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No one is quite certain how he survived – least of all Zhao himself.
One minute he’s leading an assault on the Spirit Oasis, and then the next thing he knows he’s laying facedown on a frosty shore of shale and snow, every inch of him coated with icicles. He drifts in and out of consciousness like a piece of flotsam in his own brain, coughing up vaguely salty water, shivering to the point of painful convulsion. The susurration of the tide matches the wet rasping of his lungs, the struggling pulse of blood in his ears, and for a myriad moments Zhao closes his eyes, convinced that the darkness waiting on the other side will be permanent.
He’s too cold, too tired, to really be as terrified of that as he ought to be. Strangely, he’s not even angry. It’s almost as if death is a permission of sorts.
But then he is discovered by a group of hunters, is hauled back to the walled city of Agna Quel’a like a tiger-seal carcass, and any chance of extended rest is lost to him.
Chief Arnook and the council of elders and petty chiefs deliberate long into the night about what should be done with their captured foe. The possibility of keeping him as a potential bargaining chip is brought up, but quickly dismissed. What is one admiral – one failed admiral – to the Fire Nation, after all? Holding him hostage hardly seems like a guarantee against retaliation, besides which, there isn’t anything the Fire Nation has that the Northern Water Tribe wants. They have lived behind their walls of ice and snow for centuries, undisturbed, and even with the Hundred Year War have dwelt in relative security and comfort. They do not need him, much less want him for anything.
That said, the Northern Water Tribe is not a wasteful people. Everything serves a purpose.
The men decide that Zhao’s purpose is to be made a sacrifice.
So he is taken, bedraggled and still half-frozen, back to the place of his apparent annihilation. The manacles at his wrists freeze and burn, catching the thin skin beneath his palms and peeling it with every jostle and jolt. He tries to focus himself, summon his inner flame and direct his chi into something external and hot, something useful, but he can’t. Maybe it’s the cold, the way his muscles are so taut from shivering that they ache. Maybe it’s the fact his arms are bound as tightly as they are – though his legs are free – or maybe the leaden weight of his defeat is bondage enough. He cannot face another failure, and any attempt to flee is certain to be just that.
It must be the shame, then, that keeps him from fighting back when the petty chiefs and the council of elders beat him.
First he is struck behind the knees, legs buckling beneath him, the next blow cracking across his temple. Zhao sways even as he kneels, blinking away the eruption of sparks in his vision, the stinging heat that blossoms across his face an almost welcome respite from the cold.
Fists and feet and even the butt-end of a spear continue the assault, all righteous rage and retribution. These are the men who govern the whole of the North Pole, their will is law, and their people are owed just as much as the spirits. Decades of antagonism, of terrorizing their sister tribe in the South, of genocide. They extract Zhao’s debt from him in battered flesh and blood, his body the only tribute they have to their people’s suffering. After all, Tui and La won’t mind the bruises. It’s not what’s held together by his skin that the spirits will seek to punish.
Chief Arnook grips Zhao by the back of his neck and drags him forward, thrusting his face down mere inches above the dark water of the Spirit Oasis, the position reminiscent of punishing a reindeer-dog pup for defecating indoors.
“Tell me, admiral,” the chief’s voice is deep and charged with disgust, “how many men have you seen drown while at sea? I’ve heard it’s an end your people try to avoid at all cost.”
Zhao’s lips are parted – swollen, split – but he does not answer. Just drools and bleeds into the sacred pool, staring at his own mangled reflection in the ripples. Some distant part of him acknowledges the fact that the great Chief himself is taking responsibility for this, is dirtying his hands with the details and not just the honour of dispatching an enemy. It’s a realization that offers no comfort, but he respects it all the same.
Arnook presses insistently against Zhao’s neck, glowering down at him, and then Zhao can feel the cool of the spirit water, his hooked nose dipping in –
“Father!”
A girl’s voice rings out, startlingly loud, echoing up the icy walls of the oasis. Arnook’s fingers tighten with bruising strength against the chorded muscles of Zhao’s neck.
“Yue!” the Chief hisses at her in consternation. “Go back to bed, child! This is no place for you!”
“Please,” she beseeches him, “stop this.”
“We cannot, princess,” replies one of the elders gravely, perhaps with a little too much satisfaction to be resigned. “It is the will of the spirits that this ashmaker be surrendered unto them, as penance for his desecration of this sacred place.”
The girl is incredulous when she answers, and though he is literally scant inches from death, Zhao finds himself wondering why she sounds so utterly betrayed.
“How can you even say such a thing? Father, look at him! How is this any less of a desecration of the oasis? You’re getting blood everywhere. Our spirits are balance incarnate, this is supposed to be a place of healing, of peace. What do the spirits want with a human life? How is death anything you could think they would want?”
“It is what is owed, daughter.”
“No.” The princess’s voice does not waver, takes on a tone of finality that would be laughable were she a few years younger. As it is, on the cusp of womanhood, imbued with an authority that Zhao does not fully comprehend, Yue is positively fierce.
