Avatar // Whispers Carry // Part 1 of 10 (projected)
Title: Whispers Carry
Fandom: Avatar
Rating: T
Word Count: About 7,200
Summary: What do you do when you lose a war? Start a revolution.
*
A Particular Visitor
*
Master Xi Cai drank coffee. Every morning he had a great steaming mug of the stuff, or a great slushy mug of the stuff if it was a particularly miserable summer, and he liked it. He roasted the beans himself to ensure that he liked it. His daughter shared his enthusiasm for the Earth Kingdom drink; his son and wife did not.
Katara was ambivalent, mostly because the Xi family was as strange as all get up, and being surprised every other minute got very old, very fast. On the outside, their house looked perfectly normal by Fire Nation standards. Stepping in, however, was like taking a single long stride across the ocean and into enemy territory.
The floors and walls were carved stone, either plain or painted green and gold, blue and white, red and black, orange and yellow. The artwork and furniture came from all over the world. If not for the ostensible banners in the front hall, she might have forgotten exactly where she was. Kind relatives called it unorthodox; the rest of the Xi family called it suspicious; Katara called it home, and had for five years this summer.
The building ringed a large, open courtyard and had two stories toward the rear of the house and one story at the front. It was modeled, Master Cai had once said, after parts of the royal palace. The design spoke for the family: We aren't doing anything wrong, really. On our honor. And it said so with a fuzzy puppy face, misdirection against the puddle on the floor.
She passed Master Cai on her way outside, and he waved for her to stop. Katara bowed quickly as he began, "So there is someone here after all. Damn festival has the entire city out wreaking havoc."
"I don't have much of a reason to be out there with them," she replied.
He said, "You have a point in that," and gave a small, brief smile.
"I'm okay," Katara said. This exchange was close to being tradition: every year Master Cai avoided asking her about exactly what had happened at the palace and in the capital's prison. Every year she avoided telling him, and every year as the damp, miserable heat of summer faded into the damp, bearable heat of fall Katara moved a little closer to actually being okay.
"Well, then," he said abruptly, "One of our particular guests waiting in my study."
"The usual, then?"
"This one doesn't drink tea," Master Cai replied.
"Ah," she said, "Your usual, then."
He laughed briefly, nodding. Katara bowed, but without the formality she had learned to apply to others.
The kitchen stood as its own building within the courtyard. It could feed a household of over one hundred fifty people (the house could shelter as many). She couldn't remember ever seeing an event here with more than twenty or thirty, or a point where the kitchen was full. The cooks were out at the market now, and would return later. The oil lamps that sat on small shelves on the walls remained unlit and Katara found her way around in half-darkness, the door held open with a rock.
She found comfort in the pattern of daily life. The second year, after the rebuilding was completed and she stopped collapsing every night from sheer physical exertion, had been the hardest. She kept to herself, did as she was asked, and ensured as best as she could that no one thought she was suspicious.
Now Katara's hair was pinned up in the Fire Nation style: no loops, no braid, and her necklace hung on a chain beneath her clothes. Those were concessions to blending in. She didn't wake up from dreams of her friends' executions anymore. The images of standing at the back of the crowd as they were burned or beheaded while she watched, unable to move, had gone. No one's cheers rang in her mind when she opened her eyes.
She answered to her own name. Katara, after years of being called "Kae."
"I'll tell you what," Liang - Cai's daughter, and a corporal in the Fire Army - had said, "My father's as much a smuggler and a technical 'abettor-of-the-enemy' as he is ... whatever else he is. Lots of things go on here that could get us all exiled or killed or worse. You're not the least of them, that's granted, but stranger things have happened than some waterbender girl joining our staff."
Katara saw stranger things than herself pass through here; she boxed them up and concealed them and admired them. The Earth Kingdom made better porcelain than the Fire Nation. It grew better dyes and supplied cheaper ores. Its dishes were devoid of the volcano-strength chilli peppers that found their way into every food ever to see the inside of a wok here.
Entertainment of visitors, she found soon enough, fell into two categories: people who weren't supposed to be here, and people who no one wanted to be here. The former were put up and actually entertained while the latter were plied with enough dull small talk (or alcohol, depending) to bring about agreement to some other entertainment at some other place.
Their guests were clients and contacts and officials to be bribed.
She finished filling the tray and carried it back into daylight, closing the door with her foot. Katara balanced her way across the courtyard. That route was faster than going into the house and through the hallways. Katara entered an open door halfway across the length of the open space. A sneeze sounded from inside Master Cai's study; shortly after, the long-haired orange cat which had adopted the family three years ago bounded out. He rubbed against Katara's legs as she passed him. She shouldered her way into the room.
Katara nearly dropped the tray. Across from Master Cai, the visitor continued to gesture, oblivious to her presence.
He was older, and ... scruffier seemed an appropriate description. He had a short beard; his hair had grown in, although he did not wear a topknot or queue. Katara blinked once, sharply.
Under normal circumstances, entertaining guests meant bringing food and coffee and making tea, if asked. It did not, generally speaking, include near death from shock. She coughed politely and both men turned to look at her. She sat the tray down and said, "I'm sorry to interrupt."
Master Cai replied, "Katara, I don't believe you've met the prince?"
These circumstances gave "normal" reason to run off into the sunset, flailing and foaming at the mouth.
"We've met," Zuko said. He gripped the edge of the table with one hand and narrowed his eyes at her.
Apparently there were still hard feelings.
Katara left without a response. Her shoes made soft shuffling sounds against the floor of the hall. From inside the study, she heard Master Cai speak, "You know one another?"
Prince Zuko was sitting in a room drinking tea not one hundred feet away from where Katara stopped to pull her thoughts into something resembling order, and the only word she could elicit to describe it was "weird." Granted, people who were supposedly dead or imprisoned for years showing up for afternoon refreshments certainly qualified as that, but Katara had seen so many strange things in her lifetime that her standards for the word were higher than those of many other people.
Earth Kingdom merchants within the bounds of the Fire Nation capital were a cause for raised eyebrows, but she often served them coffee and traded rumors, gossip and good-natured jabs with them. She was related - technically - to people who used bending on plants and counted catfish-gators as members of the family.
It took really extraordinary wildlife to impress a woman who had wrangled canyon crawlers and spent the better part of a year traveling by flying bison express, who had seen giant-gorilla rabbits and nearly been eaten by a platypus bear, a giant unagi and the sea serpent to end all sea serpents. Another year riding around atop an elephant-camel cemented her appreciation for unique local fauna.
Four more years living with what was quite possibly the most patriotically lukewarm noble family in the whole of the Fire Nation left her with a deep respect for unique local perspectives. In the eleven months since she had taken up the position of first steward of the Xi household, she had found that things would forever have to compete with the inventory of smuggled goods that found their way into the corners of the family's warehouses.
Spirits! She herself was a sight to behold: the first female waterbender officially trained in the northern style in anyone's memory and personally responsible for - .
Katara shook her head. While she had escaped from under the nose of one Fire Lord and helped to topple another, she really was responsible for Aang's release from the iceberg, and probably for his death as well.
The prince's presence set her on edge, because the prince was supposed to be just as dead as Aang. The logical part of her brain was practically shouting at her that there was something very ... weird about that. Two conflicting facts - two things that she knew and of which she was completely certain - stuck up against one another to form an illogical mess.
She was supposed to be the only survivor of the core of "The Avatar's Revolt," and Zuko was sitting in the other room in a state that definitely qualified as "still breathing." If he had gotten out alive, what did that say about the others? What did it mean for Sokka and Toph? What did it say about her? About what she could have done for the others, if she hadn't panicked and run?
Katara didn't want to think that way, because never led to anything good. Instead, she went to the roof.
There had been an earthquake, weeks after they had all been caught and jailed. She owed her life, her position within the Xi household and her spot on the roof to that quake. The repairs that followed it included an access ladder hidden behind a wall, leading upward to allow for maintenance work. Katara used it to get some privacy, often finding herself seated atop the building and watching the docks and the ocean on one side of the house or the city on the other. Today she faced the sea and remained there until well past dark.
