Embers and Tides

The council chamber felt smaller every time he stepped into it, the ring of red lacquered chairs tightening like a snare. Heat pressed against the windows though the morning was overcast, and the volcano breathed a thin ribbon of smoke that curled past the high arches and reminded him that the city was balanced on a throat of fire. Zuko took his seat and tried not to rub at the ache that lived behind his eyes.

“Your Majesty,” General Baatar began, bowing low before unrolling a series of maps. “Supply caravans are being delayed by protests outside Harbor District Three. The colonists say they were promised aid by this week. They haven’t seen grain in two.”

“The shipments were rerouted after the floods in the southeast,” Minister Khae added, his tone brittle, his rings clicking softly on the table. “We cannot conjure food from air. Perhaps if the farmers worked longer—”

“They’re already working longer,” Zuko said, more sharply than he meant to. He fixed his gaze on the map. Red ink marked villages like blood spots across the outer colonies. “What about the state granaries? We opened three.”

“Opened,” Lord Morio echoed, as if the word amused him. He leaned back, smile thin. “But emptied too quickly. The people are nervous, Fire Lord. When people are nervous, they steal, they hoard, they riot. Discipline must—”

“This is not a discipline problem,” Zuko cut in. The old heat flared in him, ready, ugly. He pressed his nails into his palm until the impulse receded. “This is a supply problem.”

A scribe approached with a stack of bound reports secured with crimson twine. Zuko gestured, and the scrolls landed in front of him with a soft thud that felt heavier than ink and paper. The topmost bore the seal of the Agricultural Bureau. He broke it with his thumb and scanned the opening lines as the council continued to bicker around him.

Blight. Unknown vector. Rapid spread along irrigation canals. Resistant to conventional burning.

He looked up. “Explain this.”

A small, gray-haired woman rose from the far end of the table, clutching her own copy. Director Rin, head of the Bureau, had always struck him as unflappable. Today, her mouth was drawn tight.

“We received the first samples from the Maku River delta ten days ago,” she said. “At first we assumed a fungus. But it isn’t responding to heat the way fungal spores should. We sterilized fields down to clay.” She swallowed. “The next morning, the stalks were black again. New growth withered overnight.”

“How far?” Zuko asked. His voice sounded flat to his own ears.

“Three districts officially.” Rin hesitated. “Unofficially—farther. Some farmers didn’t report right away. They were afraid their fields would be culled.”

General Baatar exhaled through his nose. “If they won’t follow procedure—”

“They’re desperate,” Rin snapped, authority cracking through the room like a slap. “These are families. Burn a field, and you ask them to starve quietly.”

Zuko closed his eyes for a beat. The image came without effort: cracked earth, a child’s hand opening to show him nothing but dry seeds, the way people looked at him like he should be able to fix it with a gesture. He had learned to hold that look and not flinch. He had not learned how to live with it afterward.

“Resistant to fire,” Zuko said, opening his eyes. “Are we sure this isn’t a rumor?”

Rin slid a dark, cloth-wrapped packet across the table. When Zuko unwrapped it, a brittle stalk lay within, blackened along its veins as if the disease had traced the plant’s lifeblood and inverted it. He pinched the tip. The husk collapsed to ash between his fingers that didn’t smear like soot; it clung, gritty, wrong. He wiped his hand on the cloth.

“We tried high heat and low, controlled burns, smudging, ember sterilization,” Rin continued. “The only effect is temporary. It returns with the dew.”

“Then we quarantine,” Morio said quickly. He stood, voice gaining weight. “Close the canals. Lock down the affected villages. We cannot risk this spreading to the capital.”

“Cut off their water and you will kill them faster,” Zuko said. He took a breath. “What about earthbender intervention to rotate soil? What about ash amendments?”

“We did both,” Rin said. She glanced at her notes, then at him. “Minimal improvement. We need time to test.”

