Work Text:
I. The General Arrives
The storm had been building since midday. The servants would not look at one another, and the banners above the gate twisted hard against their ropes, and the rain came sideways off the harbor, and still the General's carriage came on. No one had invited the storm. The General, of course, had been invited.
Inside, the house had been lit against the dark, every lamp burning, and the hallways held their light with the smug patience of something that expected to outlast whatever came. Houses like this one did not admit to fear. Houses like this one had been built by people who believed that walls and wealth were the same thing as safety, and the house had learned this belief and held it close, the way houses hold to things.
Mai sat at the table between her parents and said nothing, which was where she usually sat, between people, saying nothing. The house was warm and she was cold. She was ten, or perhaps eleven—she could not have said exactly when the counting had stopped, only that at some point birthdays had ceased to be things that happened to her and had become things she performed for other people, and she had no gift for performance, only for watching, only for waiting, only for sitting very still while the room arranged itself around her and forgot she was there. She sat. She did not speak. She wanted.
The General's hands, broad and heavy, moved across the table setting with the easy confidence of a man who had never once reached for something and found it missing. Her father's laugh came half a moment too late, a laugh that wanted something. Her mother's spine was a straight and perfect line, and Mai, who had stood before the mirror practicing this until the girl in the glass seemed like someone else entirely, thought, she is performing too, and then thought nothing, because thinking led to other thoughts, and other thoughts led to feelings, and feelings were not useful here.
Thunder rolled through the house and she felt it in her teeth.
"Your contributions to the Fire Nation's progress are truly commendable," the General said.
Her father received this as if it were a gift. Perhaps it was. Mai did not know what her father did, precisely—something with papers, something with money, something that required him to smile at men like this one and laugh at things that were not funny—and she did not want to know, because knowing would make it real, and she was already carrying enough real things.
II. Proper Posture
Her mother's glance, when Mai shifted in her chair, was a thing with edges. "Sit straight, Mai. A lady maintains proper posture."
Mai sat straight. Under the table her hands closed into fists, and she thought, I am sitting at a table in my own house and a man I do not know is being given things, and she thought, the cutlery is very fine and very sharp, and she thought, I could put a fork through his hand and he would stop talking and everyone would look at me and I would exist, and then she thought nothing at all, because thinking nothing at all was a skill she had cultivated very carefully, and she sat with her hands closed and her face empty and she did not move.
The General produced a container from beside his chair, black lacquer inlaid with gold, and placed it on the table with the particular ceremony of a man who has rehearsed this moment many times in private. The click of the latch was clean and final, and then the knife was there among the candlelight and crystal, and the room changed.
She had seen knives before; the Fire Nation was not short of them. But this one was different in the way that truly fine things are different, not merely functional but considered, worked over, thought about by someone who understood that a blade could be more than a tool, that a blade could be a kind of language. Along the spine ran engravings she did not know how to read—Earth Kingdom work, stone-inlaid, the stylized forms of animals caught mid-motion, caught forever in the moment before they became something else. She leaned forward. No one noticed.
"I don't usually bring trophies to dinner," the General said, to no one in particular, to everyone. "But there's something about a blade like this that wants to be seen. It's restless otherwise." He turned the container so the candlelight caught the engravings. "You understand." He was not asking if they understood.
"Held onto it right to the end, that one," he said, and his voice was fond in a way that made Mai's hands go still under the table. "They do that sometimes, the ones who know what they've got. Clung to it like it would save him. Makes it mean something, the taking." He paused to drink, and when he set the glass down the sound was very small against the silence. "He had a daughter about your age, I think. Maybe younger."
Mai's mother maintained her posture. Mai's father nodded in the appropriate places.
"It's not often girls get to see real craftsmanship up close," the General added, and his eyes passed over Mai without stopping, the way eyes pass over furniture, and Mai thought, the knife is beautiful and this man is not, and she kept her face empty and the room went on around her.
III. The Siege of Ba Sing Se
"But the siege of Ba Sing Se wasn't actually a victory."
She had not meant to say it aloud. Or rather—she had been saying it internally, the way she said most things, turning the words over in the quiet space behind her eyes where words could not get her in trouble, and somewhere between the thought and the silence the words had simply come out, calm and flat and factual. She had heard the servants talking. She remembered everything she heard; it was one of the more useful consequences of being treated as furniture.
The General's face did something complicated—a flicker of genuine surprise, then something harder, then a smile that was not a smile. Her parents' faces did something simpler: pure alarm, the kind that precedes a long night of apologies.
Thunder cracked, and the windows rattled, and no one looked at Mai.
"She has school early tomorrow," her father said, which was not what anyone had been talking about, and he laughed again, short and sharp, and the General allowed himself to be redirected. Mai sat very still and thought, I said a true thing and now I will be punished for it, and then she noticed that the knife was still on the table, and she was not sure which thought was the important one, and her sleeve had slipped slightly and she adjusted it, and her spine was very straight.
IV. The Gift
She asked to hold it. It was a reasonable request. She had stated it plainly, without pleading, because pleading suggested that other people had the power to give or withhold, and Mai did not like to think about power.