New people had started making visits to the Xi house some months ago. They were people outside the usual host of merchants and traders and beyond the irregular lot of pirates and smugglers and officials. While they were unusual and not visiting on business, Katara hadn't thought to give them much consideration at first. They were other noblemen on social visits; it was nothing to get excited over.
She started eavesdropping about five months ago, after catching a single snip of conversation -
"- to be done about our Lord -"
Her hovering outside Master Cai's door had gone unnoticed for approximately two of these meetings. While the actual content of the conversations was cryptic, the intent behind the words was clear enough: the people - at lease, these people - weren't pleased with Princess Azula's work as Fire Lord, and they wanted her out.
The evening after the second meeting, Master Cai had called her aside and into his study. "There is a reason why intelligence officers are stationed far from their homes," he had said.
Katara knew then that she was caught. She put on an innocent face anyway, "Sir?"
The man continued, "They stop being careful once they start getting comfortable," he paused, then "Colonel Sen will be arriving in two weeks' time. I want you to play hostess."
"But - why?" She had probably stared. Her mouth may have hung open. A number of the details of the conversation remained ethereal in Katara's mind.
"The viewpoint of an uninvolved third party is always beneficial."
Katara offered the colonel all the same courtesies she gave to any other guest. She offered him food and drink and brief conversation, then moved off to a spot just within earshot to allow the men nominal privacy while she made a show of preparing one of Master Cai's lutes.
Deliberately off-hand, Master Cai had asked that she not play - a planned action, considering she didn't know a single note - but that she stay, in case she should be needed.
All she had to do was sit, look pretty and be ignored. After Colonel Sen left to return to his station elsewhere in the city, Katara offered her opinion to the Xi patriarch, "I think you're crazy."
"Perhaps you aren't as observant as I had previously assumed," he countered with the barest lilt of amusement.
She cast him a look. "Colonel Sen seems nice enough," Katara began. She knew that her presence was experimental, and that any continued involvement hung on this conversation. She continued, "Not that it means anything. I think he's testing the water, and he'll turn on you the minute he thinks it will be an advantage to him."
That much had been easy enough to pick up - while Master Cai's and the colonel's discretion could have been due to her presence, Katara doubted it. The Count had tip-toed, careful to say nothing against the Fire Lord, and the soldier had been equally reserved.
"The campaign," Colonel Sen had meant the continued suppression of rebellion in the North, and the seizure of the mountain range around the smaller of the Earth Kingdom's two inland seas, "was successful, as her raids have been. Fire Lord Azula now wishes to lay a second siege on Ba Sing Sei."
He spoke by way of facts. The two men had danced around one another with their words, Master Cai's reply to the news the barest of derisive breaths and, "How many men do you think this will cost us, Colonel?"
All the other talk was small, moving from the Xi family's latest business undertakings to the health of Colonel Sen's wife.
"He could be useful," Katara said at last, "but I would rather use a man I could trust than him."
Hearing that seemed to please Master Cai, who made her a continual presence in the visits from what she came to refer to as their "particular guests."
The music teacher who temporarily joined the staff had scoffed and declared her "too hopelessly old" only once. Katara was quick in her reply that he would be paid either way, that she only needed a song or two, that she could learn to play by ear, and that the necessity of mastery was an issue that simply did not exist.
From there, she put together many of the logistics of this revolution. Some pieces, however, had never seemed to fit properly with the others. They wanted to depose Azula, but who would they install in her place? She had a son, but the child was barely walking and she refused to name the boy's father. The movement was far-reaching, but how many people could they actually drum up if the need arose?
Katara was acquainted with a number of what constituted the movement's upper echelon, but the numbers they gave were mostly in terms of how many men any given one could raise.
By all rights, she shouldn't have known any of it. She didn't know if she would have been able to come into the information she possessed if she hadn't risked everything last year when she accepted the steward's position left vacant by old Wancheng's death. She had waited until the last possible minute to reveal her identity.
"There's something you should know before you do this," she had said. "I'm not who you think I am - my name is Katara. I was going to be executed for my work in The Avatar's Revolt, but I managed to escape during the earthquake and I probably have a price on my head."
"You also make a damn good cup of coffee," Master Cai had replied, and that had been it.
She didn't know what she had been expecting at the time, but it was something much less anti-climactic.
Katara wondered if that was why nothing had been said about Zuko.
When Katara joined the staff here, she had been little more than a grief-stricken lump. Was it an attempt at protecting her? Was it because the prince had been on their side, at the end?
Prince Zuko was the explanation she needed. They wouldn't have to trust a child and a gaggle of over-ambitious regents with the throne, or to climb the royal family tree looking for bastards and second cousins. The need for it was gone, because Zuko's claim to the throne was just as strong as Azula's.
"I'll go with the Avatar."
It was Zuko who had escorted Aang to Fire Lord Ozai's audience chamber so many years ago. It made sense. Zuko knew the palace better than all of the rest of them put together. That it meant he got what he was after all along was little more than an added bonus.
"Do you expect him to win?" she had asked.
"I don't know."
Katara stood, and moved across the low sweep of the concave, clay-tiled roof, careful not to fall as she approached the access hatch. She climbed numbly down the ladder, suddenly very, very tired. The air was heavy, and made breathing difficult. She didn't think much of it; such weather was normal for a Fire Nation summer.
She had missed dinner. She would need to apologize for that and make assurances that she wasn't ill or otherwise incapacitated. How late was it? She walked the short way, crossing the courtyard to get to her room. There was no lock or latch on the door, and Katara entered and fell into bed with the overwhelming sensation of, "Well, now what?"
*
Work didn't stop because of the matters on her mind - considering all the different ways she could have overlooked something so obvious. Katara woke before dawn after sleeping poorly and changed clothes. Afterward, she went to unlock both the front and back entrances, then moved off to the kitchen to forage for breakfast.
A cellar was dug beneath the building, and although it was pitch-dark inside, she had gone through the motions of feeding herself before half the city even stirred so often that it was no longer an issue. The cooks were both firebenders - let one of them light the lamps and the cooking fire when they arrived.
She moved through the gloom of the outbuilding while the sun rose outside, and from there descended through the trapdoor in one corner and into the cellar. They kept root vegetables and preserved foods here, for the most part. She fumbled her way over a number of shelves and found that she wasn't hungry.
This was why Katara disliked disruptions - they left her without a sense of routine, and in routine was safety. She wanted out into the relative anonymity of city, and space to think. In a moment, Katara was back into the kitchen - now lit barely blue - and then outside. She sat down on a rock not far from the kitchen door.
She knew the time not by a clock or the angle of the sun against the horizon, but by the amount of yellow in the glow of the new day's light. Or, as it were, by the approaching figure of one of the cooks. Katara waved to Min, the younger of the two that usually arrived together. "Good morning!"
Min yawned. The girl was seventeen, married for a little more than a year and carried her baby in a sling around her front. Another child, no older than nine, peeked out from behind her. Min spoke a moment later. "Rockets and explosions and colored smoke bombs: All. Night. Long. And shouting. Lots of happy, celebrating shouting. I'm going to be so glad when this month is over!" She took a breath, then added, "That's my little sister - I brought her for backup, in case Mama doesn't make it today."
Katara smiled at the little girl, who bowed quickly and took off into the kitchen. "That bad?" she asked, tilting her head slightly to one side.
"The thirteenth district's burning, so she's down there being helpful."
That sounded like Liling. The woman would have been an army medic, if she hadn't had Min's older sister, and boasted some training in the healing arts. She was caring to the point of ridiculousness sometimes, but as good with bandages as she was with a knife.
"Something's being done about it, right?" Katara asked, following Min into the kitchen. Most of the lamps were lit - Min's sister carried a step to the next one.
Min walked over to her sister, saying, "Lan - Lan, don't do that. Do you want to break your neck?"
"I'm not gonna break my neck," Lan grumbled.
"Not if you don't do stupid things like that, you won't - go light the hearth fire." Min took the oil jug from the girl and filled the last lamps herself, lighting each wick with a press of her fingertips.
Lan muttered something, then did as she was told, sat down, pulled a loop of string from a hidden pocket and began playing cat's cradle.