Time. Another resource already spent. Zuko glanced down the line of his councilors—men and women in silk and steel, their faces turned toward him like a row of lanterns waiting to be lit or smashed. He thought of Iroh’s letters, pages of neat script filled with tea recommendations and patience disguised as advice. Leadership is often waiting while everyone screams at you to move. Do not mistake noise for urgency. Do not mistake urgency for wisdom.

“We send whatever grain reserves we have left to the worst-hit districts,” Zuko said. “And we increase the price incentives for unaffected regions to sell to the crown.”

“Expensive,” Khae murmured.

“Cheaper than revolt,” Zuko said, not looking at him. “Director Rin—what do you need?”

“Laborers we can trust, runners, permission to requisition equipment without waiting on regional approvals.” She hesitated. “And…input from healers. We are out of ideas.”

A rustle went through the room at that. Morio’s lip curled. “Healers. From the North? The…South?”

“The disease moves through water as easily as through soil,” Rin said. Her gaze slid to Zuko. “We need someone who understands water the way we understand fire. This is not about politics. It is about not watching children starve while we argue.”

He felt the room watching him decide. He felt the scar on his face pull, the tightness memory made of skin. He remembered Katara’s hand pressed to the wound years ago, cool water and steadiness against the panic inside him. He remembered her eyes, furious and clear. He remembered the way she had looked at him and seen through him and not turned away.

“We will request aid,” he said. The words felt like stepping out onto a narrow rope above flame. “Formally. From the Southern Water Tribe.”

A soft intake of breath rippled across the table. Morio didn’t bother to hide his disdain. “Inviting foreigners to meddle in internal affairs sets a dangerous precedent.”

“Inviting children’s graves sets a worse one,” Zuko said without raising his voice. He turned back to Rin. “You’ll have what you need. Draft the list. I’ll sign the orders before noon.”

He rose. Every movement felt like dragging iron. The room rose with him, chairs scraping. The volcano’s smoke looked thicker now, dark against the gray sky. He imagined the farmers standing under it, counting days, counting meals. The crown was heavy; today it burned.

When the council dispersed, he did not call after any of them. He stood alone with the maps and the little black stalk crumbling on his palm, and for a moment, the chamber was very quiet. He wanted to strike the table and see flame leap from his fist, to be the kind of man who could sear away a problem by willing it. His throat tightened. He closed his hand into a fist and let the ash grind into his skin.

“Send for the messengers,” he told the scribe without turning. “We draft the request now.”

The snow was clean enough to hurt. It reflected the low sun and turned the village into a field of white fire, each ice-edged house a familiar shape etched against a sky so blue it seemed hollow. Katara stood on the ridge above the main path and let the wind sting her cheeks, the fur of her parka brushing her jaw like a hand she could not stop seeking. The bay below lay iron-still, a skin of dark glass broken by a single seal’s dive. She could name every creak of rope and groan of ice, could walk this land blindfolded and never lose her way. The certainty should have soothed her. It didn’t.

“Master Katara?”

She turned. An apprentice—Ami, fourteen, serious to a fault—stood with her gloves clenched under her chin. Stray strands of hair stuck to her mouth with frost.

“He’s asking for you again,” Ami said. “Elder Pakkun’s cough got worse.”

Katara nodded and followed down the ridge. The village opened around them with the usual rhythm—women scraping hides, boys tilting spears to sunlight to check for hairline cracks, the scent of fish oil and woodsmoke threading the air. People called to her as she passed. Master. Councilor. Daughter of Hakoda. Each name landed gently and added weight anyway.

Elder Pakkun’s igloo was warm with breath and packed bodies. His daughter hovered, wringing a cloth to a drip. The old man’s chest rattled, each inhale a narrow victory. Katara set her satchel down, conscious of how many times her hands had performed this exact sequence: open the water skin, pour into bowl, steady her breath until the surface stilled to a mirror. She drew the water up between her palms and felt it respond, a living thing that had trusted her since childhood.

“Good to see you, girl,” Pakkun rasped. “You always make a room warmer.”

