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That which shrinks must first expand.
That which fails must first be strong.
That which is cast down must first be raised.
Before receiving, there must be giving.

That is called perception of the nature of things. Soft and weak overcome hard and strong. [Lao-Tzu]

The first time I bent fire, I was a child; a very young, very small child.

I sat on my mother's bed. I remember it perfectly; I will never forget it. I sat on her bed and she brushed my hair, humming under her breath. There was a lamp on the table beside us. I felt half-asleep, between the humming, the rhythm of the brush-strokes, and the fact that I was up very late for someone who had only just reached five years old. I watched the lamp-flame through half-open eyes.

The room had a draft, so the flame moved. I watched it, because it danced. I thought it was beautiful, perfect; I wanted to be just like that flame. Then my mother got up and closed a curtain, and the draft got cut off, the flame going completely still and bright. That was much less interesting, of course, and so when she went back to brushing my hair I stared at the flame and wanted it to move again. I frowned and I watched it and I willedit to obey me and move. I breathed carefully, like I had seen my father breathe when he sparred with my uncle. And silently, inside my own mind, I commanded the fire to do as I wished.

It did. It was only the barest of movements, but it did. The fire heard me, felt me, and obeyed me. Where once it had been moving with the draft, now it moved with my breath.

I commanded it, like an arm or a leg or a finger. The fire became a part of me. My father would search the archives later and discover that I was the youngest firebender ever who hadn't also turned out to be the Avatar. And my father swept me up into an embrace and said, My Azula, in a voice of so much pride, so much pride.

It was as if I possessed the whole world.

I am nothing, because there is nothing for me to be.

This is the truth which confronts me every time my mind is still and quiet enough to perceive it. It is a simple truth. The world in which I mattered, the world that was mine, crumbled and fell through my fingertips. This one replaced it. This one, where I lost. This one, where I failed. This one, where nothing is mine. Where I have nothing. No control, no say, no power, not even the comfort of my own mind and the will and right to use that mind to pursue my restoration, or to at least end this pathetic half-existence. I am powerless, weak, often confused, and I know all this, when I am lucid. I know this truth.

When I am lucid I know what day it is. I know where I am. I know who the people around me are. I know the state of our nation; I know the war is over. I know my brother rules. I know Mai, the traitorous bitch, rules with him. I know Ty Lee abandoned me for Earth Kingdom ritual. I know my mother is here. I know I am in her care. I suspect I live on her sufferance.

When I am lucid I know that the Avatar took my fire from me. Laid hands on me and took it away. I know he apologized afterwards. I know there was pity in his face when he left me. In lucidity, I know the world. I know the truth.

I hate it.

I hate it with every part of me, hate the truth as I have hated nothing before - and oh, I have known hate - and so lucidity is not something I embrace. It's not something I want. When my mind is clear, I am a prisoner of reality, subject to its degradations and torments. I reject it; I despise it, despise everything it brings.

At least when the madness comes, I can deceive myself into thinking that I can still fight.

Sometimes I think that if I could keep myself mired in the insanity, they would finally let me die.

I tell my mother this. It is one of the clear-headed days, the ones I hate so much. My mind is clear and my body listens to me. My hatred of everything means that these days, though, come with their own malaise. I have no desire to eat, to rise, to bathe, to dress, to be dragged out into the sunlight and made to sit under blossoms as if the scene of bucolic saccharinity would help me, would be anything but nauseous.

It isn't.

Yet this is what my mother chivvies me to do, and I certainly have no desire to waste the energy in fighting. It is easier to let anonymous servants (I refuse to learn who they are, refuse to add the humiliation of knowing my nursemaids are human to the litany of my days) draw me through every irritating step of the process. They make gestures towards proper respect. They bow and murmur highness and phrase every order like a question. Enough that I am still royal blood. Enough to make me feel like an infant, instead of a pet.

So I tell my mother this, while we sit under the Agni-blasted trees, while she sews or sometimes reads aloud. She reads today, posture perfect, neck graceful and long, voice mellifluous and measured. She is as pathetic as I remembered her being, as passive, as weak, as ridiculous. I watch her do this every day, every day that I have my own mind. Watch her be an ornament for a crown she doesn't even have anymore.

I don't know where she was, all the years between my father's ascension and now. I haven't asked. I don't care. I know that she came back and she brought me here. Now she broods over me like a mindless turtle-duck. I've told her that before, how much she disgusts me.

I tell her that I wish I could stay insane, so that they would let me die.

She puts the book down.

"Never," she says, calmly, almost placidly. I expect that I hurt her, with what I said. It should hurt her. I meant it to. But she doesn't show it. "I would give my soul to keep you safe, my Azula."

She calls me that now. I hate it almost as much as I hate the bitter truth. On the padded, cushioned bench where I lie, I turn away from her, close my eyes, and try to ignore the moment she starts to sing softly under her breath.

My mother sings the song Zuko used to ask her for, at night. At bedtime. I never, ever asked her for any songs at all.

Zuko was born first, and he was a boy; I was born second, and I was a girl.

Of course, if the physicians hadn't interfered so much Zuko wouldn't have survived being born and the whole problem would have been solved right there. But healers meddle, always, and so my brother lived and stood like a pathetic but impassable barrier in the path of what so obviously had been destined to be my life. I could bend fire like an adult by the time I was six; my brother fell over in his kata. I could command loyalty, respect and fear by the time I was ten, while my brother made petulant noises at the adults around us as if he wanted them to appease him. I excelled in every way, and he simply . . .didn't. Fire was in me like a storm; in him, it barely flickered.

My mother smiled at my successes. But she cooed over Zuko's failures.

Months have passed before I know my father isn't dead. That they did to him what they did to me, and that he lies, bound and defeated, and not dead, in the same cell where he threw my uncle. I don't want to believe it. I can't believe it. He was a lord, a king, a god among mortal filth and nothing, nothing could have overcome him so utterly. Could have destroyed him so completely that it didn't even have to kill him in the end.

Nothing, it seems, except the stupid, idiot boy.

When I say to my mother, "You're lying!" and wish more desperately than ever that fire would answer me again so that I could burn the travesty out of the world, she just watches, impassive, her hands folded away in her sleeves. Ornamental, beautiful, serene, useless. As passionless as mud.

"No, I'm not," she says, gently. I hate her gentleness. "I'm telling you the truth. I can take you to see him, if you'd like." She leaves the offer there. Simple. Leaves it an offer, so that I must choose - choose to see this ultimate dishonour of everything I have held worthy, or choose to hide from it, like a child.

It's too much. It's too funny, too awful, too much; when I want to scream it comes out like laughter and I run from the world again, like a coward.

No. I reject it. Like one who is never conquered.

(I run.)

(The air stinks of rotting plants, stagnant water, too much heat. I think I've fallen. I was - I ran? I had been running. From something. I can't remember what. My head is as fogged as the damn air around me. It's hard to catch my breath. Have I broken something? It doesn't matter! A princess disdains injury, ignores pain, endures torment. Anyone who is worthy to rule - and I am, I must be! - must first rule themselves, and I have. I chase perfection, and I catch it.

But I can't catch my breath and I can't seem to move, and my hands are wet and the swamp is, it's a swamp, it's all around me, what is it?

"You know it isn't that simple," says a voice I don't know. It's smooth and unconcerned, beautiful and powerful. "No choice is final. Nothing ever stops. There is one life, and all those choices, and then the choice whether or not to live again, and the choices of what to do in the next life.Everything is a choice."