Min turned her attention back to Katara. "As though Baojia would leave off his whores and liquor long enough to live up to his responsibilities. What city have you been living in?"
Katara listened as she gathered up the coffee grounds and service - really a converted tea set with larger cups - and set the water to boil on the newly blazing cooking fire. She conceded, "Okay, stupid question."
"Kind of. Are you down at the docks today?" Min asked as she gathered knives and bowls, which she carried over to the work surface in the middle of the room.
"Mm-hm. I'll do the work that's needed in here once I'm back."
"If it were up to you we'd all be living on plain rice and bananas," Min teased. She adjusted her sling and her child gurgled.
Grinning, Katara replied, "You're exaggerating! Grossly!"
"Uh-huh." Min paused to think, "When you're heading down to the docks, could you get my older sister, and her cousin-in-law Eryu and his brother-in-law Chen if you can, and assistants? I couldn't cook for the prince all by my lonesome self, even if Mama was here."
It didn't strike Katara as strange that Min would know about their particular guest - both cooks would have been given fair warning, and the Count trusted them implicitly. Xi Cai had the tendency to attract strays - be they possessions, pets, or people. The staff was treated well, and their loyalty lay primarily with the Xi family.
With the water bubbling, Katara pulled the kettle off of the coals. "So basically, what you're saying is that we need the same people we always bring in when Master Cai springs an impromptu dinner party on us. And if Liling was here, you wouldn't be by yourself."
Min took up three baskets, keeping two for herself and the third for her sister. She headed off toward the cellar; Lan followed. "Well, still."
"Got anything in mind?" Katara asked. She added the ground coffee beans to the kettle and stirred. "You have that look on your face."
Min had been born to cook. Her mother was good, but Min herself was an innovator.
"Well ..."
"We're three people, Min. Four, if Liang turns up. Don't overdo it."
"I won't."
Katara raised her eyebrows.
"Really. I won't overdo it. Promise." She still had that look as she descended the steps. Katara returned her attention to the coffee, using her bending to separate the dark liquid from the grainy solids, its circulation through the air cooling it enough to prevent it from cracking the porcelain not-teapot. She discarded the grounds and called her goodbye to Min, then carried the tray outside.
The light had turned almost yellow when Katara left the kitchen with the coffee tray. The air had taken on a hazy quality, owed to the fire further into the city, and had grown thick enough that it grabbed onto fabric and caused her skirt to cling to her legs.
A light breeze picked up and wispy clouds floated overhead. Katara walked back into the house and found Master Cai in his study. The man looked up from the letter he had been reading and nodded her into the room. She placed the tray on the table to his left.
"My thanks," he said and filled his own cup. "You disappeared yesterday. Coffee?"
"No, thank you. And I'm sorry." Katara looked past him, careful to avoid meeting his eyes.
Master Cai slurped his drink, then set the cup down with the clink of pottery on pottery. "You were surprised. Put off your guard."
"It's been a long time," she replied. "I needed to think. Again, my - "
"Don't you go around feeling sorry, girl."
This was the man she knew, at once kind and blunt. Katara hadn't thought this sort of person existed in the Fire Nation, before. It was a strange thing to confront even now, and unsettled her perception of the way the world ought to work.
These were the people who sat idly by as their country destroyed lives - people who participated actively in the destruction. It was luck that landed her in the household of one of a handful of men who had seen the wrong in their nation's actions. The few who were intent on stopping the devastation that they had helped to cause.
Katara looked Master Cai in the eyes and replied, "I neglected my duties."
The man nodded, then fluttered his hand in the air dismissively. "Once in four years."
She had the grace to look embarrassed. As Master Cai turned his attention back to his cup, Katara asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"
He lowered the cup enough to speak, "Tell you what?"
"That this thing was about putting Prince Zuko on the throne."
The statement hung in the air between them, taut as a lute-string. The cup clinked again as he set it back down; Master Cai inclined his head forward and to the left. He examined her as a bird might look at a worm. He replied a second later, "I had thought it was implied." Before she could respond, he picked up his letter, extending it toward her, and changed the subject, "I'll be heading out to the palace at noon, day after tomorrow."
Katara took the paper and read - it was a request for a visit from the Elder Lady Xi. She mused, "The Fire Lord Herself can't get you up there except by threat of force, yet a letter from your mother sends you running."
"Katara," Master Cai said, long-suffering, "Dear, sweet, innocent Katara - "
She she raised both eyebrows in a silent demand that he stop it.
"My mother is a 'threat of force,'" he finished shortly. Katara allowed her lips to curve upward in a slight grin. The matriarch of the Xi clan dealt with the family estate and the family's relationship with the crown while her son handled the greater sphere of business. She had met the Elder Lady Xi twice, and she was imposing in the same way that Gran-Gran was imposing. It was an old woman, "listen and do as I ask you or I'll set you floating on the next iceberg that thinks to drift by" sort of imposing.
She settled on a kind of assent, "Women like your mother are only made in limited quantities, Sir."
"My mother is a bump in our road," he replied. "She did her growing up in Lord Sozin's glory days and she's a patriot if ever there was one. That makes her one more variable to account for. It's either I go see her, or she comes down here to collect me, and I'm not having that with the prince holed up in our library."
Katara didn't want to think about that just then. "Liling is down in the thirteenth district."
"So that's where the fire is. Long Dazhei will be arriving here this evening, and Sima Kuzon tomorrow morning. We would have needed some extra hands in the kitchen anyway. Our usual folk will be fine. If they're busy, offer them more money."
"Just come out and say you want me to bribe the cooks. I'll be sure they know they're being paid once for their food and again for their discretion," she said. Master Cai nodded approval, and Katara continued, "Where do I meet our buyer?"
They were expecting the arrival of one of their off-the-books dealers today, and had already arranged to transfer the goods into another person's hands.
"He and I will be at the waterfront warehouse this afternoon," Master Cai said. "Here," He tossed a leather drawstring bag at her. It was heavy, and clinked with the coins inside.
Katara bowed slightly and exited, bound for the harbor.
*
The docks were a half-hour's walk away from the house, but Katara usually kept to the alleyways and backstreets to avoid any notice she could. There was little she could to do to keep from looking different, even as dressed and pinned and arranged in the Fire Nation style as she was.
She refused to keep her head bowed like she'd been defeated, because she hadn't. Some people stopped her to ask questions and others slowed to stare. What's that Water Tribe girl doing here?
Attracting notice was liable to get her killed. Katara doubted that the warrant for her, dead or alive, had lapsed in the years since her escape. Still, there were ways to drive the questioners off. The citation of Fire Lord Azulon's decree that female firebenders serve tours of military service alongside their brothers and with it the implication of mixed parentage was usually enough to get the pryers to shut up.
Avoidance was better. A snippy brown girl might be remembered while one who hadn't been seen at all would not. Still, it meant that the walk to the shipyard took twice as long as it needed to, and by the time she had tracked down Eryu, with instructions to bring his brother-in-law and Min's sister Ting and paid all three, full morning and the stifling, heavy heat it carried had settled over the city.
The air was a dull gray-brown color with the smoke of the thirteenth district fire. Her high shoes clunked on the wood of the wharf, and around her men and women in stands hawked their wares to traders and sailors and navymen. All sorts of folk came and went freely - the Xi family's influence over the waterfront district could be seen everywhere.
Master Cai held the rank of count at court and was called the Count of the Docks in the capital. His people saw to it that the harbor was safe and orderly and enforced the law on the docks. For his services, the family took three percent of all trade that passed through.
The fourth district nearly compared with Earth Kingdom ports in its diversity.
She felt her stomach rumble through the hum of people talking and shouting and followed her nose to a food stand. From her own purse, she paid two coppers for a steamed bun and something-on-a-stick. The skewered food was covered in a light, sweet, and mildly spicy sauce that stuck to her hands. She didn't ask what it was, having decided that where street food was concerned she would generally rather not know. The bun was stuffed with pork and those tiny peppers.
When Katara bit into it, she swallowed quickly and dropped the other half to the ground. She doubled over, breathing through her mouth to cool the burning on her tongue.