“Then you know I’ll nag you about going outside this week,” she said, and directed a thin tendril of water into his mouth, letting it travel down, cool and searching. She guided it along inflamed tissue, soothed rawness, eased tight muscles into slack. The old man sighed as if a rope had been loosened around his chest.

It was easy to lose herself in the work. The world narrowed to breath counts and subtle shifts, to the way the body told her its story if she only listened. When she finished, Pakkun’s color had improved and the cough came softer.

“You should rest,” she said. He grinned, stubborn as ever.

“Rest when the fish gut themselves.”

She smiled back, tucked the blankets around his knees, and stood. Outside, the cold hit her throat and the ache she had been ignoring came roaring back. She wanted—what? She had no words for it that didn’t feel like ingratitude. There were worse fates than being needed in a place that loved you. There were worse fates than competence.

The council hall was half-full when she arrived, men and women already arguing over seal quotas and trade schedules. Her father sat at the center with a heavy ledger open in front of him, his beard catching the light like fresh-fallen snow. He looked up when she entered, and the lines around his eyes softened.

“Katara,” he said, with a welcome that tugged at something tender in her chest. “We were just talking about the northern route. Ice is thick this year. We could send two boats with the first thaw.”

She shed her parka and took her seat. The discussion slipped around her like well-worn boots. Gran-Gran’s voice in her head—steady, tart—reminded her where the elders would dig in. Sokka would have made a joke here, to cut tension; she felt the absence of him like the gap left when a tooth is pulled. She offered suggestions, she argued a point about distributing skilled hunters among crews so no boat went out too green. People nodded. Her father’s eyes glinted with pride.

When the meeting broke, he walked beside her to the doorway and set a hand on her shoulder. He did that less now, careful with her adulthood.

“You looked far away today,” he said softly.

“I was here.” She tried to make it a tease and failed. He heard the thinness anyway.

“Not all of you,” he said. “Aang sent a hawk. He’ll be in Republic City longer than he planned. Toph’s got him helping with some waterway mapping.” He watched her face, the way a father watches weather.

Aang. The sound of his name no longer pinched; it only left an echo of something bright that had been folded, put away. They had been careful when they ended it, both unwilling to make an enemy out of a friend. They had hugged on the pier while the whole village pretended to look elsewhere. He had cried and she had not, and later, alone, she had.

“I’m glad,” she said. “He loves a project.”

Hakoda’s hand squeezed. “He loves you. In whatever way he can.”

“I know.” She let herself lean into the warmth of him for a breath, then straightened. “I’m fine, Dad.”

He studied her, then nodded. “All right.” He paused. “When you want to not be fine, you know where to find me.”

She laughed, a short sound that curled into the cold. He went back to the hall. Katara cut toward the hill where the white tower of ice—half shrine, half childhood—caught the weak light. The Spirit Oasis water sloshed in its skin at her hip, the weight familiar against her thigh. She hadn’t needed to use the potent stuff today. She rarely did. Saving it was a habit she could not shake, as if hoarding one small piece of wonder would keep the rest of her life from thinning out.

She passed the training circle. A group of girls leaned into forms in unison, water arcing from barrel to barrel with the clean precision of work done together. The instructor, Pia, glanced up as Katara paused and bent her head with respect that still felt strange to receive.

“Master,” Pia said. “We’re working on fine control.”

Katara watched a moment, corrected a wrist angle, adjusted a stance with her palm on a warm shoulder. The girl looked up at her like a tide rising to meet the moon. Katara could feel pride bloom slow and warm. It didn’t fill the hollow.

The ridge above the village was a place for speaking to no one. She climbed again, boots biting. A gull scraped a line across the sky and was gone. She pulled the water skin free and uncorked it, balancing the pouch in her lap. The water rose obediently, clear as memory. In its surface she saw her own face, older now, the angles softer and the mouth set with a calm people mistook for permanence.

“What do you want?” she asked her reflection before she could stop herself. The wind took her voice and scattered it across the snow.