"This one has made every choice that matters." The second voice is harsher, older, sounds more tired. I swear I have heard this voice before. I swear that I know it, but I can't - I don't -

Why can't I move? Why can't I move? Where am I? I have to be home! My father needs me, the invasion is coming, I'm his right hand, everything depends on me -

"Well then," the first voice is oily and it purrs, like a cat who's just finished toying with the bird she brought down. "Give her to me, old friend. Give her to me. She might as well do some good in the world, and her face is very lovely."

Something cold shivers down my back. For a moment, I am afraid. The thought chokes me, gags me. I am the Fire Princess, I am Azula, named for Azulon, son of Sozin, and I will conquer the world, but the fear stays there. Stays, trickles like water down my back, from the crown of my head -

The first voice laughs. There are little splashes in the water. "You can't, can you? Oh, truce old man. I'll turn my back away, it's so painful to see an old man try not to cry. You can't give her up? Well you'd better find something to do with her. She'll be back, you know. And I've seen her now, so I think I'll be waiting."

"I should have killed you," says the second voice, now uneven with emotion. I feel a sneer, or think I do, for the speaker. Contempt: he's obviously weak.

"Yes, but you didn't. And that was the result of choice, too, wasn't it? All the ones you didn't make. In fact, almost everything you do wrong is about choices, isn't it? At least your new self seems to be able to make them, even when they're ridiculous."

The cold feeling is still all over me, all over my back and my arms and my legs and I manage to make my head lift, to look up. I see a writhing thing, and I hear - I hear "No!" - )

My mother is holding my arms. She is saying, "Azula, Azula, daughter, love - please, you're going to hurt yourself!" I'm in a tub. There's water all around me. They were cleaning me. Like an infant. Like an invalid. I scream and laugh and laugh, but the oily voice is in my head. She'll be back, you know.

Eventually, fighting is too hard. I give up, to wait for the next moment.

My mother tells me stories. I try not to listen. I don't want her to do this, and I refuse to take comfort in it. But on the edge of sleep and out of sheer boredom the mind rebels, and so I hear - no, I listen to some of what she reads aloud, or what she makes up. Some of them slide out of my head again and leave nothing more than faintest tracks, like a slug-trail under the sun. Some of them stick in my head like weeds in murky water, growing up through my dreams both waking and sleeping. Some of them infest me like sickness.

Some of them, I remember.

There was an old man who hunted gold in the hills, and one day he found a fox in a trap. "O please, kind sir," said the fox, "let me out." "But if I let you out," said the man, "you will play tricks on me and steal my food, for I know you, Fox." "No," said the fox, "instead I will give you four wishes . . . . "

- Then the old woman put back her cloak and all could see that she was a spirit-queen, with white hair and red eyes, and she snatched up her gifts and took them back, plunging the village into ruin -

. . . . But the thirddaughter was clever and patient and endured the witch-woman's insults, for she was honourable also and determined to fulfill her bond, and so earn the cure for her father's sickness . . .

Some of them, I remember, rattling around in my head like the pebble in your shoe that you can't get rid of. Some of them, I hear again and again in the darkness of my own head. Whether I want to or not.

Once, says my mother's voice, long before Sozin, long before we ever were a nation, great lords and firebenders also hunted dragons. They did it for the same reasons - for honour, for glory, to prove their power. Now, one dragon, as she lay dying, called upon a great spirit and said to him, Help us, or avenge us, for this throws the world out of balance.

The spirit said, it is the task of the Avatar to mind the balance. But the dragon said, he does not see. Help us, or avenge us, for you spirits keep us from flying down on humankind and devouring them; this balance is yours to keep.

And the spirit bowed his head and agreed. So he took from the dying dragon a single egg and turned his power on it.

It so happened that the great warrior who had killed the dragon was married, but he and his wife had no children, and could not bear any. So the spirit came to the warrior's wife and said to her, in a dream, "Go to the borders of your husband's land, and find the egg I have left there. Care for it, and when it hatches, you will have a daughter, and if the daughter lives, you will have a son."

When the woman did as she was told and found the egg, she rejoiced. She cared for it, and kept it warm, and crooned songs to it and loved it, and in half the time that a baby lies beneath a woman's heart, she woke in the night to find that it had cracked open and left a baby girl. The woman and the warrior rejoiced again, for the baby did not cry, but lived and was strong, and watched the world from dark, bright eyes that never seemed to still.

Less than two moons from then, the woman found that she was pregnant, and the joy of the household was greater than any.

The girl grew, and grew, and they called her Ria. Some say she was beautiful, and some say she was strange. She knew things about the world that no one knew, but though both her mother and her father were firebenders, she showed no skill at all. More than once, too, she hurt herself by leaping off high places. She always said to her mother and her father that she was trying to fly.

One day, when she was nearly a woman, she walked further from her home than ever before, and came upon a man, hooded and cloaked, his face covered. Because she had been raised to be polite, the girl shared her food with him and spoke with him for some time. He said to her, "Come with me. I will show you where your mother died."

The girl laughed, and said, "My mother is at home," and pointed back the way she had come, to the home she had been raised in.

"No," said the man, "your mother died here, in the woods. And the man who lives in that house killed her." Then he took her hand and showed her the dragon bones.

What else was said, no one knows. But the girl returned to the home she was raised in and drove everyone out. Then there was a fire, so great and hot that it cracked stone and melted glass, and everyone around was terrified and dismayed. And in the end, when the fire burned out, there was the girl in the centre, sitting upon the only stone untouched, for she was a dragon and now she knew it, and fire doesn't touch them.

The man and woman who had raised her as father and mother were terrified and fell down upon their faces. She said to them, "Go from here. I give you your lives, for you loved me and raised me, but for your crimes you will go, and you will leave us be. For some spirits will keep a dragon from revenging itself on humankind, but that does not bind me, and I will know you, and come."

So the people went forth, and the dragonhunts stopped.

Some of the stories, I remember.

My mother parades me before physicians. Or parades them before me. Each of them comes, and then each of them goes. Driving them off is one of the tiny, pathetic pleasures of my caged life. I may be helpless and imprisoned, I may have failed, I may have fallen, my very fire may have been ripped out of me unwilling, but by my great-grandfather's spirit I can break them with as little as being who I am, what I am, and turning it on them without remorse.

They are young, looking to make their reputation. They are old, trading on theirs. They come from the Fire Nation, the Earth Kingdom, and the places that people still can't decide which is which, that they'll probably argue about until we're all in the grave. It pleases me to think of Zu-Zu trying to work that out. The headaches it must give him, the terror he must be in about putting the least step wrong and upsetting someone. The misery Mai must inflict on him, in her impatience with anything but the most brutally direct of solutions. She'll have no subtlety. She never did.

The physicians come and I break them and drive them away, so that it is only me and my mother again. I take pleasure in how tired she looks, after each of them goes. Eventually, I will make her give up. I will outlast her hope. I don't see why she should have something so completely torn out of me.

They come from the Fire Nation, the Earth Kingdom, and the territories disputed - but the one who comes now is new. His clothes are not theirs. I have only ever seen that style, or something like it, a very few times before; it is, of course, all done in the insipid blues of the barbarians of the Water Tribe.

My mother seems surprised by him. She is the soul of courtesy, of course, and invites him to our little orchard tea-party and serves the blubber-chewing mongrel with her own hands. It disgusts me. Even she is far above that. I say nothing; I refuse to look at him directly. I don't need to, in any case. Observation doesn't have to be so crude.