"This blade's no plaything for a dainty child," the General said. "Especially little girls like you." He said it the way one might explain weather to someone who had never been outside. He said it without looking at her hands. He was already turning back to her father.
Her father apologized for her. The solution he proposed involved money—a few weeks without allowance—offered with the embarrassment of a man trying to price a thing that could not be priced. Her mother said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. Under the table, Mai's fingers traced the shape of a throwing motion against her own forearm, and she did not know where the gesture came from, only that her body seemed to understand things her mind had not yet been taught.
She wanted.
V. The Hallway
The storm had decided things. The General was given the guest quarters, and the hallway between Mai's room and his grew long and deliberate in the dark, the way hallways grow in houses that pay attention.
She had not planned this either. Or she had planned it in the way of water—not scheming, only moving toward the lowest ground, finding the available path. She was good at finding paths that did not belong to her. She stood outside her door and listened to the house settle, listened to the rain, listened to her own breathing. A good girl sits straight. A good girl does not touch things that are not hers. She opened her door and went out into the hallway, and her feet were bare and cold on the stone floor and her hands were perfectly steady.
The hallway portraits regarded her as she passed. She told herself they were only paint and paint could not see, and still she did not look at any of them directly.
She stood outside his door and listened. She could hear snoring, and rain, and thunder already moving east and already losing interest in what was happening here.
The metal of the door handle was cold. She opened the door.
VI. The Moonlit Room
The room was mostly darkness and the smell of a sleeping stranger, and the General lay in the deep, entitled sleep of a man who had never once considered that someone might come for him in the night, and his breathing was steady and without apology. The storm was breaking—she could hear it in the longer spaces between thunder—and through a gap in the curtains a shaft of moonlight had found the far table, and the container sat in it as though it had been waiting for her.
Her throat was dry. She crossed the room on her cold bare feet, feeling the stone and then the particular roughness of the rug, and she could hear everything—the General's breathing and the rain and the small sounds the house made when it thought no one was listening. She was listening. She was always listening.
The General shifted and she went absolutely still, so still she became part of the darkness. She was good at this, she had been practicing all her life, and then he settled, and she breathed, and she moved.
Her hand came down on the container's latch and it opened without sound and the knife was there, bright and patient in the moonlight, and her hand closed on the blade's handle and she wanted this, wanted it so badly the wanting was a taste in her mouth, and she took it.
VII. The First Knife
The knife was heavier than she had expected, heavier than it looked, and the weight was right, and she had not known until it was in her hands that this was what her hands had been waiting for. She held it carefully, without ceremony, learning the actual heft of the thing. The moonlight moved along the blade in a crescent, and the Earth Kingdom engravings pressed against her fingertips with a history she could feel but not yet read, and three feet away the General breathed on, unaware, and Mai stood there in the dark with the blade and did not move, and the room did not ask her to move.
"Not yours anymore," she whispered, and did not say mine, because she was not certain yet what that word meant, only that the knife was in her hands and she was alone with it, and that was enough.
She went back to her room and the hallway was dark and the portraits did not see her. She slept with the knife beneath her pillow.
VIII. The General's Laughter
The morning came cold and bright, the storm washed away, the harbor glittering. The General woke, took breakfast, let Mai's father thank him for the honor of his visit, and departed for the harbor. Out in open water, when the coast had gone to a thin gray line, he opened the container, went still for a long moment, and then laughed once, and then louder, and then louder still.
IX. The Practice Board
Her room became a different room. She did not notice it happening, only that it happened—the walls seemed closer and more familiar, the corners held different shadows, the door locked from the inside with a click that meant mine. The practice board she propped against the wall held the marks of her education, wide and scattered at first, and then collecting slowly toward the center, and toward the center, until the center itself was ruined and she had to turn the board around and begin again.
She found diagrams in one of the scroll-cases her parents kept for decoration rather than reading, old drawings that matched the style of the engravings on the blade, and she studied them with the careful attention she brought to everything that actually mattered to her.
The knife hit flat and fell, and she picked it up and threw again.
At some point she noticed she had not stopped, that her hands moved toward the blade when she was not thinking about moving them. Her hands were learning something her mind did not have words for, and she did not try to unlearn it.
Once the blade skipped off the frame and opened a thin line across her palm, and the blood was bright, brighter than she had expected, and she pressed it against her sleeve until it stopped, and she did not cry, and she picked up the blade, and she threw again.
Then one afternoon the knife went in point-first, solid and quivering, and she felt the impact travel through the air between her hand and the target, and something in her face did what faces only do when no one is watching and the thing that has happened is true.
She was still looking at it when she heard the doorway.
X. The Evidence
Her mother stood there and the room changed around her, became smaller and more dangerous, and Mai did not move because moving would be admission and she had not yet decided what to admit. The knife was in the board. The board was scarred. The evidence was complete.
Her mother looked at the board for a long moment. Then she looked at the wall behind it, where the wood had been scuffed and marked. "That will need to be repainted," she said. "Before your father notices."
Mai said nothing.
"The board is ruined. I'll have a new one sent up. And those throwing blades from the market—the ones the soldiers' children use. More appropriate." She did not look at the knife itself, though it was still quivering slightly in the center of the board. "We won't discuss where that came from. You'll keep it somewhere it won't be found."
