak with grey eyes speaking the dialect of the Calderan court met them on the way and guided them home.
Three thousand Fire Nation cavalry smashed into the Dai Li headquarters, burnt the sentries, slaughtered the sleeping agents, and killed Long Feng where he stood.
Azula paraded into an open city the next day ahorse, surrounded by marching lines of infantry. Coins were thrown to the crowds, and flowers tossed back. The people cheered her. It was what she had worked to achieve, across years of bribes and spying and killing, yet it still sat oddly. This was the heart of the enemy, and the place where Lu Ten was buried - she would pay her respects to him, and soon, her brother fallen upon a field foreign no longer - and yet they hailed her all the same.
Kuei had donned a regal aspect in the throne room, to await Azula’s coming. His ranks of office; a necklace of emerald atop a jade mantle and robes of pleated silk finer than any in the world. Niri and Ake - free, finally, of their deception - stood sentinel at his side in gowns of gold and green.
The crown princess bore no such finery.
She wore the armour of her soldiers, battered and scuffed and well-loved. Her trousers were patched, her boots worn, the scabbarded dao at her hip armoury-issue. Only her hair, bound in a perfect topknot, and the gold insignia in it, was as he would have expected.
It was an artifice, and he fell a little in love with her just for seeing it.
She marched to the foot of his throne, alone, unescorted - what need did a woman who had humbled a continent have of an escort? - and knelt before him, and looked up.
“Your serenity,” she said, carrying, declaratory. “I am Azula, heir to the Phoenix Throne, and I am come to ask for your hand in marriage.”
Azula had not known what to expect of Kuei. Ty Lee’s reports had assured her that his uselessness was very much a front, which was a blessing. But they had not remarked upon his eyes. He gazed at her as though she was a wonder, and a mystery, and something to understand and never to own.
When he spoke, his voice was gentle, a rustle of leaves in an autumn wind. “Your grace,” he said. “It would be my great honour to accept your suit.”
They went out to address the people, then. To declare peace, brought about by the union of two crowns, and to hand out alms. Kuei gave the speech he had written overnight, denouncing Long Feng, proclaiming that never again would the Earth Kingdom be enslaved. Azula, thoughtfully, had made sure that most of her troops entering the city were from Gaoling and Gaipan and Yu Dao; a symbol of a future, together.
As for their own? They only had privacy that evening - Kuei had been consumed with matters of state and his network strained as he asserted his real power, while Azula had had letters to send and armies to reposition - but met, alone, in his study.
She had let down her hair, tumbling in loose waves to the small of her back. He thought about kissing her.
Instead, he said, “I don’t imagine Fire Lord Ozai has agreed to this match?”
A smile flickered at the edge of her mouth. “You imagine correctly, your serenity.”
“Kuei, please. If we are to be,” he swallowed, without meaning to, “husband and wife, then you should at least use my name.”
“Kuei, then. And never fear. My father shall not be a concern for long.”
Ozai or not, there was plenty to occupy them. The Earth Kingdom had spent a hundred years fighting the Fire Nation, and for all its exhaustion and for all Azula’s reforms, the war could not, did not, end easily. It was Kuei who made the difference. He sent deputations out from Ba Sing Se with the news - peace upon status quo ante lines, a withdrawal of Fire Nation forces to the western provinces; but the heir and issue of Crown Princess Azula and Earth King Kuei would inherit both nations. Resistance flickered and was quelled, but only by constant attention and constant effort.
Azula dined with him every day, and took, soon, to breaking her fast in his cambers too. At first, it was a matter of appearance. Then, a function of their shared work. By the sixth day, she could confess her pleasure as an object; by the ninth, as the main object, staying long into the night to play at dice and debate. Both needed the other, and so both could be free with the other.
It was a rare thing, for those of their rank, and beautiful for it.
Two weeks after the proposal, the pair of them began a progress back west, to show the citizens their king and the peace he had won. A palanquin was the only suitable transport, of course. Azula laughingly refused it, and instead rode alongside, pointing out the ground - the units of her army they went past, and she seemed to know every soldier - and answering the myriad questions Kuei had with an amused patience.
She was not a soft woman, his intended, not the perfumed concubines Long Feng had offered. Her jaw was too austere, her mouth too easily curling into contempt, her body knife-slim and dagger-sharp. Yet her eyes were full of fire and her mind a glory of clockwork and gears and calculation, and he thought he might spend his whole life learning her anew every day.
News from the Earth Kingdom began to reach the Caldera, as rumour and imprecation and impossible fantasy. At first, it was dismissed. Then another report came, and another, and be it however vague it could not be barred from Ozai.
His fury was towering. The pamphlets made fun of it, the acid-tongued non-entity upon the throne, the play-king pretending to be Sozin, the court viper twisting in a trap. That did not help, and nor did his hangings, and nor did the young man burnt alive by the Fire Lord for disrespect.
On the eleventh day out of Ba Sing Se, Kuei took Azula to bed; or she did him. Experience, for both parties, was somewhat lacking.
Enthusiasm, as it turned out, was not.
An evening in the Caldera. It seemed as normal as any night could be, in those days. But pieces were in play and on the move. Agitators went quietly among the 403rd and 192nd Domestic Forces divisions within the capital. A group of Yuyan Archers ghosted through the gardens of the royal palace; a pair of street toughs lingered outside Admiral Zhao’s estate.
And a single figure went up to Ozai’s quarters. They were not authorised for entry. No one was to disturb him.
The guards let them in anyway.
The man on the bed was asleep, so they could have taken their time. They didn’t need to.
Mai, lady of the clan Saowon, slit her Fire Lord’s throat and spilled his blood all over the sheets.
Azula was taking breakfast with Kuei - or, rather, eating a handful of cashew nuts and staring at a field commander’s report from Naija - when a messenger came in, bowed to his waist, and gave her the news.
When she was finished smiling, she showed him.
Ozai, Zhao, Bujing, Qin, and Mung were all dead, together with their families. Her brother Zuko was spirited away to a loyal estate, killed in all but truth, there to live in exile. The Domestic Forces had proclaimed her Fire Lord; the Army of the North and the Mo Ce Fleet had followed suit.
Two hours later, her own army acclaimed her and Kuei both upon the field - rulers of the greatest kingdom the world had ever known.
They married in Yu Dao - bastion of the west, gateway to the east - as the spring was turning into summer. Citizens of both countries flocked the streets, for this was the heart of Azula’s power, a personal fiefdom ruled for nearly six years and loyal indeed, for all ructions might yet still exist elsewhere in the world and the kingdom. Azula wore the red of her house, the crown of her office; Kuei, the vestments of his. Sages of Earth and of Fire joined together for the ceremony.
“As I am Oma,” Kuei said. “You are Shu.”
“As I am the fire,” Azula had replied, the words unbroken down the centuries. “You are the light.”
And there, upon the steps of the temple, Azula, Fire Lord and Queen-Consort; and Kuei, Earth King and Fire Prince; cemented their union before spirits and man, and pledged henceforth peace between their realms, and bequeathed a legacy of unity to the child they would raise together.
They had both been born into cages. Together, they had remade the world over again.