He is young. His face is clean-shaven and he wears beads in his hair. When my mother hands him a teacup and admits that she is surprised he came, he smiles.

There's something behind the eyes that's sharp, and it comes out in the smile. I find myself glancing at him, right at him, just once. He says, "I come from the Northern Tribe, your highness. Unlike our Southern cousins, our ways can be somewhat . . .rigid, or at least, have been. And change comes slow. It's like the breaking of ice." He shrugs. "Until only these past few years, it was so: men learned to use their bending to fight, to build, and women used their bending to heal, to preserve. This was . . .challenged." His amusement is pointed. I remember the Water Tribe bitch, the Avatar's handmaid, and think I know who challenged it. "From one direction, at least," he goes on. "The young woman was, is, incredibly gifted - and extremely driven." He shrugs. "I am the other side of the balance. I make some elders among my people uncomfortable. We have received your many letters and petitions, these past years, your highness."

I am disturbed. I don't like the word years. It hasn't been years. It can't have been more than months. I would know. I've only been here -

"Whenever anyone offered to come, our Chief and his council refused to grant their permission. Until me. I suspect they'll be a little less concerned if it turns out to be a trap - and if I fail, it only proves that I shouldn't have been playing at this anyway."

He's a barbarian and a pathetic water-rat. But I can, at least, respect what I hear in his voice when he says that. If nothing else, he'll be harder to drive away than the others.

Except that he does nothing.

He follows me. Follows where my mother takes me, follows if I go somewhere myself. He sits, on the floor, legs crossed, and sips tea by the hour. If my brain-sick uncle were younger, less fat and less of a buffoon, they might be twins. He sits, and he watches. He says nothing to me. He does nothing to me. And I'm not about to stoop so low as to actually start the conversation.

I refuse to so much as learn his name. The same way I refused to learn any of the others.

When he doesn't watch me, he speaks with my mother, as if they were friends. He listens to her stories. Sometimes he tells some of his own. I have decided that I hate him, and unlike the others, I wish to see him dead, not merely driven away.

I look up. Mai is in the mirror, and she's laughing at me. I snarl and I turn, but nothing is there. I turn back to the mirror, because somehow she's gotten inside it, behind it, there's a passageway or something and I kick at it, smash at it with my hands; I will rip the bitch to pieces for everything she's done -

(This is not the swamp.

I'm on solid ground. I'm lying in the dirt. I feel like I've been beaten, hard enough I don't want to get up. Even the self-recrimination for weakness seems far away. I don't know why. There are gnarled trees around me, and something like the ruins of an old tower, with scorched and broken stones. There's darkness all around me, and fog. I hear voices.

"You know that only Ren and Shao are left, old man?" Those are a woman's tones, but low, low for a woman. They're harsh and sharp and sound irritated. As if someone took Mai and gave her some animation, some life. "You know why?"

"Yes," and the other voice is is is is that voice from . . .before? Have I been here before? I remember a voice, an old man's voice, and an oily one . . .

"So feed it to Koh and be done with it," says the woman's voice. "He'll have a pretty new face to delight over, and he'll owe you a favour - always a useful thing to have. Especially for the Avatar."

"She is my great-granddaughter," says the old man's voice, as if there's nothing more to say.

"It's a nasty, vicious liar, and it's rabid now. It would have slaughtered millions of its own kind. It did torture hundreds. It would have killed its own brother. I would imagine that if it had won and whelped, it would have eaten its own young, if one wasn't a satisfactory monster. Pity it if you're compelled, but put it out of its misery, and the world's."

She's talking about me. I know that. The woman's voice, every word it says, every word is about me. And I have never heard anyone, anything, talk about me that way. So disgusted, so contemptuous, and yet so indifferent. As if I really were nothing. As if I were not even worth hating. Like a vole-bird that bit its master's hand . . . .

"She is," says the man's voice, and it's heavy and tired, "my great-granddaughter."

Silence. Then the woman's voice says, "What do you even want, once-Avatar?"

"She is my great-granddaughter," the man's voice says, for the third time, like repeating it makes it matter. "And to her I have the responsibility of a grandparent. Of an ancestor."

"She's an evil little monster," the woman's voice says. It's indifferent again. Like I really don't matter. But this time, I notice, she says she, and not it. "Even Sozin's grand-brat saw that."

"Nothing is evil by nature," says the old man. "Only because it's misplaced."

Silence again, and then laughter. Scornful, incredulous laughter. "You don't expect anyone to be able to turn that into a decent human being, do you, Roku?"

This time, when the old man speaks, it sounds like there's another voice behind it. Another woman's voice. "No. But human isn't the only thing a creature of fire can be. You know that."

I, I'm furious, now. I stand up. I step through the mist, but I find nothing, and I don't know where I'm going, and I have no power to light my way. I want to shout I can hear you! How dare you! But my pride steps in, keeps me protesting like an angry infant, like Zuko when he fails and others laugh. My hands clench and unclench; to my shock, I feel my nails bite into my palms. I look down, spreading my fingers out in front of me.

My nails are long and groomed, the way I haven't been allowed for - for - for - since that day. When I look down at myself, I'm not wearing one of the soft, insipid tunics my mother chooses for me. I'm dressed as what I am. As what I was. As the princess of a militant, triumphant empire.

The woman's voice comes out of the fog again. "You realize what you're asking, do you? And you realize how slim the hope?"

"Yes," says the old man.

"You realize that you indebt yourself to me? Avatar? And that it is your living self that will carry it?"

"There is no life," says the old man, except that it seems like he speaks with many voices, "in which I would not ask you to do this."

" . . . .really?" The woman sounds halfway between scepticism and surprise.

"Really," answers a voice, a third voice, another woman's voice. A voice that sounds like it's never been less than certain of anything. Ever. "My current self," the voice goes on, sounding almost exasperated, "least of all."

I'm trying to gauge the distance and position by the voices - )

I'm awake. I'm soaking wet. I splutter and feel stone floor under me. See, through my dripping hair, the legs of the man who threw the water over me, from a wooden tub. The Water-Tribe healer. Bare-foot and walking away, a few steps, to put the tub down and then sit on the floor with his legs crossed.

He waits until I push myself up to sitting. I know that I'm snarling, as I push my hair out of my face. He is . . .unperturbed.

"I asked your mother to leave," he says, "so that I could speak with you privately. I suspect with her gone, you will have less reason to lie, at least about certain things."

I don't answer. I'm not going to say a thing to this peasant. He can do what he wants. I won't give him the satisfaction of a response.

He has blue eyes. A thin face. I study him in this moment of silence, considering his posture, his stance. I come to the conclusion that he's stronger, more steadfast than most. I don't like it. I don't like having to admit that, admit that he could be. He's slender. There's a scar near his hairline, jagged. His hands are wrapped in a way that leaves only his fingers free; they rest on his knees.

"You know," he says, "that illness is a matter of balance." He pauses. "Or maybe you don't. I don't know if Fire Nation royalty studies that sort of thing." He flicks that away as if it's unimportant. "We keep in balance with our bodies and our minds, and that's how we stay healthy. For some people, that's like walking a broad path. For others, a narrow beam. For some, like you, it's more like a taut thread stretched over a pit of vipers."

Unbidden, I see Ty Lee, balancing on her hand, over the net I set on fire. I see the fear in her eyes, and remember my own satisfaction, knowing that she would do what I wanted, now that she saw the alternative.

"The narrower it is, the harder it is to stay on. Obviously. Some people are unlucky and are born with a narrow path. Some people are even unluckier, and circumstances in their lives eat away at it until there's almost nothing there."