She straightened her sleeve, which did not need straightening. She turned to leave.
Then she stopped in the doorway, not turning back, and said, very quietly: "You looked like someone I used to know."
And before Mai could ask—before the question could even finish forming—her mother added, in her usual voice: "Sit up, Mai. You're slouching."
And she left, and the room was Mai's again, and the knife was Mai's, and tomorrow someone would come to measure the wall for repainting, and there would be appropriate blades from the market, and Mai stood in her room with her ruined board and her claimed blade and she breathed. She did not cry. She was proud of this, and she was not sure the pride was a good thing, but it was hers.
XI. What She Keeps
The seasons arranged themselves and moved on, and Mai arranged herself within them. The practice board held its accumulating record—new boards now, proper targets, a set of throwing blades that her mother had acquired without discussion—and the knife, the first knife, the stolen knife, stayed hidden, stayed secret, stayed hers in a way the other blades could never be.
By then she had learned to make movement look effortless and still make it exact.
She was fifteen when Azula came to Omashu and everything Mai had built in secret became, suddenly, useful to someone else.
XII. The Answer
The man ran and Mai did not think. She had gotten very good at not thinking—at going straight from the problem to the answer without passing through the part where she hesitated, where she felt—and her hand went back and then forward and the blade sang across the alley and pinned the man's sleeve to the wall with a sound like a period at the end of a sentence. He stopped. His legs kept trying for a moment, the way a body does when the mind has not yet explained the situation to it, and then he stopped entirely and looked at the blade at his shoulder, and then he looked at Mai, and she looked back at him the way she had learned to look.
Azula walked toward him the way she walked everywhere, as though the ground existed for this purpose.
"You were saying," Azula said. She said it without inflection. She had no need for inflection; she already knew how things ended.
The man said nothing. He was looking at the blade at his shoulder and breathing through his teeth.
The alley smelled of stone and rot and the particular staleness of a city that had been made to belong to people it did not recognize. Ty Lee had positioned herself in the mouth of the alley with her arms loose at her sides and her smile in place, and her eyes were doing something behind the smile that Mai recognized as watchfulness, as waiting.
Azula looked at the man, and the man looked at the wall, and the silence held.
Then Azula looked at Mai.
It was a small look. A sideways thing, brief as a door closing, and what it said was: do something. What it said was: you know what is needed here. What it said was: that is what you are for.
Mai felt it in her teeth, the way she had felt the thunder at ten years old in a lit house with a man who had not looked at her. She felt it in the old scar on her palm, the thin white line from the first afternoon she had learned what edges were for. The look was the same as her mother's look at the dinner table: sit up, Mai. A lady maintains proper posture. You are decoration until you are required, and then you will be required correctly. The look said: you have been given a shape, and now I need you to hold it.
She had wanted this. She had stolen for this. She had bled for this in a locked room while the house went on around her without noticing. She had spent five years building herself in secret into something that could do exactly what was being asked of her right now.
She reached into her sleeve and found the knife.
Not one of the market blades—those were in her other sleeve, efficient and anonymous. This one was heavier. She had carried it for five years and her hand knew its weight the way her hand knew her own pulse, without thought, without counting. The moonlight that first night in a sleeping man's room had moved along it in a crescent, and the Earth Kingdom engravings pressed against her fingertips with a history she could feel but not yet read, and she had whispered not yours anymore, and she had not said mine.
She held it where the man could see it. She held it the way she had practiced in her room in the house on the hill, with the portraits and the long hallways and the performances at the dinner table—with complete stillness, with no drama, with the flat attention of someone who has decided.
The man looked at the knife. The man looked at her face.
"I heard them talking," he said. "In the lower market. Three days ago. They said—"
He said it. The words came out in a rush, the way things come out when the body overrides the mind and decides it would prefer to keep existing. He said where. He said when. Azula listened with the patience of a person who has never had to wait for anything and so does not know that waiting is unpleasant. When the man finished, she nodded once, the smallest possible acknowledgment, and then she turned and walked out of the alley.
Ty Lee bounced past Mai with a brightness that was doing real work. "Come on!" she said, and her voice was warm, and her eyes were careful, and she had learned too, somewhere, how to make herself useful to someone who did not look at her.
Mai put the knife back in her sleeve. She stepped over the man's feet—he was sitting against the wall now, sleeve still pinned, small and ordinary in the gray light—and she did not look at him. Looking back was not something she did.
She walked out into the street where Azula was already moving, already certain of the direction, already two steps ahead in a way that had nothing to do with walking and everything to do with knowing that the world arranged itself for her rather than the other way around. The city around them was occupied and defeated and going on anyway. A city learned to go on. A city learned what it was now.
Mai followed.
She had the knife and she had a use and the use was not hers—it was Azula's, to spend as Azula needed—and she walked behind someone who did not look back to check if she was there, and she thought, without heat, without drama: I have traded the table for the alley and the room for the street and the look is the same look and I am still carrying sharp things where no one can see them.
She thought this and she kept walking and the city closed around them, and she was good at this, she had been practicing all her life.