She wanted motion. She wanted a problem she couldn’t solve with a steady hand and a patient word. She wanted heat that didn’t come from a fur hood or a crowded igloo. She pressed her thumb to the skin at the hollow of her throat, felt her pulse there, even and strong, and admitted the rest: she wanted to be looked at by someone who saw the whole of her and didn’t flinch. She wanted to see herself new through somebody else’s eyes.

The guilt came right on schedule. Gran-Gran’s stories, her mother’s hands, the weight of what they had all survived—she owed this place more than restlessness. She eased the water back into the skin as if she could cork the ache with it. It sloshed once, then stilled.

Footsteps crunched behind her. Sokka’s stride had always been easy to hear—too big for the subtlety the world sometimes required. He flopped down beside her without asking, shoulder bumping hers, breath smoking white.

“You hiding or thinking?” he asked.

“Both,” she said.

“Excellent. I brought dried sea prunes, which solve neither.” He shoved a pouch toward her and watched her not take it. His humor softened. “You look like you’re listening for something that isn’t here.”

She blew out a breath. “Have you ever felt…like you got everything you thought you wanted and it still wasn’t…enough?” The words tasted like a small betrayal. She said them anyway.

Sokka leaned back on his hands and tilted his face to the sun like a lazy cat. “Frequently,” he said. “Usually right before the world tries to kill me and I miss being bored.”

She smiled despite herself. He nudged her knee with his.

“Hey,” he said, more serious. “You don’t owe anyone staying in one shape because it’s the one that helped them. You’re allowed to want.”

Her throat pulled tight. She had always been the one to press the wound and stop the bleeding, not to show her own bruise. She swallowed, the salt of the air sharp.

“I don’t know what I want,” she said.

Sokka bumped his shoulder into hers again. “Then that’s what you want. To find out.” He pulled something from his pocket and waved it between two fingers. A scroll, the seal broken and clumsily re-tied. “Also, a messenger hawk came while you were playing ghost. United Republic seal. Dad told me not to open it. I obeyed in spirit.”

She took it. The paper was stiff with cold. She didn’t unroll it. Not yet. The ridge, the village, the bay—all of it breathed around her like a living thing waiting to see which way she would turn. She loosened her grip, smoothed the edge of the scroll with her thumb, and felt the prickle at the back of her neck that came right before something changed.

Sokka watched her not open it, his mouth flattening into a line she knew too well—the one he wore when he’d come to say something he hated.

“It’s not just any Republic seal,” he said. “It’s my seal. I’m… an official envoy on this one.”

She rolled the scroll with her fingers. “What did you do.”

“Got on a ship, froze my ass off, and came to ask you to do something you won’t want to do,” he said with forced brightness that didn’t reach his eyes. “Open it.”

She broke the wax. The words were neat, formal, and heavy. The United Republic Council requested, at the behest of the Fire Nation and with support from the Earth Kingdom and Air Nomad representatives, that Master Katara of the Southern Water Tribe travel to Caldera City to consult on an urgent matter of public health. The phrasing was polite, practiced neutrality wrapped around danger.

She read it twice. Sokka waited until her jaw set, then spoke.

“There’s a blight,” he said. “Started in the outer Fire Nation colonies. Fast. It eats the soil. Crops look fine until a day later when they melt in your hand. People are getting sick from whatever it leaves behind. Fever. Skin rashes that don’t respond to anything. It spreads in patterns that don’t make sense, jumps village boundaries like it’s thinking.”

Her fingers tightened on the scroll until the paper creaked. She kept her gaze on the ink.

“Firebenders tried to burn it out,” Sokka continued. “Does nothing. Earthbenders can’t stabilize the fields. They’ve rationed down to the bone. If the spring harvest fails in the interior, they’re looking at famine. Refugees. Unrest.”

He let the words hang. The wind carried the smell of brine and old ice. Katara swallowed around the sudden dry in her mouth.

“This is the Fire Nation’s problem,” she said, soft and flat. “Why is the Republic involved.”

“Because people are involved,” he said, and the softness went out of his voice. “Because if the Fire Nation goes unstable, everyone pays. Because they asked. Zuko asked.”