He means me. My lip curls at the idea that anything could have worn at me so. I am Azula, daughter of Ozai, son of Azulon. I am not so weak as that. Even now.

(Pity it if you're compelled, but put it out of its misery, and the world's. I am on the floor, soaking wet, and I cannot even kill the one who put me here. And there is a voice in me, and it isn't quiet, that wants to know why that's true, how it could possibly be true, if what he said wasn't right.)

"But the fact of the matter is, no matter how wide the path," the Water-Tribe peasant-healer goes on, like he doesn't see my expression, or it doesn't matter, "if you constantly go to the edge and jump off, you destroy whatever hope you have. And you keep doing that, your highness."

His voice is unchanging and calm. And young. He can't be that much older than Zuko. I want to think of that, and not his words. "Most people," he says, when I say nothing, "fight with every last bit of themselves to hang onto what little balance they can. Sometimes they even accidentally hinder themselves because they're scrabbling when they should be still. But it's like you don't want the balance. I've watched you jump back off into the vipers, time and time again."

"It can think," I say, letting my words drip sarcasm. "Congratulations. You've managed to be more perceptive than my idiot mother."

He doesn't give me any reaction to that, to my tone. "Oh, I think your mother knows," is all he says. "That's not the point."

"Please," I say. "Enlighten me." I am sitting on my knees now, as composed as I can be, my wet hair pushed back out of my face. I'm cold; I refuse to shiver. Refuse to show this impertinent wretch any weakness. I ignore the part of me that says he has seen me at my weakest, that he had me brought here when I was insensible and poured cold water all over me. I can't listen to it. If I do, I will scream and scream and try to tear his throat out with the nails I no longer have. And I will not face the humiliation of that failure. Not again.

"I can't promise you healing," he says. He sounds candid. And for the first time he looks vaguely troubled, showing the slightest crack in his invincible armour of serenity. "I can promise you that I will do everything in my power to give it to you. But - " he says it with a raised voice, maybe because he sees that I am about to laugh or retort, "what I can promise you, Princess Azula, is that if you do not try, if you do not stop your reckless self-destruction, you will remain as you are until you die. You will be," and his gaze is flat, "an invalid. The victim of your own mind, thrown from delusion to delusion, unable to care for yourself, unable to decide your own fate, dependant on the whims of others, unable," he adds like a backhanded flick, "to decide even what clothes to wear."

The clothes that cling to me are soft, pale cream embroidered in cherry blossoms. I hate them, even when they aren't clammy, freezing folds sticking to my skin. Everything that I had been going to say chokes me.

I am silent.

I feel sick.

He continues, "Your mother will not give up on you. Even if she does, what then? You'll throw yourself off a cliff? Impale yourself on someone else's sword? Die, like this?" He shrugs. "Slowly waste away in your own filth, as I'm told your father is doing? The terror of Ba Sing Se should be better than that, I would think."

I feel sick, and I want to kill him. I want to strike him for daring to speak to me that way. To speak of my father, of Ozai that way. I want to kill him, because there is nothing that he says that isn't true. "Why," I say, through my teeth, "do you care."

The peasant looks thoughtful. "Do you want all the reasons?" When I say nothing, he says, "All right, then. For one, I care because my people care about family, and all things considered, your family's devotion to you is pretty impressive. It implies there must be something under there other than a vicious spoiled brat who would have destroyed a continent."

He says these things like they're minor character flaws. Like they don't matter. It boils up under my chest. I want -

"For another," he goes on, "I'm a healer. I fought long and hard to make them let me be a healer. I have a responsibility to my vocation, to do what I can with anyone I come across who's in pain."

I snort. "And you think I am? And that your help will save me?" I laugh. "How very noble. And of course the prestige of curing the mad princess means nothing to such a pure spirit as you." I spit the words.

"I think," he replies, "that you've been in pain most of your life. I think something has been eating away at you as long as you can remember, and you've never known a moment's peace in your entire existence. I don't know if that's why you did the things you did. It might not be. But I think it's why you're here now. I think it's why you hate the world so much that you'd rather drown in your own delusions and phantoms than live in it. I think you spent your whole life dragging yourself over broken glass because you were promised something in the end, and now that you don't have it, you don't want anything, or so you think."

I don't like this. I don't want to have this conversation. I would rather be back in my fantasy listening to voices argue and dismiss me, but I won't show that. I won't. I am a princess of the Fire Nation, I am - "And how would a peasant like you come to think he knows so much?" I demand, and that's better. That's . . .closer. Thin, still. But better.

"I've spent a lot of time talking with your mother," he says. "Some with your brother, some with Ty Lee of Kyoshi island. I even spoke to your father, though," he adds, like he's being conscientious, "he wasn't very forthcoming."

I note, distantly, that he says nothing about Mai. But then, that is Mai. When she bothers to do anything, she does it completely. Including betrayal. Including enmity. Perhaps especially.

"And I've spent a lot of time watching you, these past months."

I am jarred. Thrown. "You haven't been here for months," I snap. "You've barely arrived."

His eyebrows rise. But it's as if something is simply confirmed. He asks me, "How long has it been since the Comet passed, Princess Azula?"

I can't answer him. I start to. Thoughts form in my head. Ideas. It was - last ye - was it? Last spri - no. There was the island, and then my mother, and it's - I know this. I know it. I -

The Water-Tribe peasant interrupts. His voice is, is loud. It cuts through my thoughts. "I suspect you actually know, if you sat and thought about it and were honest with yourself. You hide from the passage of time, the same way you hide from everything else, and you are an excellent liar. I wouldn't imagine that you yourself are harder to fool than anyone else."

It's like someone is driving a splinter into my mind, ice and steel, one of Mai's knives. I lash out, because if my fire and my spirit are taken I still have my body, and I can do this, I can take the weight onto my arm and lash out with my foot -

The water from the floor catches me, slowing the motion of my foot until he has his hand around my ankle. My arm gives out. I look at myself in horror and see that I am thin. The peasant lets my leg go.

"All young men with the talent are trained to combat with their bending first," he says, matter-of-fact. "I was fourteen before I started fighting to be allowed to study healing instead." His hand returns to his knee. "It has been years, Princess Azula. And you know that. When your wits are about you, you stare at nothing and lash out in small ways at your keepers. When you leap off into the agitated, deluded part of your illness, you surrender to it and the passage of time gets ignored. Your memory gets scrambled. The physicians you have driven away have gone to some pains to conceal that from you. They thought it would shock you too much. That the horror of it might damage you. But as far as I can see, everything else has been tried, and you're still here, and you still pursue your own destruction." He shrugs. "Shock, maybe, is worth a shot."

It's hard to breathe. It's hard to do anything. I've killed people for less than this. "Get out of here," I snarl. I'm still staring in horror at my arm. At its thinness. At its weakness. "Get away from me."

"As you wish, your highness," he replies. He stands, in one motion. "I will be easy to find, if you wish to speak further on the subject, or find a way to balance yourself." He pauses, and then adds, in a much different, more tentative voice, "It . . .can be easier, to walk out of this world when one can't tell the difference between the dream and the real anyway. But it's extremely unwise. I . . .can also speak to you further on that, if you wish."

Then he is gone.