Someone laughed at her - a kid, maybe seven years old. She glared fiercely at the boy; when he met her eyes he flinched back. He was dressed in tightly-woven, sturdy linen and worn but well-made boots. The child's eyes were a deep, intense shade of gold. He had slipped into a defensive stance, which suggested that he was a firebender as well.
Katara ran her tongue beneath her teeth. The friction cooled her mouth enough to speak. She used the same reasoning she did on nosy adults, simplified for a child's benefit. "Damn Water blood," she winced as she said the words. She supposed that lie would never stop hurting. "Makes me a wimp with spicy food."
The boy's eyes widened as Katara stood back up. The pepper burn hit the back of her throat. He stayed only a second longer, then ran off.
Katara played with the chain of her mother's necklace for a moment and started back on her way. Her footsteps fell hollowly on the planks. The incoming waves sloshed against the pilings of the pier, their sound welcoming and comforting. The crowd wasn't too thick - most locals were further in the city, taking part in the Fire Festival, and Katara was able to move quickly.
She knew the ship first by its colors. At the top of the mast the breeze tossed the stylized black flame of the Fire Nation on its field of rust red. It was the swirling, openwork banner, denoting a civilian vessel. Military ships ran the solid-flame flag. This one bore a key difference: where the official design ran around left, the flag she was interested in had its swirls going right. The deviation was small enough to be missed by a layman and brushed off to an official, but key to those who knew to look for it.
The flag was frayed on the far edge and sun-bleached from years of keeping captain, crew and cargo safe in unfriendly or occupied waters and ports. The ship itself came into view as she moved up the wharf. It was a small, sturdy Earth Kingdom junk, not unusual on its own. Earth Kingdom merchant ships were often commandeered by the Fire Navy and sold on the black market, or auctioned legally, depending on the ethics of the captain who had done the commandeering. This one could hold a crew of twenty-five and a few passengers, perhaps three or four if they didn't mind close quarters. The inside would be filled with nooks and hiding-holes and places to make contraband vanish like magic.
Katara knew this particular vessel well, having found safety within its hulls during the first - and hardest - wave of Azula's raids. The friends it likely bore were more than welcome, as far as she was concerned. The gangplank hit the dock. Katara increased the speed of her gait.
She jogged up the ramp when she reached the ship, sidling past a sailor who glared at her. Katara called out, "You've made captain already?"
A man turned at the sound of her voice, his first mate picking up where he had left. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and dressed in rust red the better to blend in here. He went shirtless; the sun had deepened the color of his already brown skin and bright green eyes completed the betrayal of his Earth Kingdom heritage. Miaz ihl Aszar called back, "Katara!"
A moment later she was returning his fierce embrace. Miaz picked her up and spun her around once; Katara laughed outright. "It's good to see you," she said as her feet made contact with the deck.
"How long has it been?" he asked, though she knew he knew their months apart just as well as she did.
"More than a year," she replied. "How are you?"
Miaz motioned her to follow below deck. He lifted the hatch and let her pass first, then followed her down the ladder. "Engaged, actually," he said. At the base of the ladder, he grabbed a burning lantern and continued forward. "The contract's been drawn up, so all that's needed is a final review and for my fiancé and I to sign the thing."
Katara offered her congratulations, and the two continued down into the hold with light conversation. They exchanged rumors and news of mutual friends, finally stopping in the middle of the hold. There was a wall there - a structural element that added strength to the ship and separated the bow end from the stern end. Miaz slid part of the wall open and motioned for her to enter ahead of him.
He followed with the lantern, the light revealing some twenty barrels of medium size. One of them was open. Katara went to examine its contents.
"Nice," she said. Katara dipped her hands into the barrel, pulling up a handful of dried purple-red insects. Each was the size of a grain of rice and some were still covered in a soft, white fuzz. She tipped her hands, allowing the bugs to fall back into the barrel, then picked up a pinch of them between two fingers. She crushed those, the sound small and sharp to her ears. They left a purple-red residue on her skin. The color would have been closer to maroon on a paler person, and the dye the creatures would be processed into would be a fine, colorfast scarlet.
The cochineal insects fed on cacti that grew in the Earth Kingdom scrubland. independent importation was illegal, and government cochineal dye was expensive enough to be exclusive to the high born. Miaz would pick up ten thousand gold pieces on this trip, but the Xi family would turn around and sell the goods for four times that price.
She regarded Miaz seriously, then said, "I hope you realize that I could kiss you right now."
"So the little guys pass muster, " he replied, amused.
"That's the understatement of the century. Master Cai will be waiting for us at the waterfront warehouse. We need to get there without being seen." she said.
The man nodded. "That's no great feat. We can take the barrels there in the longboats and nobody will be the wiser."
*
Documents fell into Katara's sphere of influence: finding loopholes in the rules or ways to bypass them all together had come to her as easily as anything she could remember. While her title was "steward," her duties placed her somewhere between "maid-of-all-work" and "evader-of-taxes."
She stopped and stared in the doorway of the library, watching Prince Zuko apply his single-minded intensity had to a task she identified with herself. Either he hadn't noticed her or he was ignoring her on purpose. Katara shook her head to clear it and stepped inside loudly enough that he looked up. Zuko returned to his work without a word.
"Master Cai said you had set up shop in here," she said, and sat opposite him. "You missed dinner."
Zuko tapped the document in front of him in explanation. A pile of others sat on the table, off to one side; all of them bore the palace seal. Aloud, he said, "I met with Duke Dazhei earlier. What are you doing here?"
"I live here," Katara replied. She took a scroll from the pile and made a show of unrolling it. "The actual question that needs asking is what you're doing here and beyond that, exactly what's going on."
She had only enough time to register that the document she held was a duty roster before Zuko took the scroll, rolled it with a snap of his wrist and placed it back atop the others. Each motion was deliberate and measured; he looked like he was putting a great deal of effort into not staging an spontaneous cremation.
The prince folded his hands on the table in front of him and watched her. Katara mirrored the gesture. She didn't know how long they stayed like that, silent and still, barely even blinking.
He looked older than his twenty-one years, and tired. Do I look like that? the thought ran unbidden through her mind. Katara could only assume that he had spent the past five years running, hiding, and doing all he could to avoid notice, just she had.
Katara spoke first, "You want to depose your sister." Zuko acknowledged the statement with a nod. She continued, "I want to depose your sister. That puts on the same side."
"No," Zuko replied, voice level, "It doesn't. What it means is that both of us would like to achieve the same result."
She ignored that. Instead, she said, "This is a revolution."
"Thank you for the insight," he said derisively.
There are times when bluntness is appropriate. The time Master Cai's son decided to take up juggling knives after seeing a street performer had been one of them. The time Min, despite being six months pregnant, had decided to join the army to be with her husband had been another. Her own discovery that the pirates she had lifted the waterbending scroll from were contacts of the Xi family qualified as well.
Katara was blunt now. Zuko held the power to remove her from any involvement in the planning or execution of this rebellion, and she knew she needed to convince him that she was worth having around. "I want in," she said. "I've lost my brother and my friends to her, and I need to be part of this. I'm good in a fight, and I know the plans and arrangements that have been made." Katara stopped, took a breath and finished, "I will be part of this."
The prince looked at her as if she had sprouted a second head. Zuko raised his brow and drummed his fingers on the table in - irritation? Suspicion? That was ridiculous; Katara's trustworthiness should be evident by how deeply involved she already was.
"No," he said. His voice was low, the words spoken half through his teeth. He glared. "You will not. I suggest you leave."
Their conversation was done, and both knew it. Katara stood, made the appropriate Fire Nation style bow and left with a muttered, "By your leave, Your Highness."
Once out of earshot, she said to herself, "I will be part of this." She only needed to figure out how.
Katara walked through the house to get to the access closet which led to the roof. She moved all the way around to the front and through the antechamber, then back down the other side. Her palms were damp; her chest was tight. It was that easy for him: one word and Zuko had kicked her out of his coup. Why?
Why didn't matter, she decided. "I'm in," Katara said to herself. "I won't go away that easily, not from something this important."
She went to the roof to figure out how.
