Avatar: The Book Of The Phoenix

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Xanadu had gone loud again, then quiet in the wrong places.

Three days after the Avatar walked out of the fortress with his friends, the war camp at the base of the wall still smelled like the argument: wet ash, rhino, men pretending they had not been made fools of by a girl in stolen paint and a man with a boomerang.

Azula found Rokkun on the inner steps with a cup he was not drinking.

"They are gone," she said. Not a question.

"They are gone." He watched the dark beyond the gate as if Aang might be rude enough to wave.

"Sokka will tell that story until somebody knocks his teeth out. Your brother will call it a victory. The Avatar will call it mercy." A thin breath. "I call it a door I left open."

"You call it that because you like to own the mistake." Azula's mouth tipped. "They will run to Zuko. Zuko will make a face. The world will continue to be inconvenient."

Rokkun's grin flickered and did not stay. "Ride with me."

She looked at him.

"Not a patrol. Not a lesson for the men. A ride." He turned the cup. "Before I start a war with a sunset just to feel useful."

Azula studied the request as if it might be armed.

Then she said, "If you intend to apologize to the landscape, I am coming to supervise."

The camp opened for them because everything opened for him now.

His bull rhino was already saddled, steam at the nostrils, the ugly loyal kind of beast.

Beside it, a mongoose lizard waited with a look of personal offense, long and low and bright-eyed in the torchlight.

Rokkun put a hand on the lizard's neck.

"For you," he said. "Thought the rhino was a bit on-the-nose. This one's mean, fast, and unimpressed by titles. More your style."

Azula gave the animal a look that was almost approval. "You bought me a joke."

"I selected you a joke. There's a difference." He swung up onto the rhino. "Try to keep up. I have a reputation."

"You have a mouth," she said, and mounted as if she had been born on the thing.

They took the path that skirted the camp and climbed the coastal ridge. For a while there was only leather, tide, the fortress falling into a red geometry below them.

No banners. No Oghuz. No Taijuk. The kind of quiet they had not been allowed since the tavern in Bin-Er.

Azula let the lizard stretch. "You are riding like a man who has forgotten he is supposed to be impressive."

"Maybe I am tired of impressive." He said it too quickly, then covered it. "Or maybe I am letting you win so you will be pleasant at dinner."

"I have never been pleasant at dinner."

"I noticed."

The ridge widened into a flat of grass above the drop. Xanadu on one side, the sea on the other, the Iron Dragon a dark thought in the harbor.

Rokkun pulled up. The rhino stamped and settled.

He did not.

Azula saw it immediately. The way his hands had nowhere correct to be. The way he looked at the water instead of at her.

"You are acting strange."

"I am acting like a man on a rhino."

"You are acting like a boy who brought something he is afraid to show me." She turned the lizard side-on. "Spit it out before I decide it is an ambush and ruin your evening."

"It is not an ambush."

"That is what men say about ambushes."

He almost smiled. It broke.

They sat with the wind. He talked about the escape because talking was easier than the other thing: Suki's paint, Sokka's mouth, the Avatar slipping a fortress built to hold worse. Azula let him. She had already won that argument three nights running.

Then he ran out of fortress.

Rokkun got down first. The grass came to his knees. He stood there like the ridge had asked him a question he had been postponing since the gardens.

"When we were kids," he said, and the swagger had to work to stay in the sentence, "I brought you flowers. You looked at me like I had handed you a dead turtle duck." His throat moved. "I don't have flowers. I have a stolen fortress and a name I did not choose. It is a worse offering. I know that."

Azula did not help him.

"I am not asking you to decorate a hall," he went on, rougher. "I am asking you to take the thing I have been building and put your name on it so it is not only mine. I thought you were dead to me. Then you walked into Bin-Er and set a tavern on fire and said my old name like it still fit. I have been trying to be the Khan about it. I am bad at being the Khan about it."

He looked at her properly.

"Marry me."

No kneel. No army. The sea doing too much work in the silence after.

Azula sat on the lizard for a long moment, golden eyes unreadable in the last light.

"That," she said at last, "was sloppier than the flowers."

Rokkun huffed out a breath that wanted to be a laugh and did not make it.

She dismounted. Walked to him. Looked up as if measuring whether the years had improved the boy who could not hide a bouquet.

"You do not get to ask me that as if I am a prize you found in a cell. I am not going to stand beside you so the Nomads have a princess to point at. I will stand beside you because I have already chosen the fire, and I will not spend the rest of my life watching you aim it without me." A thin, dangerous smile. "If you take a second wife, I will end you. If you make this a speech in the yard tomorrow, I will deny it and call you a liar. If you are doing this because you think I need rescuing from my brother's peace, you have misunderstood me in a way I will not forgive."

Rokkun's voice was very quiet. "I am doing it because I am tired of calling you the girl I lost."

Azula's chin tipped.

"Then say it again. Correctly. I accept proposals from men who can finish a sentence."

He did. Less theater. Her name in it. The old one and the new one both.

Azula looked past him at Xanadu, then at the water, then at his mouth.

"Yes," she said. "Obviously. Do not look so stunned. It is unbecoming of a khan."

The grin that came back was not the public one. It was the garden.

She put two fingers in the front of his tunic and tugged him down anyway, as if the ridge required proof.

Below them the fortress kept its lamps. The sea kept its noise. For a little while the war had the good sense to stay off the hill.