Once, I was terror, and power, a queen with all the fire of the Comet in me. Once, even in defeat, I breathed fire, like a dragon, like something too dangerous to live, even vanquished. So much so that they stole fire from me, tore it out of me like and left my shell behind. Once, whole armies would suffer from my wrath. Once the very lightning was my toy and I shone like the sun itself, as terrible as a volcano. Love, and fear, power and dignity, control and loyalty. All of it mine. All of it my right, of birth, of training, of long, careful work. To love and to honour my worthy parent. The one who would be king of the world, and then give it to me, worthy heir of the strongest element.

I am cold and I am wet and I am alone in the bathhouse. I cry. I hate myself for it.

(I am cold and I am wet. But only to my knees, to my elbows. Under the murk of the water, I see my hands. My nails, filed long and clean - they would be clean, if they weren't in the muck - and sharp. A lady's hands. A princess's hands. A princess's arms, in princess's military uniform -

I sit back on my knees. And I know that this is real.

So is the dragon, the vast red dragon, who stands in front of me and looks at me down a long muzzle, showing me his teeth. Before I lost everything, I always regretted that my doddering uncle had killed the last of the dragons, because it meant that there were none for me to face, none left to grant me the title I deserved. It shouldn't be possible for one to stand in front of me, eyes unreadable, body-language strange to me. I know the postures of fear, aggression and submission of hundreds of dangerous beasts. I studied them, for what they told me about people.

I have no idea what anything about this dragon means. Whether it's going to devour me, obey me, or simply fly away.

I get to my feet. "Where am I?" I demand. I know this is real. I know it's real, because I can remember every word, every hateful Agni-cursed word the Water-Tribe peasant said to me. I know it's real because I can still remember my own disgrace, my own helplessness. I know it's real because I think it's unreal. Because I know there's something wrong.

I never know, in the delusions. I believe them, I believe every one of my senses. I doubt all of them here. So this is real. Quite the fascinating paradox. I detest paradoxes.

The dragon says nothing. To tell the truth, I'm not sure what I expected it to say. They're animals. We hunted them and killed them. Did I expect it to speak, to explain to me all of the strangeness? To wax poetic, maybe? Am I so ridiculous? Like my brother, believing old legends and clinging to fairy-tales as if they could be true?

Yes. I suppose I am. My mother's stories echo in my head and I expect this . . .thing to speak to me.

"What are you?" I say, and again, "Where am I? Why have you brought me here?" I may as well blame the beast. It's there to blame, after all.

It stretches out its head, its teeth towards me, and I step back. Find my stance. Against a dragon, I have nothing - I have a dagger, here? But I don't question it, don't have time, will defend myself, I will die, at least, fighting -

Then the dragon snorts. Moves. And I am flat on my back in the mud, one enormous - paw? Claw? In the centre of my chest. I have no time to comprehend this sudden defeat before it bends its head, and one of its whiskers touches my face.

It's almost exactly like having a paper lantern explode in my head. Fragments of coloured paper and light, but the coloured paper is images, ideas: my mother, an old man, a woman with dark skin, the Fire Sages, a world splitting into two, the Avatar sitting and then a second form stepping away from his body, like him but unlike -

I stare at the dragon looming over me. "Are you trying to tell me," I say, "that I'm in the spirit world?" I am almost offended. I might actually beoffended. I've never had time for the idiocy, the reverence the gullible offer the idea. Offer this place. Uncle used to prattle on about it. It belongs to his idea of the universe, his infantile beliefs, the soft-headedness and soft-heartedness that led to his failure at Ba Sing Se and his fall from grace. The idea that I am there, here, is distasteful.

The dragon snorts at me again. It looks almost amused. It takes its foot away from my chest and lets me stand up.

I don't stay wet. It's almost as if the idea of wetness falls off of me when I stand up, and as I look at my hands and what I wear, I am forced to wonder if it told me the truth - however it was it told me anything. It occurs to me that I'm oddly sure that it told me anything, with a whisker-touch to my face.

The Water-Tribe peasant's voice echoes in my memory, another indication that I am not mired in my delusions: It . . .can be easier, to walk out of this world when one can't tell the difference between the dream and the real anyway. I hadn't cared what he meant then. Now, I look at my hands, fingers spread, and I look at the dragon, and I understand.

"Well?" I say, because even imaginary places I am still who I am. "What do you want?"

One of the dragons whiskers touches my forehead again, and this time I'm given two images. One is of me, seated astride the dragon's back, holding on; the other is of me flailing from the grip of its two forelegs. It is, it seems, offering me a choice between how I want to go with it.

I consider my dagger. I consider the thing's speed. In the end, I go to it of my own will.

I can always change my mind later.

We fly, but not far. You almost couldn't call it flying, anyway. Not in this unreal world, where air and water and land were all just ideas, like after-images of the real world left after a bright flare. I've flown, on machines great and small, powered by flame I command. I've fallen, with nothing more than myself to catch me, and survived. I know what it feels like to really fly. This isn't even a cheap copy.

I leap from its back as soon as it alights. There is no swamp here, no echo of foetid air and no splash under my feet when I touch ground. Instead it's firm, dry land, covered in a layer of moss and - needles? Yes, evergreen, as if I were high up in the mountains. And I'm surrounded by fog, by the kind of mist that mountains get, with the clouds settling on their heads and slopes. But I don't remember that we flew up -

I don't remember much of the flight at all. I can't picture it in my head, and I turn on the dragon. "What did you do?" I demand. "Where am I?"

It only snorts, two rings of smoke coming from its nostrils. It settles down onto its belly, curling its long body around itself and settling its wings. Clearly, it doesn't intend to do anything or go anywhere. Or answer me. Stupid, useless beast.

I look up, look around me. I am surrounded by the trunks of great trees, their bark rough and their resin strongly scented. They are evergreens. The fog is everywhere and thick, but through it I can smell smoke somewhere. The ordinary woodsmoke of an ordinary fire. Or so I think. Nothing can possibly be ordinary here. Wherever "here" is.

My hand goes to the dagger I shouldn't have. I hold up my hands, one of them holding it, and turn them over and over again, looking at them. They look like mine, like my hands, strong and slender and clawed. As they should be. I put the dagger back away and then push up one of my sleeves to stare at my arm, at the strength there. It looks as it should. It looks nothing like the wasted, awkward thing that let me fall in the bath-house, soaked from the healer's bucket.

But this isn't real. It can't be real.

Spirit world, my mind whispers to me again, as I glance at the dragon. If it is, I wonder what's happening to my body. If they think I'm dead, sick, sleeping.

The dry needles on the ground rustle behind me. I turn, dagger in my hand again, but I don't throw it.

What comes out of the forest towards me is a fox-wolf, black and black-tailed. I've never seen anything like it before. It sniffs in my direction once, and then ignores me, trotting over to the dragon instead and putting its nose to the dragon's muzzle. The dragon - coughs. That's the only word for it. Once, deep, rolling and explosive. The fox-wolf sits back on its haunches and snorts.

Then it comes to me, and sits down, and looks pointedly at the knife in my hand. After a moment, I say, "I'm not going to get rid of it. Don't be stupid."

I'm talking to a fox-wolf. I really am insane.

The thing lifts its eyes to mine and gives one, single, low growl. As if it's trying to say, I could take it from you if I wanted, but I just don't feel like it right now. It coughs, almost like the dragon. Then it gets up, turns around, and takes a few steps into the mist. When I don't follow, it looks at me over its shoulder, and makes an impatient sound.

When I follow, it's because my other choices are to stay with a lump of a dragon, or strike into the mist on my own. I don't really take note of how quickly I dismiss the second of those choices. Something in me says that it strays beyond reckless and into stupidity.

I have never had a thought like that before.