*
[Next Chapter]
[ Directory of Chapters]
Fandom: Avatar
Rating: T
Word Count: About 7,200
Summary: What do you do when you lose a war? Start a revolution.
*
A Particular Visitor
*
Master Xi Cai drank coffee. Every morning he had a great steaming mug of the stuff, or a great slushy mug of the stuff if it was a particularly miserable summer, and he liked it. He roasted the beans himself to ensure that he liked it. His daughter shared his enthusiasm for the Earth Kingdom drink; his son and wife did not.
Katara was ambivalent, mostly because the Xi family was as strange as all get up, and being surprised every other minute got very old, very fast. On the outside, their house looked perfectly normal by Fire Nation standards. Stepping in, however, was like taking a single long stride across the ocean and into enemy territory.
The floors and walls were carved stone, either plain or painted green and gold, blue and white, red and black, orange and yellow. The artwork and furniture came from all over the world. If not for the ostensible banners in the front hall, she might have forgotten exactly where she was. Kind relatives called it unorthodox; the rest of the Xi family called it suspicious; Katara called it home, and had for five years this summer.
The building ringed a large, open courtyard and had two stories toward the rear of the house and one story at the front. It was modeled, Master Cai had once said, after parts of the royal palace. The design spoke for the family: We aren't doing anything wrong, really. On our honor. And it said so with a fuzzy puppy face, misdirection against the puddle on the floor.
She passed Master Cai on her way outside, and he waved for her to stop. Katara bowed quickly as he began, "So there is someone here after all. Damn festival has the entire city out wreaking havoc."
"I don't have much of a reason to be out there with them," she replied.
He said, "You have a point in that," and gave a small, brief smile.
"I'm okay," Katara said. This exchange was close to being tradition: every year Master Cai avoided asking her about exactly what had happened at the palace and in the capital's prison. Every year she avoided telling him, and every year as the damp, miserable heat of summer faded into the damp, bearable heat of fall Katara moved a little closer to actually being okay.
"Well, then," he said abruptly, "One of our particular guests waiting in my study."
"The usual, then?"
"This one doesn't drink tea," Master Cai replied.
"Ah," she said, "Your usual, then."
He laughed briefly, nodding. Katara bowed, but without the formality she had learned to apply to others.
The kitchen stood as its own building within the courtyard. It could feed a household of over one hundred fifty people (the house could shelter as many). She couldn't remember ever seeing an event here with more than twenty or thirty, or a point where the kitchen was full. The cooks were out at the market now, and would return later. The oil lamps that sat on small shelves on the walls remained unlit and Katara found her way around in half-darkness, the door held open with a rock.
She found comfort in the pattern of daily life. The second year, after the rebuilding was completed and she stopped collapsing every night from sheer physical exertion, had been the hardest. She kept to herself, did as she was asked, and ensured as best as she could that no one thought she was suspicious.
Now Katara's hair was pinned up in the Fire Nation style: no loops, no braid, and her necklace hung on a chain beneath her clothes. Those were concessions to blending in. She didn't wake up from dreams of her friends' executions anymore. The images of standing at the back of the crowd as they were burned or beheaded while she watched, unable to move, had gone. No one's cheers rang in her mind when she opened her eyes.
She answered to her own name. Katara, after years of being called "Kae."
"I'll tell you what," Liang - Cai's daughter, and a corporal in the Fire Army - had said, "My father's as much a smuggler and a technical 'abettor-of-the-enemy' as he is ... whatever else he is. Lots of things go on here that could get us all exiled or killed or worse. You're not the least of them, that's granted, but stranger things have happened than some waterbender girl joining our staff."
Katara saw stranger things than herself pass through here; she boxed them up and concealed them and admired them. The Earth Kingdom made better porcelain than the Fire Nation. It grew better dyes and supplied cheaper ores. Its dishes were devoid of the volcano-strength chilli peppers that found their way into every food ever to see the inside of a wok here.
Entertainment of visitors, she found soon enough, fell into two categories: people who weren't supposed to be here, and people who no one wanted to be here. The former were put up and actually entertained while the latter were plied with enough dull small talk (or alcohol, depending) to bring about agreement to some other entertainment at some other place.
Their guests were clients and contacts and officials to be bribed.
She finished filling the tray and carried it back into daylight, closing the door with her foot. Katara balanced her way across the courtyard. That route was faster than going into the house and through the hallways. Katara entered an open door halfway across the length of the open space. A sneeze sounded from inside Master Cai's study; shortly after, the long-haired orange cat which had adopted the family three years ago bounded out. He rubbed against Katara's legs as she passed him. She shouldered her way into the room.
Katara nearly dropped the tray. Across from Master Cai, the visitor continued to gesture, oblivious to her presence.
He was older, and ... scruffier seemed an appropriate description. He had a short beard; his hair had grown in, although he did not wear a topknot or queue. Katara blinked once, sharply.
Under normal circumstances, entertaining guests meant bringing food and coffee and making tea, if asked. It did not, generally speaking, include near death from shock. She coughed politely and both men turned to look at her. She sat the tray down and said, "I'm sorry to interrupt."
Master Cai replied, "Katara, I don't believe you've met the prince?"
These circumstances gave "normal" reason to run off into the sunset, flailing and foaming at the mouth.
"We've met," Zuko said. He gripped the edge of the table with one hand and narrowed his eyes at her.
Apparently there were still hard feelings.
Katara left without a response. Her shoes made soft shuffling sounds against the floor of the hall. From inside the study, she heard Master Cai speak, "You know one another?"
Prince Zuko was sitting in a room drinking tea not one hundred feet away from where Katara stopped to pull her thoughts into something resembling order, and the only word she could elicit to describe it was "weird." Granted, people who were supposedly dead or imprisoned for years showing up for afternoon refreshments certainly qualified as that, but Katara had seen so many strange things in her lifetime that her standards for the word were higher than those of many other people.
Earth Kingdom merchants within the bounds of the Fire Nation capital were a cause for raised eyebrows, but she often served them coffee and traded rumors, gossip and good-natured jabs with them. She was related - technically - to people who used bending on plants and counted catfish-gators as members of the family.
It took really extraordinary wildlife to impress a woman who had wrangled canyon crawlers and spent the better part of a year traveling by flying bison express, who had seen giant-gorilla rabbits and nearly been eaten by a platypus bear, a giant unagi and the sea serpent to end all sea serpents. Another year riding around atop an elephant-camel cemented her appreciation for unique local fauna.
Four more years living with what was quite possibly the most patriotically lukewarm noble family in the whole of the Fire Nation left her with a deep respect for unique local perspectives. In the eleven months since she had taken up the position of first steward of the Xi household, she had found that things would forever have to compete with the inventory of smuggled goods that found their way into the corners of the family's warehouses.
Spirits! She herself was a sight to behold: the first female waterbender officially trained in the northern style in anyone's memory and personally responsible for - .
Katara shook her head. While she had escaped from under the nose of one Fire Lord and helped to topple another, she really was responsible for Aang's release from the iceberg, and probably for his death as well.
The prince's presence set her on edge, because the prince was supposed to be just as dead as Aang. The logical part of her brain was practically shouting at her that there was something very ... weird about that. Two conflicting facts - two things that she knew and of which she was completely certain - stuck up against one another to form an illogical mess.
She was supposed to be the only survivor of the core of "The Avatar's Revolt," and Zuko was sitting in the other room in a state that definitely qualified as "still breathing." If he had gotten out alive, what did that say about the others? What did it mean for Sokka and Toph? What did it say about her? About what she could have done for the others, if she hadn't panicked and run?
Katara didn't want to think that way, because never led to anything good. Instead, she went to the roof.
There had been an earthquake, weeks after they had all been caught and jailed. She owed her life, her position within the Xi household and her spot on the roof to that quake. The repairs that followed it included an access ladder hidden behind a wall, leading upward to allow for maintenance work. Katara used it to get some privacy, often finding herself seated atop the building and watching the docks and the ocean on one side of the house or the city on the other. Today she faced the sea and remained there until well past dark.