The name landed like a coal on fresh snow. It hissed and burrowed and left a line of steam.

“He wants me?” Her voice cracked on the last word, small and furious at being small.

“He wants hope that isn’t fire,” Sokka said. “They’ve tried everything they know. You know things they don’t. Healing. Water. Spirits. The Council wants to send an expert team, but the expert they all agreed on was you.”

She stood without meaning to, the motion hard enough that the water skin at her hip thumped her thigh. The ridge fell away at her feet, the village spread like a child’s drawing below. She forced air in and out of her lungs until her heart eased.

“When did he ask,” she said.

“Two weeks ago. I got briefed in Republic City with Toph and a couple of Earth King aides. They had maps, Katara. Red pins everywhere. Villages you and I ate noodles in after the war.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Zuko… he looked tired. Not Fire Lord tired. Hunted tired.”

She hated that picture, how easily it rose in her mind. A boy on an iron deck with sea spray in his hair, jaw tight, eyes older than his age. A man in a throne room he never wanted, shoulders held like he carried stones.

“You’re asking me to go into the Fire Nation and fix what they broke,” she said. “Again.”

“I’m asking you to help people who will die if you don’t,” Sokka said, equally soft and equally brutal. “I’m your brother and I’m also an envoy. Those jobs are at war in me right now. I’m not going to pretend the politics don’t make me sick. But I can’t bring anyone else who can do what you do. Not at that level. Not with that—” he gestured at her, frustrated “—thing you have when the rules fail.”

Katara stared at the ink until it blurred. Her mother’s face rose, the shape of her mouth when she laughed, the stillness of the snow the day they put her necklace in the box. The Fire Nation flag snapping over a metal ship that cut the water like it owned the ocean. Zuko in Ba Sing Se, in a cave lit by green light, betrayal like a blade. Zuko on a mountainside, eyes wide with shame, apology raw and awful. All of it lived inside her like knots.

Sokka nudged her knee with his. “Say something.”

“What if I can’t help,” she said. The fear tasted copper. “What if I go and I can’t do anything. What if it just eats and eats and I watch it.”

“Then you’ll know you tried,” he said. “And I’ll know I asked the right person to try.” He swallowed. “They’re not sending you alone. You’d have guards. Blank check access to their archives. Whatever you need. The White Lotus will help coordinate. It’s not walking blind into an enemy camp.”

“It is,” she said, hollow. “It will always be that.”

They sat with it. Seals barked on the ice floe near the mouth of the cove, their voices thin in the cold air. Far below, a child’s laugh cut sharp and brief as a gull.

Sokka reached into his coat and pulled out a second scroll, smaller, the wax seal imprinted with a flame. He didn’t hand it to her immediately, turning it over in his broad fingers like it might break. “This one is personal,” he said. “From him.”

She closed her eyes and then opened them. “I don’t—”

“I read it,” Sokka admitted, unashamed. “Envoy. Brother. Same difference. He didn’t beg. He just… said he trusts you. That you’re the only person he could think of who might see something the rest of them can’t.”

Her grip loosened. She didn’t take the letter. She couldn’t make her fingers do it.

“Katara,” Sokka said, softer than he’d been all day. “You could say no. You could say no and stay here and no one who loves you would love you less. Dad would nod and say he understands. Gran-Gran would make that face and then make you tea. Aang would write a letter about choices and balance. I would take the ship back to Republic City and tell them my sister is not a resource you requisition like coal.”

“But?”

“But you’re not going to say no because you already know what you’ll see if you close your eyes tonight. And you won’t be able to sleep through it.”

She laughed, the sound harsh. Then it faded. The ridge, the wind, the taste of salt on her tongue. The heavy certainty of being needed in a way that hurt.

“How soon,” she asked.

Sokka’s shoulders dropped, relief and sorrow in the same breath. “Ship in three days. Sooner if you say the word. I’ll send a hawk ahead.”