The mist erases the dragon behind me, closes around the fox-wolf in front of me, making my steps faster to keep it in sight. I don't know why I'm doing this, except that to stand around and demand that someone explain it all to me is disgusting, as an idea. Each time the thought crosses my mind, I see my idiot brother, fists clenched and voice-raised, demanding that I explain myself to him. Trying to command me, and only spluttering more and more as I demonstrate just how much in his power I'm not. The idea of being like him is nauseous. I won't do it.

So I follow this creature instead, as its ridiculous tail waves in front of me, white on the very tip. I follow it until there's something like a red glow in the mist in front of me; and the glow becomes a house, small made entirely of stone except for the roof, and that's narrow. The door is wide, and it's also wide open. The thing has windows, even though it's not much more than a glorified pile of stones. The red-gold glow comes from the light inside, and the paper lanterns outside, incongruous against the stone house.

"I like paper lanterns," says a woman's voice, startling me. "And it's my house."

There was nobody in sight, I could have sworn to it, but now there's a woman sitting cross-legged on the house's narrow porch. She has a blanket spread out over her knees, and is apparently mending it. The fox-wolf wags its tail and jumps up onto the porch to sniff her elbow and then throw itself down to one side of her, as she absently reaches out and scratches behind its ear with one hand.

Her hair is as long as my mother's. In fact, she reminds me of my mother, except darkened by the sun, and with black, unnerving eyes. She wears gold earrings made of chains and loops that ring softly against one another as she moves her head. She wears a necklace of heavy gold ropes twisted around each other that sits against her collarbone. She wears black silk, as far as I can see. And she sits on bare wood and mends a rough blanket.

My dagger is still in my hand.

She shakes out the blanket and eyes it, with a critical expression that could have come from my mother's face. Then she puts it down, and looks at me.

"At least you've managed to be in your right mind this time," she says. Her voice is very low, for a woman. "The last time I saw you, you looked like a half-wild animal. How long are you going to stand there staring?"

My lip has curled at what she says. I draw myself up, take the breath I need. "And who are you," I say, coldly, "to speak to a Princess of the Fire Nation this way?"

"You can call me Ree," she replies. Her voice is indifferent. "You can stand there being insulted and regal, or you can come over here, sit down, and find out why you're here at all. It's up to you. I don't particularly care."

"Then why did you bring me here?" I demand. But I step closer.

"I didn't," she replies. "Fang did." At my blank look she adds, "The dragon. All I did was neglect to leave you standing around in the forest staring at the trees." She sets the blanket aside, and takes another, smaller thing into her hands. I can't see what it actually is. She doesn't look at me. She has the same placid look as my mother gets, empty-headed and docile, when she sews things. Embroiders things. Whatever it is she does.

"Fine," I say, sharp. "Then why did the dragon bring me here?"

"Because his person asked him to, more or less," the woman who said I could call her Ree replied. "He's very fond of the old fool, even for a dragon." She doesn't add anything else. After a minute, when I refuse to play this game any longer, she starts to hum something under her breath.

When I recognize it as one of the lovesongs my mother likes so much, my lip curls again, and this time the disgust sticks. If I was wrong and this is a new kind of delusion, casting my mother into the role of spirits or magical witches hiding in forests, maybe I will drown myself. Before, at least my insanity let me believe I could escape her.

"I'm not your mother," says this Ree, as if she can read my mind. "In fact, your mother isn't very much like me at all."

The fox-wolf whines, once. It lolls out its tongue and thumps its tale against the porch. The woman smiles.

"Yes," she says, softly, as if she's talking to herself, paying attention to her work. "Poor little Ursa. Taught to be so good, so quiet, so peaceful and graceful. Honour, fidelity, family." The words are sing-song, as if the woman, as if Ree were mocking them. "They hamstrung her. Left her bargaining and grasping and nobly accepting her fate. No, little princess," she goes on, and this time she's talking to me, but not looking at me, "if your mother were anything like me, she would have gutted her husband the minute he threatened her child. Gutted him, slit her father-in-law's throat, and taken the nation for your brother then, or for you, whichever." She waves a hand, like it isn't important. "Both of you, maybe; siblings have ruled before."

I feel my teeth grind at her tone, at her words, at she herself. "My mother didn't live in some fantasy forest," I snap, half-snarl. "She lived in the real world, where rulers come with guards, and power of their own, and the daughters of noble houses aren't always taught to fight. She would have been stopped before she so much as twitched; my father could have beaten her to death without turning to his bending. She'd've been dead. And so would Zuko." I find my hands clench again, feel the nails in my palm.

Only now does the woman, does Ree, look up at me. Her face is startled. A little amused, maybe. "Are you defending her? You?"

The question takes me aback. It unsettles me. I am, I realize; I was. I've thought the same thing - no. I've thought things like it. Because in the end, this woman, this spirit-woman had called my mother weak. And I can't count the times I've done the same. And she is; she is. Weak, foolish - but.

But -

But, something whispers in me, she's mine. She's my mother. I can think of her as I please: she feared me, she hated me, she failed me and left me, I can hate her if I want, I can hold her in all the contempt that I want, but she's mine. This - thing, this spirit-creature, has no right. Has no right to say anything about my mother, has no right to even think badly of her.

These words tangle in my mouth. That happens to me now. It never used to. And the spirit-woman's face has turned thoughtful.

"Maybe you aren't hopeless," she says. Then she turns to her work. "But that's enough, I think, for today.")

I wake. I've been moved to the bed in my room. And I'm alone.

The peasant-healer's name is Kaska. I overhear this from my mother. She behaves as if nothing has changed, nothing is different. I know she's wrong, though I don't know why. Or how.

I'm restless. The lassitude that marked any day I knew my own mind before is gone now, and I can't seem to get it back. I can't seem to not-care about time passing or that I have nothing to do. That I have nothing to be. Two days after I wake up from the hut in the forest, I chase one of the maids out of my room with a flung hairbrush. My mother comes in to lecture me, at least after she confirms that I'm not in some kind of senseless madness.

When I turn on her with the names you can't help learning, travelling with soldiers, no matter how carefully they tiptoe around you, my mother's eyes harden. "That," she says, in full formal terms, "is beneath you, Princess Azula."

I laugh. "But I'm not a princess, am I?" I spit it at her. "I'm your crazed little pet, the mistake you care for to make yourself feel better about your failures, your doll to toy with out of charity." But the words have less venom in them than they should. I can't seem to find it. Or at least, I think so; this time, though, she seems to actually hear what I say.

"Don't be stupid," my mother replies, with the first heat from her I've heard since I was a child, since the night she disappeared. "You are my daughter. You will remain my daughter whatever you do, whatever you say, whatever happens, whether you like it or not, Azula. Yes, I have cared for you, and yes, I will continue to care for you for as long as you need it, but I do it out of love, not guilt. I did everything I could for you, for you both, and if what happened while I was helpless grieves me it was not my doing and not my guilt to bear."

I turn and walk away from her, to the window, because I want to hit her. Something in me wants to hit her. Wants to feel my hand as it strikes her face, and forgets that I don't have nails anymore, imagines the claw-marks. For once, for once I've riled her, and I can't even enjoy it, because something in me burns, like the fire I don't have anymore. "You did everything you could for Zuko," I hiss. "Don't pretend you cared about me. You were afraid of me."

"Never. I was never afraid of you. I was afraid for you, my Azula," she denies. "Never of you. Never of my own daughter. I was afraid that you would get lost, I was afraid that you were already confused about the world and how it worked."