New people had started making visits to the Xi house some months ago. They were people outside the usual host of merchants and traders and beyond the irregular lot of pirates and smugglers and officials. While they were unusual and not visiting on business, Katara hadn't thought to give them much consideration at first. They were other noblemen on social visits; it was nothing to get excited over.
She started eavesdropping about five months ago, after catching a single snip of conversation -
"- to be done about our Lord -"
Her hovering outside Master Cai's door had gone unnoticed for approximately two of these meetings. While the actual content of the conversations was cryptic, the intent behind the words was clear enough: the people - at lease, these people - weren't pleased with Princess Azula's work as Fire Lord, and they wanted her out.
The evening after the second meeting, Master Cai had called her aside and into his study. "There is a reason why intelligence officers are stationed far from their homes," he had said.
Katara knew then that she was caught. She put on an innocent face anyway, "Sir?"
The man continued, "They stop being careful once they start getting comfortable," he paused, then "Colonel Sen will be arriving in two weeks' time. I want you to play hostess."
"But - why?" She had probably stared. Her mouth may have hung open. A number of the details of the conversation remained ethereal in Katara's mind.
"The viewpoint of an uninvolved third party is always beneficial."
Katara offered the colonel all the same courtesies she gave to any other guest. She offered him food and drink and brief conversation, then moved off to a spot just within earshot to allow the men nominal privacy while she made a show of preparing one of Master Cai's lutes.
Deliberately off-hand, Master Cai had asked that she not play - a planned action, considering she didn't know a single note - but that she stay, in case she should be needed.
All she had to do was sit, look pretty and be ignored. After Colonel Sen left to return to his station elsewhere in the city, Katara offered her opinion to the Xi patriarch, "I think you're crazy."
"Perhaps you aren't as observant as I had previously assumed," he countered with the barest lilt of amusement.
She cast him a look. "Colonel Sen seems nice enough," Katara began. She knew that her presence was experimental, and that any continued involvement hung on this conversation. She continued, "Not that it means anything. I think he's testing the water, and he'll turn on you the minute he thinks it will be an advantage to him."
That much had been easy enough to pick up - while Master Cai's and the colonel's discretion could have been due to her presence, Katara doubted it. The Count had tip-toed, careful to say nothing against the Fire Lord, and the soldier had been equally reserved.
"The campaign," Colonel Sen had meant the continued suppression of rebellion in the North, and the seizure of the mountain range around the smaller of the Earth Kingdom's two inland seas, "was successful, as her raids have been. Fire Lord Azula now wishes to lay a second siege on Ba Sing Sei."
He spoke by way of facts. The two men had danced around one another with their words, Master Cai's reply to the news the barest of derisive breaths and, "How many men do you think this will cost us, Colonel?"
All the other talk was small, moving from the Xi family's latest business undertakings to the health of Colonel Sen's wife.
"He could be useful," Katara said at last, "but I would rather use a man I could trust than him."
Hearing that seemed to please Master Cai, who made her a continual presence in the visits from what she came to refer to as their "particular guests."
The music teacher who temporarily joined the staff had scoffed and declared her "too hopelessly old" only once. Katara was quick in her reply that he would be paid either way, that she only needed a song or two, that she could learn to play by ear, and that the necessity of mastery was an issue that simply did not exist.
From there, she put together many of the logistics of this revolution. Some pieces, however, had never seemed to fit properly with the others. They wanted to depose Azula, but who would they install in her place? She had a son, but the child was barely walking and she refused to name the boy's father. The movement was far-reaching, but how many people could they actually drum up if the need arose?
Katara was acquainted with a number of what constituted the movement's upper echelon, but the numbers they gave were mostly in terms of how many men any given one could raise.
By all rights, she shouldn't have known any of it. She didn't know if she would have been able to come into the information she possessed if she hadn't risked everything last year when she accepted the steward's position left vacant by old Wancheng's death. She had waited until the last possible minute to reveal her identity.
"There's something you should know before you do this," she had said. "I'm not who you think I am - my name is Katara. I was going to be executed for my work in The Avatar's Revolt, but I managed to escape during the earthquake and I probably have a price on my head."
"You also make a damn good cup of coffee," Master Cai had replied, and that had been it.
She didn't know what she had been expecting at the time, but it was something much less anti-climactic.
Katara wondered if that was why nothing had been said about Zuko.
When Katara joined the staff here, she had been little more than a grief-stricken lump. Was it an attempt at protecting her? Was it because the prince had been on their side, at the end?
Prince Zuko was the explanation she needed. They wouldn't have to trust a child and a gaggle of over-ambitious regents with the throne, or to climb the royal family tree looking for bastards and second cousins. The need for it was gone, because Zuko's claim to the throne was just as strong as Azula's.
"I'll go with the Avatar."
It was Zuko who had escorted Aang to Fire Lord Ozai's audience chamber so many years ago. It made sense. Zuko knew the palace better than all of the rest of them put together. That it meant he got what he was after all along was little more than an added bonus.
"Do you expect him to win?" she had asked.
"I don't know."
Katara stood, and moved across the low sweep of the concave, clay-tiled roof, careful not to fall as she approached the access hatch. She climbed numbly down the ladder, suddenly very, very tired. The air was heavy, and made breathing difficult. She didn't think much of it; such weather was normal for a Fire Nation summer.
She had missed dinner. She would need to apologize for that and make assurances that she wasn't ill or otherwise incapacitated. How late was it? She walked the short way, crossing the courtyard to get to her room. There was no lock or latch on the door, and Katara entered and fell into bed with the overwhelming sensation of, "Well, now what?"
*
Work didn't stop because of the matters on her mind - considering all the different ways she could have overlooked something so obvious. Katara woke before dawn after sleeping poorly and changed clothes. Afterward, she went to unlock both the front and back entrances, then moved off to the kitchen to forage for breakfast.
A cellar was dug beneath the building, and although it was pitch-dark inside, she had gone through the motions of feeding herself before half the city even stirred so often that it was no longer an issue. The cooks were both firebenders - let one of them light the lamps and the cooking fire when they arrived.
She moved through the gloom of the outbuilding while the sun rose outside, and from there descended through the trapdoor in one corner and into the cellar. They kept root vegetables and preserved foods here, for the most part. She fumbled her way over a number of shelves and found that she wasn't hungry.
This was why Katara disliked disruptions - they left her without a sense of routine, and in routine was safety. She wanted out into the relative anonymity of city, and space to think. In a moment, Katara was back into the kitchen - now lit barely blue - and then outside. She sat down on a rock not far from the kitchen door.
She knew the time not by a clock or the angle of the sun against the horizon, but by the amount of yellow in the glow of the new day's light. Or, as it were, by the approaching figure of one of the cooks. Katara waved to Min, the younger of the two that usually arrived together. "Good morning!"
Min yawned. The girl was seventeen, married for a little more than a year and carried her baby in a sling around her front. Another child, no older than nine, peeked out from behind her. Min spoke a moment later. "Rockets and explosions and colored smoke bombs: All. Night. Long. And shouting. Lots of happy, celebrating shouting. I'm going to be so glad when this month is over!" She took a breath, then added, "That's my little sister - I brought her for backup, in case Mama doesn't make it today."
Katara smiled at the little girl, who bowed quickly and took off into the kitchen. "That bad?" she asked, tilting her head slightly to one side.
"The thirteenth district's burning, so she's down there being helpful."
That sounded like Liling. The woman would have been an army medic, if she hadn't had Min's older sister, and boasted some training in the healing arts. She was caring to the point of ridiculousness sometimes, but as good with bandages as she was with a knife.
"Something's being done about it, right?" Katara asked, following Min into the kitchen. Most of the lamps were lit - Min's sister carried a step to the next one.
Min walked over to her sister, saying, "Lan - Lan, don't do that. Do you want to break your neck?"
"I'm not gonna break my neck," Lan grumbled.
"Not if you don't do stupid things like that, you won't - go light the hearth fire." Min took the oil jug from the girl and filled the last lamps herself, lighting each wick with a press of her fingertips.
Lan muttered something, then did as she was told, sat down, pulled a loop of string from a hidden pocket and began playing cat's cradle.
