Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

The Khan

The dungeons of Bin-Er were a grim affair—dank stone, earth, defeat. Azula leaned against the wall, wrists in iron, irritation held on a short leash.

Two nights ago she had gone into the tavern to measure the Nomads. A few of them, drunk on rice wine, had taken her mouth for an invitation. The scuffle left scorch marks and singed men. Their numbers did the rest.

The door creaked. Torchlight. A grizzled woman with a scarred cheek, a lanky youth who wanted to be elsewhere.

"The Khan wishes to see you," the woman said, unlocking the chains. "Don't try anything stupid."

Azula rose and brushed dust from her tunic.

"Stupid? Me? You must have me confused with someone less incendiary."

The youth flinched. The woman snorted and walked.

They took her through what was left of Bin-Er. Markets gone to tents and forges. Walls under firebender patrol. Smoke and metal. Not raiders. An army that intended to stay. The Governor's mansion wore Nomad banners now, a coiled dragon over green tile.

Inside: maps, steel, a low table, two cups.

At the center stood the Khan.

Tall. Sleeveless crimson. Dark, auburn hair loose in the torchlight. Amber eyes, and that grin—the one that had no business surviving a front.

"Well, well, well," he drawled. "If it isn't Princess Azula, gracing my humble mansion. Gotta say, you look good for someone who just torched half my men in a bar fight." A wink. A gesture at the table. "Tea?"

Azula did not take the next step.

The name in her head was not the one on the banners. For a long, ugly second she could not make her face do anything. The hall narrowed to auburn hair and a mouth she had last seen on a boy the palace had sent away. Ozai's voice arrived without being invited—petty romance. The lists. The clerks. The letter she had burned, then burned again so the ash would not have the last word.

Years of assuming the front had closed over him like water.

"No," she said, and it was not aimed at the tea.
Her breath went thin. The chains were gone and her hands still felt bound. She looked at the scars on his knuckles as if they were a forgery. She looked at the grin as if it were a trick the war had learned to play.

"Aarslan."

The old name came out too soft. Garden-soft. The voice of a girl who had not yet learned to ask her father for a corpse.

He tilted his head. Amusement first. Then something that was not.

"Aarslan's dead, Princess. Burned up with the rest of the old world." The grin sharpened. Under it, for one unguarded flicker, the boy who had let her win just often enough. "Call me Rokkun now."

She did not recover in an instant. That was the lie she would tell later.

She stood in a stolen mansion in a broken city and felt the years rearrange. Alive. Taller. Harder.

Standing in front of her with tea, as if decades and a reported death were an interval between jokes.

Heat crawled up her throat. She swallowed it because the guards were gone and she would not give the room the satisfaction of a princess who shook.

When the mask came back, it came back cracked.
She arched an eyebrow. Stepped forward because standing still had become dangerous.

"You've traded palace silks for... this?" The gesture at his tunic was teasing. Her eyes were not. Knuckles. Stance. The fact of him. "I expected the great Khan Rokkun to at least have a throne."

Rokkun chuckled, low. "Thrones are for stiffs like your brother. I prefer to keep things... flexible." He poured. Jasmine. Steam like a flourish. He slid the cup. "Sit. Let's catch up. Been a minute since we were kids plotting world domination in the palace gardens."

Her fingers brushed his on the cup. The heat was familiar and unearned. She sat. She drank. Bold, bitter, the way she liked it, which was another small impossibility.

"You were exiled, Rokkun. Banished by my father." She kept her voice level with an effort she hoped he would not inventory. "I thought you'd be sulking in some backwater. I thought—" She cut the rest. I thought I had already finished mourning you. "Not playing warlord in a stolen city."

He leaned back, smirking. "Sulking's not my style, princess. The wilderness taught me a few tricks—how to lead, how to fight, how to take what's mine." A glance at the maps. "Bin-Er's just the start. The Nomads? We're building something big. Something that'd make old Ozai proud."

Her mouth twitched. The smile threatened because if she did not smile she might do something worse.

"You always did have a flair for the dramatic. But what's a king without a queen?" Playful. Sharp. Hunting the boy under the new name.

Rokkun leaned in, all charm and danger. "Oh, I'm lookin' at her. Question is, does the great Azula still dream of setting the world ablaze, or has Zuko's peace nonsense dulled your spark?"

She set the cup down and matched him. "Zuko's peace is a cage. I don't do cages, Rokkun." Blue sparked at her fingers, brief, a proof of life. "But I'm not here to join your little band of raiders just because you pour a decent cup of tea. Or because you had the poor taste to stop being dead."

He laughed, full, off the stone. "That's my girl. Never easy, always worth it."

He did not circle her like a speech. He sat with the second cup and let the hall be only the two of them for a minute the war could not have.

"I looked for you," Azula said, and hated that it had come out. "Not in the way that makes a good story. A question I was stupid enough to ask my father. He told me you were a waste of a princess's time. He told me you were probably bones." She turned the cup. "I believed him. It was easier than the other thing."

Rokkun's grin thinned to something almost careful. "Yeah. Well. Dying was never one of my talents." He watched her over the steam. "If I'd known you were burning letters, I'd have written better ones. Most of mine didn't make the distance."

"I noticed."

"I noticed you noticed." He tipped his cup at her.

"You're here anyway. In my stolen house. After setting half a tavern on fire. That's either fate or you still can't walk past a fight."

"I can walk past a fight," Azula said. "I choose not to. There is a difference."

"There she is." The warmth in it was unhidden now. "Stay tonight. Not in the cell. We've got a feast—meat, wine, men who will pretend they weren't the ones you singed. I want you at the table. I want the room to see what the palace threw away and what walked back in."

Azula held his gaze. The shock had not left. It had only taken a seat.

"A feast," she said. "In a city you just finished breaking. You always did have timing."

"I have a table and a girl I thought the war ate." Rokkun stood and offered a hand that was not a command. "Come eat, Princess. If you hate it, you can always burn the next tavern. I'll even point you at the loud ones."

She looked at the hand.

She did not take it quickly. That would have been the girl in the garden. She took it like a woman who had spent years practicing the end of this scene and had just been informed the scene was not over.

"If the wine is as decent as the tea," she said, "I may forgive you for being alive."

Rokkun's mouth hooked. "I'll take that as a yes."

They left the war maps where they were. The hall kept the tea steam and the old name Azula had said too softly. Outside, Bin-Er burned in the orderly way of a conquest that intended to throw a party on top of it.

She walked beside him, still waiting for the trick.

The trick did not come.

The feast did.