I say nothing. I would spit at her that I have heard her say this before, but I remember that I haven't. That wasn't her. It was a delusion, a phantasm in a mirror.

When I don't break the silence, she does. "And yes, I did everything I could for Zuko," she says, her voice hard. "For Zuko - and for you. Do you really think you would have been safe? While Ozai fought his father and his brother for the throne and they fought him for their lives?" She actually laughs. It is a hard sound. I'm not used to hard sounds, from my mother. "Don't be naive, Azula."

I turn back to her, my fingers curving like claws. "What?"

Her face is like something moulded in iron, stark and hard. "Naive," she repeats, her voice cool. "Did you think you mattered more to them than your brother did, to your father or your grandfather? You were easier for them to train and control, and you did better tricks when they gave you commands, but nothing more."

"I was my father's right hand," I snarl, but my mother doesn't even blink.

"And where did that get you, Azula?" she asks. Her hands are folded in front of her. She's like a princess carved out of ice. "Left behind, abandoned with no purpose on the very eve of his great assault, his great glory, the one you gave him? Where did that get you? Tossed a bauble your father no longer wanted while he chased his own power, left to play ruler like a child in robes that were too big for you?" Her voice is like the sound of the ice on a lake cracking. I've heard it, once, in the mountains. "Alone, abandoned, with not a single soul you dared trust, even your terrorized companions turning on you, left to imagine just how quickly everyone else might do the same?"

Like ice. Like grinding, grinding ice. That's her voice. I don't want to hear it. But it goes on. "Your father used you, Azula. He used you, and when you were no longer the tool he wanted, he threw you aside with a pittance to keep you from bothering him while he did as he pleased."

She stops. I realize she's breathing quickly. Her words echo in my head, but I refuse them. Reject them. No. She's wrong. Wrong, and jealous, jealous of my father, that he valued me more than her precious favourite, my idiot brother - I won't hear her. She's wrong.

But I remember, I see the moment I thought, I knew, that the Dai Li would turn on me. And I remember knowing -

(I hear in my mind, the voice that ruled my life: Azula. Control yourself. Like the crack of a whip.)

My mother takes a deep breath, one that shudders. I can't say anything. She lifts up her hands and presses them to her face, and takes another.

"Azula, I love you," she says, and looks up, lets her hands fall and her eyes search my face. "I do." And its as if I hear her echo, but in my memory she is in a mirror, and isn't real. My hand is on the window frame. I think I might be leaning on it. "There is nothing in the world that I regret," she goes on, her voice uneven, "more than the fact that I had to leave you to this, to grow up like this, that I couldn't be here to teach you where that road would end, where the cliff was before you fell of it."

In my head, Mai has a knife in her hand and says, cool as her own steel, You miscalculated. I love Zuko more than I fear you. In my head, I remember what it felt like when my body stopped obeying me. In my head - In my head I stand behind my father at the air-ship dock, and he tells me that I can't come. Tells me that he has a very important -

In my head, I am very small, and I follow my father, follow his footsteps as he walks down the hall. And he stops and he turns to me, and says,Azula, you can't come in - I need you to take this to your mother. It's a very important job, that I can only entrust to you. And because I am a very small child, I glow with the pride of importance and run off and away, while my father steps into the audience-chamber.

My chest hurts. The room blurs; my eyes are filling. "Azula - " my mother begins, but I step back and shake my head.

"Get away from me," I say, through my teeth. I am ready to say it again, to scream it if I have to, but she just looks stricken, and then steps back and turns to walk out of the door again. To get away.

She is afraid of me, after all.

I think the healer expects me to come to him after that. The delusions come, though not for as long. I don't think. I don't trust my sense of time anymore. I don't trust anything anymore. I don't go to the healer-peasant. I don't want anything to do with this. Any of this.

I don't know what I do want. My memories are poisoned now, and everything is bitter.

It's very late. The lamp on the table in my room burns, and I sit on the bed, not sleeping. I don't want to sleep. I don't want to be awake. I don't want to live and I don't want to die. Everywhere I turn there's taint and slime and my own dishonour. I haven't spoken to my mother since I told her to get away. I haven't really spoken to anyone. My head feels empty of words and thoughts. Sleep feels like a devouring dark. I stare at the flame, and my mother's room, her hands on my hair and the brush as it pulled through. I stare at the flame, and remembered the first time fire answered me. I stare at the flame and remember being alive.

After a while, I close my eyes, and wish to be anywhere but here.

(The forest has no mist today, and the fox-wolf is waiting. It tilts its head, where it sits on its haunches and watches me. I stumble, because the first step I take I don't know where I am. Then I snarl a curse.

I don't think I want to be here, wherever here is. I don't think I care to try to reconcile the soft-headed monkeyfeathers of my uncle's prattling with what I see and feel and think I can touch. But the fox-wolf -

No. There are two of them, this time. The same near black, with a white patch on their tails. The second one bounds over and bites the ear of the first, tumbling over it; the first one looks put-upon and ignores it. It looks at me again and whines. And I don't want to be here, but there's nothing terribly enticing about going back to the darkness and staring at the lamp-flame, so I follow them anyway.

The hut is the same. This time, there's no paper lantern. The woman, Ree, is still sitting on the porch, but this time she has calligraphy spread out in front of her. Her hair is bound back in braids today, probably to keep it out of the ink. The fox-wolves both get up beside her and lie down, although one of them only stays for a few seconds before he gets up and darts back out into the woods.

"Eventually," the woman says, "you're going to have to figure out how to get here on purpose, princess, instead of just falling in by chance."

When she says princess, it doesn't sound like a title of honour. It sounds like something a street-merchant would call an urchin getting above herself. "Where is 'here'?" I demand, not bothering with respect when she shows so little.

"Ah," she murmurs, as she gathers her sleeve and dips her brush into the ink. "Better question, this time. But you already know the answer. Believe me, princess, the world doesn't care much what you do and don't find acceptable. Zhao's ignominious punishment, at least, should have taught you some little fear, even if nothing could teach the likes of you proper respect."

"Zhao fell to the Avatar," I say, more to make her speak again than anything else. She laughs, softly.

"No," she says. "The Avatar only gave La a body to borrow long enough for vengeance. Lucky for the Fire Nation. It's not wise for an island people to so anger the ocean. La holds a grudge for a very long time, if he wants to, and the ocean can hold the whole earth as a hostage."

I don't recognize the characters she shapes on the page. I don't understand what she's saying, either. Not really. It's easier than I expect to admit that to myself. Truth, I think and wonder where the thought comes from, is easier here.

She goes on, "It's a flaw in your people. That wasn't the first time it's surfaced. You become so impressed with the power of the fire you control that you start to think you are the pinnacle of flame, and nothing else can match it. Then you start meddling with things beyond your understanding." She finishes one character, lifts the brush and dips it into the ink again. "And all the fire on your little world would not stand for a moment before La without Tui to calm him."

I don't understand what she's talking about, and that galls me. But I bite the inside of my mouth, and instead I ask her, "Who are you?"

"I told you that last time," she says.

"No," I reply. "You told me I could call you Ree. That's not the same thing, and I'm not stupid."

"We'll see." She sets the brush aside. Her face is considering; I can't read her at all. I've always prided myself on knowing people, but her body, her face, they both tell me nothing. If one could be said to have a body, as such, in the spirit world. Whatever it is, I can't read it.

In the end, Ree says, "'Who' would mean nothing to you. Yet. I may be your teacher; we'll see. I was a woman. I was something else. Now I'm here."