She finally took the flame-sealed letter and tucked it into her coat without opening it. The paper warmed against her skin like a living thing.

“I’m not doing this for him,” she said. “Do you understand me. Not for him. Not for his nation.”

“I know,” Sokka said, and his eyes were bright. “You never do anything for the person asking. You do it for the people who don’t get to ask.”

She nodded once, the motion small and absolute, and felt the shift inside her like a tide turning under ice. The weight settled. It didn’t crush. It steadied.

They climbed down from the ridge in silence, the snow squeaking under their boots, sky washing into slate. At the bottom, the wind dropped and the village sounds returned—pots clanging, a dog yipping, the thud of someone chopping a frozen fish. The normalcy made everything worse.

In their father’s house, the air smelled like seal oil and dried kelp. The fire snapped in the hearth. Sokka shrugged off his furs and hung them, then waited in the center of the room like a man in an arena. Katara stayed by the doorway a beat too long, the cold clinging to her.

“Say it,” he said, gentle. “Don’t swallow it down and tell me later you’re fine.”

She pulled the flame-sealed letter from her coat and set it on the table with more care than she felt. Her hands shook. She tucked them into her sleeves so he wouldn’t see.

“How am I supposed to walk into their palace,” she asked, voice flat. “Stand under their banners. Bow to their customs. Smile at their ministers. Like they didn’t burn my home and take my mother. Like the smell of smoke isn’t sitting inside my throat waiting to choke me.”

Sokka’s mouth tightened. “I didn’t ask you to bow. I asked you to help.”

“You want me to help the Fire Nation,” she said, the words rough. “Do you hear yourself?”

He took a step toward her, then stopped. “I hear it. I hate it. I also hear children coughing in villages you healed after the war. I hear farmers who didn’t set those ships on our horizon.”

“And where were their fathers,” she snapped. “Where were their fathers when ours were hiding in snow caves with soot in their lungs and no food for weeks? Where were they when Mom stood in front of me and—” Her voice broke. She shut her eyes hard, forcing the image back into the place it lived. “I don’t forgive because time passed, Sokka. I don’t forget because I learned to stop shaking when I hear a fire crack.”

He rubbed his hand over his jaw, eyes dark. “Neither do I. I still wake up ready to grab a club when a hawk lands at night. I still look for a knife when there’s a knock on the door. But we made it through the war by doing hard things we hated. Sometimes we did them for people who didn’t deserve our mercy.”

She stared at the letter, the flame imprint bright as fresh blood. “You read what he wrote. You said he trusts me. He trusted me in Ba Sing Se too, until he didn’t.”

“That was years ago.”

“It was yesterday,” she said, the words so quiet they felt like they might crack. “I can still smell the earth in that catacomb. I can still feel the heat of his lightning in the air. He stood there and chose the path that hurt me because it hurt him less. And now he wants me to come and save what his people can’t?”

Sokka’s jaw flexed, a muscle working. “He also chose you on the airship. He chose us at the Boiling Rock. He chose the world when he stepped in front of his father. People are not just their worst choice.”

She snorted, bitter and small. “No. They’re also the people who put a scar on a child and called it discipline. They’re the people who marched across the world and called it destiny.”

“And they’re also the old women who hand you tea in markets and call you daughter,” he said. “They’re the kids who ran toward Appa like he was a miracle. Those are Fire Nation too.”

She drew in a breath that shuddered. “You make it sound simple.”

“It’s not. It’s ugly. It’s everything at once.” He softened. “Katara, I’m not naïve about what this asks of you. I wouldn’t put it on you if there was anyone else. But when the world broke last time, you were the one who sewed it back together. Not because you wanted to, because it needed doing.”

Her gaze slid to the hearth. The fire whispered and popped. The first time she’d seen Caldera, soot had fallen like black rain. She had scraped it from her hair with shaking hands. She could still feel the press of iron decks under her bare feet, the eyes of soldiers on her back as she walked to heal someone they’d brought her like a trophy. She had wanted to drown the world and felt the pull of that possible violence the way a tide pulls at ankles.