Min turned her attention back to Katara. "As though Baojia would leave off his whores and liquor long enough to live up to his responsibilities. What city have you been living in?"
Katara listened as she gathered up the coffee grounds and service - really a converted tea set with larger cups - and set the water to boil on the newly blazing cooking fire. She conceded, "Okay, stupid question."
"Kind of. Are you down at the docks today?" Min asked as she gathered knives and bowls, which she carried over to the work surface in the middle of the room.
"Mm-hm. I'll do the work that's needed in here once I'm back."
"If it were up to you we'd all be living on plain rice and bananas," Min teased. She adjusted her sling and her child gurgled.
Grinning, Katara replied, "You're exaggerating! Grossly!"
"Uh-huh." Min paused to think, "When you're heading down to the docks, could you get my older sister, and her cousin-in-law Eryu and his brother-in-law Chen if you can, and assistants? I couldn't cook for the prince all by my lonesome self, even if Mama was here."
It didn't strike Katara as strange that Min would know about their particular guest - both cooks would have been given fair warning, and the Count trusted them implicitly. Xi Cai had the tendency to attract strays - be they possessions, pets, or people. The staff was treated well, and their loyalty lay primarily with the Xi family.
With the water bubbling, Katara pulled the kettle off of the coals. "So basically, what you're saying is that we need the same people we always bring in when Master Cai springs an impromptu dinner party on us. And if Liling was here, you wouldn't be by yourself."
Min took up three baskets, keeping two for herself and the third for her sister. She headed off toward the cellar; Lan followed. "Well, still."
"Got anything in mind?" Katara asked. She added the ground coffee beans to the kettle and stirred. "You have that look on your face."
Min had been born to cook. Her mother was good, but Min herself was an innovator.
"Well ..."
"We're three people, Min. Four, if Liang turns up. Don't overdo it."
"I won't."
Katara raised her eyebrows.
"Really. I won't overdo it. Promise." She still had that look as she descended the steps. Katara returned her attention to the coffee, using her bending to separate the dark liquid from the grainy solids, its circulation through the air cooling it enough to prevent it from cracking the porcelain not-teapot. She discarded the grounds and called her goodbye to Min, then carried the tray outside.
The light had turned almost yellow when Katara left the kitchen with the coffee tray. The air had taken on a hazy quality, owed to the fire further into the city, and had grown thick enough that it grabbed onto fabric and caused her skirt to cling to her legs.
A light breeze picked up and wispy clouds floated overhead. Katara walked back into the house and found Master Cai in his study. The man looked up from the letter he had been reading and nodded her into the room. She placed the tray on the table to his left.
"My thanks," he said and filled his own cup. "You disappeared yesterday. Coffee?"
"No, thank you. And I'm sorry." Katara looked past him, careful to avoid meeting his eyes.
Master Cai slurped his drink, then set the cup down with the clink of pottery on pottery. "You were surprised. Put off your guard."
"It's been a long time," she replied. "I needed to think. Again, my - "
"Don't you go around feeling sorry, girl."
This was the man she knew, at once kind and blunt. Katara hadn't thought this sort of person existed in the Fire Nation, before. It was a strange thing to confront even now, and unsettled her perception of the way the world ought to work.
These were the people who sat idly by as their country destroyed lives - people who participated actively in the destruction. It was luck that landed her in the household of one of a handful of men who had seen the wrong in their nation's actions. The few who were intent on stopping the devastation that they had helped to cause.
Katara looked Master Cai in the eyes and replied, "I neglected my duties."
The man nodded, then fluttered his hand in the air dismissively. "Once in four years."
She had the grace to look embarrassed. As Master Cai turned his attention back to his cup, Katara asked, "Why didn't you tell me?"
He lowered the cup enough to speak, "Tell you what?"
"That this thing was about putting Prince Zuko on the throne."
The statement hung in the air between them, taut as a lute-string. The cup clinked again as he set it back down; Master Cai inclined his head forward and to the left. He examined her as a bird might look at a worm. He replied a second later, "I had thought it was implied." Before she could respond, he picked up his letter, extending it toward her, and changed the subject, "I'll be heading out to the palace at noon, day after tomorrow."
Katara took the paper and read - it was a request for a visit from the Elder Lady Xi. She mused, "The Fire Lord Herself can't get you up there except by threat of force, yet a letter from your mother sends you running."
"Katara," Master Cai said, long-suffering, "Dear, sweet, innocent Katara - "
She she raised both eyebrows in a silent demand that he stop it.
"My mother is a 'threat of force,'" he finished shortly. Katara allowed her lips to curve upward in a slight grin. The matriarch of the Xi clan dealt with the family estate and the family's relationship with the crown while her son handled the greater sphere of business. She had met the Elder Lady Xi twice, and she was imposing in the same way that Gran-Gran was imposing. It was an old woman, "listen and do as I ask you or I'll set you floating on the next iceberg that thinks to drift by" sort of imposing.
She settled on a kind of assent, "Women like your mother are only made in limited quantities, Sir."
"My mother is a bump in our road," he replied. "She did her growing up in Lord Sozin's glory days and she's a patriot if ever there was one. That makes her one more variable to account for. It's either I go see her, or she comes down here to collect me, and I'm not having that with the prince holed up in our library."
Katara didn't want to think about that just then. "Liling is down in the thirteenth district."
"So that's where the fire is. Long Dazhei will be arriving here this evening, and Sima Kuzon tomorrow morning. We would have needed some extra hands in the kitchen anyway. Our usual folk will be fine. If they're busy, offer them more money."
"Just come out and say you want me to bribe the cooks. I'll be sure they know they're being paid once for their food and again for their discretion," she said. Master Cai nodded approval, and Katara continued, "Where do I meet our buyer?"
They were expecting the arrival of one of their off-the-books dealers today, and had already arranged to transfer the goods into another person's hands.
"He and I will be at the waterfront warehouse this afternoon," Master Cai said. "Here," He tossed a leather drawstring bag at her. It was heavy, and clinked with the coins inside.
Katara bowed slightly and exited, bound for the harbor.
*
The docks were a half-hour's walk away from the house, but Katara usually kept to the alleyways and backstreets to avoid any notice she could. There was little she could to do to keep from looking different, even as dressed and pinned and arranged in the Fire Nation style as she was.
She refused to keep her head bowed like she'd been defeated, because she hadn't. Some people stopped her to ask questions and others slowed to stare. What's that Water Tribe girl doing here?
Attracting notice was liable to get her killed. Katara doubted that the warrant for her, dead or alive, had lapsed in the years since her escape. Still, there were ways to drive the questioners off. The citation of Fire Lord Azulon's decree that female firebenders serve tours of military service alongside their brothers and with it the implication of mixed parentage was usually enough to get the pryers to shut up.
Avoidance was better. A snippy brown girl might be remembered while one who hadn't been seen at all would not. Still, it meant that the walk to the shipyard took twice as long as it needed to, and by the time she had tracked down Eryu, with instructions to bring his brother-in-law and Min's sister Ting and paid all three, full morning and the stifling, heavy heat it carried had settled over the city.
The air was a dull gray-brown color with the smoke of the thirteenth district fire. Her high shoes clunked on the wood of the wharf, and around her men and women in stands hawked their wares to traders and sailors and navymen. All sorts of folk came and went freely - the Xi family's influence over the waterfront district could be seen everywhere.
Master Cai held the rank of count at court and was called the Count of the Docks in the capital. His people saw to it that the harbor was safe and orderly and enforced the law on the docks. For his services, the family took three percent of all trade that passed through.
The fourth district nearly compared with Earth Kingdom ports in its diversity.
She felt her stomach rumble through the hum of people talking and shouting and followed her nose to a food stand. From her own purse, she paid two coppers for a steamed bun and something-on-a-stick. The skewered food was covered in a light, sweet, and mildly spicy sauce that stuck to her hands. She didn't ask what it was, having decided that where street food was concerned she would generally rather not know. The bun was stuffed with pork and those tiny peppers.
When Katara bit into it, she swallowed quickly and dropped the other half to the ground. She doubled over, breathing through her mouth to cool the burning on her tongue.