The word-play makes me want to grind my teeth. Instead, I say, with as much patience as I can summon up, "Why am I here, then?"

"To learn how to live," the woman replies, getting to her feet in one motion, rolling back onto her feet and standing all at once. "Maybe. To see if you can be something else, since you've failed so badly at being a human. To find a way to exist that neither drowns you in misery nor threatens the balance of the world and necessitates killing you for the good of others." She pauses, and adds, "Maybe." As if she sincerely doubts the possibility.

A white bird flutters underneath the porch roof and lands, first on her shoulder and then, when she holds up her hand, on two of her fingers. She listens, or looks like she's listening, and then gives it a brief look of disgust before letting it come back to her shoulder.

It changes. And then there's a monkey-squirrel staring at me, its hands in her hair and its tail around her neck.

I felt my lip twist when she spoke; now that she's finished, I swallow the ideas that should be words and aren't, and they taste bitter. "And why," I ask her, "would you so generously offer that?"

"Because your mother's prayers moved her grandfather's heart," she replies, and doesn't react to my tone at all. "And because I owe Koh an annoyance for something of mine he tried to steal, and right now he's rather set on acquiring your face for his collection."

" . . . What?" I ask, not sure that I heard right, and her eyebrow rises.

"They really do teach you nothing, don't they?" she says. "Koh is a very old spirit. He steals faces, if he can. Spirits can continue on, after a fashion; humans die. If a human is caught in the spirit world, they sometimes hang between life and death, their spirit lost and faceless, their body still living in the trance that they left it in. It's rather unpleasant."

She goes on, with the attitude of someone offering something for free, "Koh is an agent, and a measure, of balance. You stumbled here, in one of your fits. It isn't terribly surprising; the skill runs in both sides of your family. Koh saw you, and knew you. You were an agent of imbalance, your face is pretty enough, and it would upset Roku badly if Koh caught you. Any one of those reasons would be sufficient; he has all three."

My ears catch at one word, as I listen, and try to make sense. I don't know why I'm listening. I don't know why I haven't left. But I hear the nameRoku, and know it; I bite my tongue on Avatar Roku is dead. Then I bite my tongue on why would he care about me? I am tired of asking this woman questions. I am tired of this. I have no reason to stand here and listen to disrespect, to put up with her games, her toying answers and her insulting tone.

And yet I don't say anything, and I don't know why.

(I have no reason to do anything. I have no reason even to die.)

The question that comes out of my mouth, eventually, after I stand in silence for what feels like too long, is, "What are you?" And I mean how are you doing this to me? Why am I listening to you? Why do I tolerate your tone, your riddles, your half-insults?

Black eyes consider me, as if the woman who owns them is considering something else. "In part," Ree says, somehow (and I'm starting to hate that word, that thought, it's implications of all that I don't know) answering my mind instead of my voice, "because even you get tired of self-destruction after several years; wallowing in your great tragic defeat is all very well, but you're still very young, and you have many long years ahead of you. Your pride fetters you," she tells me, as the white squirrel-monkey stares at me with wide, dark eyes, "but you want more than you have now, for the rest of your life."

My lip curls. My nails bite into my palms. My voice is satisfyingly disgusted when I echo, "In part?"

Then Ree smiles and steps down from the porch. Faces me, and - blurs. Is, somehow, two things at once.

And there is the woman (and now I know who she is), her hair braided and her dress black satin, the gold at her ears and her throat, beautiful in a sun-browned (sun-touched, fire-touched) kind of way. There is a woman, the woman I've seen twice now and heard three times - and curled over her is the blurred shape of a dragon, like the one that brought me here the first time and not like him at all, black and curled, wings folded and body coiled.

The woman fades. Disappears. The dragon grows . . .more. It is black, black as coal, as the burnt out remnants of the greatest of fires, black as obsidian, and touched here and there with gold. Its eyes are still her eyes, black and wide. The wings are small, but I know, suddenly, that dragons don't fly by wings. Those are only for direction. Dragons fly by existing. Dragons fly because fire leaps at the sky.

I've seen paintings of dragons, before. I saw the one that brought me here. They were never anything but another battle to prove myself, if only I could; nothing more than a victory I knew I would win, my only regret that they were all dead before I ever got the chance. They were never anything more than this, except now, as the shape of the woman trades places with the shape of the dragon that looks down at me. Except now, as something in me aches, as the dragon bends its head.

Leans down to me, where I stand, where I refuse to run. Where its muzzle, her muzzle, touches my forehead and suddenly I know.

I know everything. Everything that matters. I know what it is to fly with lightning in a storm and not have to control it, because it just dances with you. I know what it's like to dart through the volcano's eruption like a game, the around the flame and fire that come from the very core of the world; I know what it's like to breath on dead wood, I know what it is to breathe fire that will never die and I can hear, I can hear the sun singing; I can feel what it's like to carry a Comet inside you, because you are fire, because you are the flame.

Then the blur fades and she's a woman again. And it's all gone. It's all gone. I fall to my knees, and I don't care. Everything she showed me is gone and I have nothing left of my own. It's gone. I'll never get it back.

"I told you," she says. "I was a woman. Then I was something else. Now I'm here. There is a little dragon in you, Azula of the Fire Nation. Just like in every firebender. Dragons don't bother with pride or arrogance, because we have no use for them; the dragon in you knows that the dragon who isme is a lot bigger than she is."

I can't answer. I don't care. Fire answered me when I was five years old, and now she's shown me everything, and it's gone. I can't touch it.

Ria smoothes the front of her robe. "Your great-grandfather will owe me a favour, princess," she says. "He thinks that since the human way has failed you, a dragon's way might be better. I thought he was a doting fool; now I'm not so sure. He might be right."

My hands have gone to my ribs; loss aches, my body itself aches, and my eyes are blurred when I say, "They took my fire." I say it, hiss it through my teeth, but I can't even gather up what's left of me to be angry. The hiss is just pain. And something in me knows that she'll understand.

For the first time, her expression is something other than detached, amused; she says, "Yes. I know," and her voice is no longer mocking and indifferent. "We may be able to do something about that. But my responsibility is to dragons, princess, not to human children. You get to decide which you are."

I turn away. The ache is in me, and it comes with something like hate. Something like, but too complicated. I can feel the Comet, the power, like a phantom hand; I can feel, I remember -

Fire was my tool, my strength, my weapon. Nobody ever told me it could be anything else.

"How?" I ask. My voice is harsh.)

For all of his hope, Kaska is surprised when the princess does, in the end, come to him.

He is in the garden, by the pond, because there is no reason to fall out of practice with any skill he's ever had, bending not least, and in their slower forms the kata are comforting, calming. But when he sees a dark head come towards him, dressed in the red-trimmed white her mother lays out for her, he lets the water flow back into the pond and waits.

She is a haggard thing, this Fire Nation princess. Her face is thin and the skin under he eyes is dark, very dark. She seems brittle, and when he came seemed fragile, too. Now, though, there is a little change; now there is something in her eyes, in the set of her jaw, that tells him of - what? A decision made, maybe. A choice. She's worked very hard not to make choices, as far as he can tell.

"You have things to show me," she says, her voice flat. Kaska thinks that the slight undertone of disgust is more for herself than for him, but she has made a long habit of despising herself and then turning the hatred into a virtue and a joke. So it's not surprising. "Start now."

It is, at least, a beginning.

33
Knowing others is wisdom;
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self needs strength.

He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present. [Lao-Tzu]