“I don’t want to be their remedy,” she said, the words scraping her throat. “I don’t want to be the one they call when their own fire can’t fix what they broke.”

“Then don’t be their remedy,” he said. “Be the villagers’. Be the children’s. Be yours.”

She looked at him, anger flaring, sharp enough to taste. “And when I get there? When I see their colors on every wall and hear them talk about honor and sacrifice while they eat on plates made from our bones? Do I just swallow the bile and smile? Do I pretend my hands aren’t shaking?”

“No,” he said. “You go and you do what you do. You tell them what you think. You don’t let them own your skills or your story. You go because you decided to, not because they pulled a string.”

Her hands were numb inside her sleeves. She pulled them free and pressed her palms to the table until the old wood dug into her skin. The house creaked around them. The wind hummed low against the walls. She could hear her father moving in the other room, tin cup against basin, the normal clinks of a life they had fought to keep.

“I hate them,” she said, and it was naked and ugly and true. “I hate that I can still taste ash. I hate that when I close my eyes, I see her lying on the floor and I see a red flag.”

Sokka’s face went soft in a way it only did for her. He came closer this time and reached for her hand slowly, giving her time to refuse. She didn’t. His fingers were warm and steady, callused from a different life. “I know,” he said. “I hate them too. And I hate that hating them hasn’t fed a single hungry mouth.”

Tears burned, hot and humiliating. She blinked them back and one escaped anyway, cutting a line down her cheek. She wiped it away, angry with herself for letting him see.

He squeezed her hand. “You don’t owe them forgiveness. You don’t owe them comfort. You owe the world the best of you if you have it to give. If you don’t, you say so, and I walk back into the cold and I tell a room full of men with medals that the answer is no.”

She stared at the letter again, then slid it toward her and back, like a tide inching forward and retreating. “If I go,” she said, voice barely above a whisper, “I go for the sick. I go for the fields. I go for the girl who won’t have to hold her brother’s hand and watch a door open to soldiers. I will not go for their honor. I will not go for his crown.”

“Good,” Sokka said, relief and grief tangled. “That’s the only way I want you to go.”

She nodded once, small and sharp, then pulled the letter closer and left it unopened. It felt like a brand against her skin anyway. The decision settled in her belly like a stone. It hurt. It steadied. She would carry both.

Night leaned heavy over the village, a low hush under a sky cut clean with stars. Katara walked past the last ring of tents, down the narrow path blazed by years of footsteps to the burial grounds. The wind had a blade in it this far from the fires. Snow crusted and squeaked under her boots, a steady beat to match the tight pound in her chest.

Her mother’s grave sat at the edge, where the land fell away into a hard white plain. The marker was simple and weathered, the letters smoothed by salt and time. She knelt and brushed the snow from the engraved name with bare fingers until her skin stung. The cold bit bone-deep. It felt close to honest.

“Hi, Mom,” she said, and the sound went nowhere, swallowed by dark. “I don’t know how to do this without being angry.”

The old grief was not a wave anymore. It was a cold weight that never thawed, changing the way she moved and breathed. She watched her breath curl into the air and then fade, and wanted to be that—visible and then gone. The wind picked up, lifting loose strands of hair and whispering over stone and scrub like a mouth trying to form a word.

She talked anyway. About the letter she refused to open but could recite in her head. About Sokka’s face when he asked her to do the thing he didn’t want to ask. About the farmers she hadn’t met yet, the children she could picture because she had seen them before in too many villages, the same hunger, the same fever-bright eyes. It felt like laying out pieces of her heart one at a time on the snow.

“I don’t forgive them,” she told the name. “I still can’t say Fire Nation without my throat burning. The palace smells like smoke even when I’m not in it. The first time I walked into their halls, it felt like walking into a belly.”

Her hands had gone numb. She flexed them, rubbed them together, then set them flat over the packed snow above her mother’s body. Her bending hummed low under her skin, the call and answer of water in air and ice. She drew a thread of it into her palms and let it warm her just enough to feel.