Someone laughed at her - a kid, maybe seven years old. She glared fiercely at the boy; when he met her eyes he flinched back. He was dressed in tightly-woven, sturdy linen and worn but well-made boots. The child's eyes were a deep, intense shade of gold. He had slipped into a defensive stance, which suggested that he was a firebender as well.
Katara ran her tongue beneath her teeth. The friction cooled her mouth enough to speak. She used the same reasoning she did on nosy adults, simplified for a child's benefit. "Damn Water blood," she winced as she said the words. She supposed that lie would never stop hurting. "Makes me a wimp with spicy food."
The boy's eyes widened as Katara stood back up. The pepper burn hit the back of her throat. He stayed only a second longer, then ran off.
Katara played with the chain of her mother's necklace for a moment and started back on her way. Her footsteps fell hollowly on the planks. The incoming waves sloshed against the pilings of the pier, their sound welcoming and comforting. The crowd wasn't too thick - most locals were further in the city, taking part in the Fire Festival, and Katara was able to move quickly.
She knew the ship first by its colors. At the top of the mast the breeze tossed the stylized black flame of the Fire Nation on its field of rust red. It was the swirling, openwork banner, denoting a civilian vessel. Military ships ran the solid-flame flag. This one bore a key difference: where the official design ran around left, the flag she was interested in had its swirls going right. The deviation was small enough to be missed by a layman and brushed off to an official, but key to those who knew to look for it.
The flag was frayed on the far edge and sun-bleached from years of keeping captain, crew and cargo safe in unfriendly or occupied waters and ports. The ship itself came into view as she moved up the wharf. It was a small, sturdy Earth Kingdom junk, not unusual on its own. Earth Kingdom merchant ships were often commandeered by the Fire Navy and sold on the black market, or auctioned legally, depending on the ethics of the captain who had done the commandeering. This one could hold a crew of twenty-five and a few passengers, perhaps three or four if they didn't mind close quarters. The inside would be filled with nooks and hiding-holes and places to make contraband vanish like magic.
Katara knew this particular vessel well, having found safety within its hulls during the first - and hardest - wave of Azula's raids. The friends it likely bore were more than welcome, as far as she was concerned. The gangplank hit the dock. Katara increased the speed of her gait.
She jogged up the ramp when she reached the ship, sidling past a sailor who glared at her. Katara called out, "You've made captain already?"
A man turned at the sound of her voice, his first mate picking up where he had left. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and dressed in rust red the better to blend in here. He went shirtless; the sun had deepened the color of his already brown skin and bright green eyes completed the betrayal of his Earth Kingdom heritage. Miaz ihl Aszar called back, "Katara!"
A moment later she was returning his fierce embrace. Miaz picked her up and spun her around once; Katara laughed outright. "It's good to see you," she said as her feet made contact with the deck.
"How long has it been?" he asked, though she knew he knew their months apart just as well as she did.
"More than a year," she replied. "How are you?"
Miaz motioned her to follow below deck. He lifted the hatch and let her pass first, then followed her down the ladder. "Engaged, actually," he said. At the base of the ladder, he grabbed a burning lantern and continued forward. "The contract's been drawn up, so all that's needed is a final review and for my fiancé and I to sign the thing."
Katara offered her congratulations, and the two continued down into the hold with light conversation. They exchanged rumors and news of mutual friends, finally stopping in the middle of the hold. There was a wall there - a structural element that added strength to the ship and separated the bow end from the stern end. Miaz slid part of the wall open and motioned for her to enter ahead of him.
He followed with the lantern, the light revealing some twenty barrels of medium size. One of them was open. Katara went to examine its contents.
"Nice," she said. Katara dipped her hands into the barrel, pulling up a handful of dried purple-red insects. Each was the size of a grain of rice and some were still covered in a soft, white fuzz. She tipped her hands, allowing the bugs to fall back into the barrel, then picked up a pinch of them between two fingers. She crushed those, the sound small and sharp to her ears. They left a purple-red residue on her skin. The color would have been closer to maroon on a paler person, and the dye the creatures would be processed into would be a fine, colorfast scarlet.
The cochineal insects fed on cacti that grew in the Earth Kingdom scrubland. independent importation was illegal, and government cochineal dye was expensive enough to be exclusive to the high born. Miaz would pick up ten thousand gold pieces on this trip, but the Xi family would turn around and sell the goods for four times that price.
She regarded Miaz seriously, then said, "I hope you realize that I could kiss you right now."
"So the little guys pass muster, " he replied, amused.
"That's the understatement of the century. Master Cai will be waiting for us at the waterfront warehouse. We need to get there without being seen." she said.
The man nodded. "That's no great feat. We can take the barrels there in the longboats and nobody will be the wiser."
*
Documents fell into Katara's sphere of influence: finding loopholes in the rules or ways to bypass them all together had come to her as easily as anything she could remember. While her title was "steward," her duties placed her somewhere between "maid-of-all-work" and "evader-of-taxes."
She stopped and stared in the doorway of the library, watching Prince Zuko apply his single-minded intensity had to a task she identified with herself. Either he hadn't noticed her or he was ignoring her on purpose. Katara shook her head to clear it and stepped inside loudly enough that he looked up. Zuko returned to his work without a word.
"Master Cai said you had set up shop in here," she said, and sat opposite him. "You missed dinner."
Zuko tapped the document in front of him in explanation. A pile of others sat on the table, off to one side; all of them bore the palace seal. Aloud, he said, "I met with Duke Dazhei earlier. What are you doing here?"
"I live here," Katara replied. She took a scroll from the pile and made a show of unrolling it. "The actual question that needs asking is what you're doing here and beyond that, exactly what's going on."
She had only enough time to register that the document she held was a duty roster before Zuko took the scroll, rolled it with a snap of his wrist and placed it back atop the others. Each motion was deliberate and measured; he looked like he was putting a great deal of effort into not staging an spontaneous cremation.
The prince folded his hands on the table in front of him and watched her. Katara mirrored the gesture. She didn't know how long they stayed like that, silent and still, barely even blinking.
He looked older than his twenty-one years, and tired. Do I look like that? the thought ran unbidden through her mind. Katara could only assume that he had spent the past five years running, hiding, and doing all he could to avoid notice, just she had.
Katara spoke first, "You want to depose your sister." Zuko acknowledged the statement with a nod. She continued, "I want to depose your sister. That puts on the same side."
"No," Zuko replied, voice level, "It doesn't. What it means is that both of us would like to achieve the same result."
She ignored that. Instead, she said, "This is a revolution."
"Thank you for the insight," he said derisively.
There are times when bluntness is appropriate. The time Master Cai's son decided to take up juggling knives after seeing a street performer had been one of them. The time Min, despite being six months pregnant, had decided to join the army to be with her husband had been another. Her own discovery that the pirates she had lifted the waterbending scroll from were contacts of the Xi family qualified as well.
Katara was blunt now. Zuko held the power to remove her from any involvement in the planning or execution of this rebellion, and she knew she needed to convince him that she was worth having around. "I want in," she said. "I've lost my brother and my friends to her, and I need to be part of this. I'm good in a fight, and I know the plans and arrangements that have been made." Katara stopped, took a breath and finished, "I will be part of this."
The prince looked at her as if she had sprouted a second head. Zuko raised his brow and drummed his fingers on the table in - irritation? Suspicion? That was ridiculous; Katara's trustworthiness should be evident by how deeply involved she already was.
"No," he said. His voice was low, the words spoken half through his teeth. He glared. "You will not. I suggest you leave."
Their conversation was done, and both knew it. Katara stood, made the appropriate Fire Nation style bow and left with a muttered, "By your leave, Your Highness."
Once out of earshot, she said to herself, "I will be part of this." She only needed to figure out how.
Katara walked through the house to get to the access closet which led to the roof. She moved all the way around to the front and through the antechamber, then back down the other side. Her palms were damp; her chest was tight. It was that easy for him: one word and Zuko had kicked her out of his coup. Why?
Why didn't matter, she decided. "I'm in," Katara said to herself. "I won't go away that easily, not from something this important."
She went to the roof to figure out how.
*
[Next Chapter]
[ Directory of Chapters]