“If I go,” she said, and the word hung in the night like a drop of water clinging before it fell, “it won’t be for him. It won’t be for the crest over his throne. It will be for a boy with a cough that won’t break, a woman with cracked hands and no clean water, a field that could feed a village if it breathes again. It will be for the person who puts a bowl down and looks at the bottom because there’s nothing left to scrape. It will be for the girl who thinks she has to be made of iron to survive.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead to the cold stone, letting the ache have her for a long, quiet minute. The earth here held the memory of salt tears, of laughter before the war, of small hands learning to braid. When she pulled back, the skin of her brow burned.

“What would you do,” she whispered. “If the people who took everything asked for help to save someone who had nothing to do with it.”

Silence. Wind. Her heart, steady and sore. She knew the answer already. It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t surrender. It was a choice to put her skill where it would matter most and take the cost into her own body.

She stayed until the north sky paled toward a thin gray, until her knees ached from the cold through her furs. She rose stiffly and touched the stone one last time. “I’ll go,” she said to the grave and to herself. “Not for him. For the sick. For the ones who don’t get to ask.”

Back in the village, morning bled into the snow in pale bands. Smoke climbed from chimneys. Dogs yawned and trotted to their rounds. Gran-Gran sat by the hearth with a carved bone needle, eyes flicking up the moment Katara stepped through the door.

“You walked late,” Gran-Gran said, not a question.

Katara shrugged out of her furs. Her cheeks stung, her fingers burned, and an old steadiness had set in beneath her ribs like a spar. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Gran-Gran nodded once. She threaded the needle through wool and said nothing more. The quiet settled like a blanket.

Sokka emerged, hair sticking up, sleep grit in his eyes. He took one look at her face and straightened. “Well?”

The word landed between them like the heel of a spear into packed earth. Katara watched a line of light find the edge of their father’s cooking pot and slice it into a bright half-moon. She breathed in, slow. The air smelled like tea on the brink of boiling.

“I’ll go,” she said.

Sokka’s shoulders dropped with relief and something like grief. He rubbed his hands over his arms as if redistributing heat. “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. I’ll send the hawk.”

“Not for him,” she added, and her voice didn’t shake. “For the people who will die if I stay.”

He nodded. “I know.”

Her father came in then, cold clinging to him, and stopped. His gaze moved from her face to Sokka’s and back. He didn’t ask. He set down a net and crossed the room to hold her like he had when she was little and fierce and ready to take on men twice her size with nothing but words and a bowl of water. She folded into him and let herself be held. It made the decision more real and more bearable.

When he let her go, Hakoda’s hand stayed on her cheek a moment longer. “You were always going to do what’s right even when it’s hard,” he said. “I hate that the world keeps asking it of you. I’m proud that you keep answering.”

Katara nodded, the compliment landing like a weight and a lift at once. “I need to pack.”

She took her small pouch of Oasis water from its place on the shelf and slid it into her bag first, along with rolls of bandage cloth, herbs she had dried last summer, a thick needle, thread. She paused at a soft blue scarf and tucked it in, an anchor to color in halls veined with red and gold. Her hands were sure. Each object clicked against the next with a familiar purpose. This was what she knew—moving toward pain to change it.

When the hawk took wing from the post with Sokka’s message strapped to its leg, she followed its climb with her eyes until it was a black pin against the pale morning. The wind off the ocean cut clean in her lungs and left them clear.

She stood on the ridge once more before noon, her mother’s grave a dark notch below, the village spread small and stubborn against the cold. The decision sat inside her like a steady current. She didn’t owe the Fire Lord her softness. She didn’t owe his nation her ease. She owed the world what she could do with water and will.

“I’ll come back,” she said into the wind, to the graves and the houses and to herself. “And I’ll still be me.”

The hawk was gone. The horizon held. She turned and walked down toward the pier where a black ship would anchor in two days, feeling the weight settle in her bones—not crushing now, just the consequence of carrying what she was built to carry.