“I cannot allow this. I will not.”
Arnook releases his clawed grip from Zhao’s neck and, for a moment, the admiral knows a thrill of apprehension. Not for himself, but for the girl – foolish thing – defying her father like that. He’s seen what happens to royal children when they disregard the will of their parents, when they display such utter, reckless obstinance.
And for what, he wonders. What possible reason could Arnook’s daughter have for trying to spare his life?
Silence falls over the Spirit Oasis, reverent and appalled all at once.
The Chief levels his daughter with a hard, searching gaze over the prone body of their captive. He has no idea how she’d come to hear of their decision, how she had been able to make her way to the Spirit Oasis in time. It’s almost as though she was told, as though something had driven her there with purpose.
“You’re convinced of this, are you, Yue?” he asks gently, seeking her understanding as much as her certainty. “You would deny the Tribe their satisfaction?”
“That’s not what this is, father.”
He nods his head grimly, and then his hand is once again at Zhao’s neck, hauling the other man across the grass and practically throwing him at the girl’s feet. The admiral knocks his head hard against the ground when he lands, sending jolts of pain that he can feel even in his teeth. Delirious, eyes streaming, nose and mouth and forehead bloody, he looks up.
Princess Yue stands above him, silhouetted in diaphanous silver, and since he is belly-down in the grass he can see that she is barefoot. A foreign strain of bewilderment stirs in his gut at the sight of her naked toes – Where are your boots, girl? he wants to ask, Don’t you know it’s cold out? – but he cannot summon any derision at this obvious lack of self-preservation.
Icy blue eyes regard him with a conflicted mixture of revulsion and pity, and Zhao feels something dangerously akin to shame, laying prone before her.
“You know the laws of our people, my child,” Arnook says unhappily into the night, calling Yue’s gaze away from the admiral, and Zhao feels air flood his lungs. “If you would claim responsibility for this man, you must do so wholly.”
The girl nods. Then she reaches down to Zhao, extending a slender hand.
“Can you walk, admiral?”
What this means, ultimately, is that he becomes a pet as much as a prisoner. The princess keeps him on a leash – literally, his neck encircled by an iron collar attached to a chain – and he is dragged along behind her when he isn’t sequestered away in a cell that has been laboriously carved into their permafrost. He suspects she does this so that he may see sunlight, which is kind of her, but comes with its own price.
His new purpose is to serve her and the Tribe, not as a sacrifice to their spirits, but as a creature of labour.
His excursions above ground involve shoveling snow, carrying and moving heavy items from the ships and docks, being hooked up to a sledge and hauling its cargo like a reindeer-dog. Though the princess vouches for him by proxy, there is an understandable lack of trust, and so he is kept just cold enough to not be able to bend beyond the necessity of regulating his own body temperature. It’s surprisingly hard work, and in the evenings it is his brain forced into exercise, for the princess visits him with an unending stream of questions.
She’s a curious thing, and seems to come purely for her own interest, rather than as a way to trick him into divulging the secrets of his nation. Much of what she asks is innocuous enough – what do your people eat, are your women also healers, what kind of animals are there in the Fire Nation – but other inquiries are more complicated for him to answer.
Explaining his people’s concept of honour and shame is harrowing, not only because Yue does not fully seem to understand – it is too different, too abstract from the Tribe’s approach to such things – but because with every word that leaves his mouth, Zhao must contend with his own disgrace. Still, as awful as his defeat has been, the all-encompassing humiliation is not enough to drive away desperate thoughts of returning home. He will escape, he tells himself. He’ll find a way.
Unfortunately, falling under the princess’s care does not grant him complete amnesty. Zhao is still regularly subjected to the brutality of the Northern Water Tribe, his body taking the brunt of almost a century’s worth of malcontent against a nation that they cannot reach except through him. It’s quite a leap from how he had once envisioned himself as representative of the Fire Nation – all their might made manifest.
He is kicked, slapped, spit on. Children pelt him with snow dirtied by their animals. Punitive degradations that act as some form of communal catharsis. It’s obvious that the princess is dismayed by this – that she struggles to not intercede every time her people see fit to inflict their personal vendettas upon him – but such is the weight of being his warden. It is the necessary compromise, the give to her take.
Zhao endures it all.
Until one day, no more than a month into his captivity, when he is led out to the pavilion of the Chief’s palace and violated beyond imagining.
At first he assumes Arnook is going to address him formally, perhaps to demand he provide more strategic information to them about the Fire Nation. He wonders if perhaps he can bargain with the man, can negotiate the removal of the collar, or be granted enough warmth to conduct his bending more properly. His scheming mind is already whirring with arguments of how he might be more useful to the Tribe if allowed to practice his fire when he is forced to his knees, and a hand grips his topknot.
Zhao’s entire body is rocked with an explosion of adrenaline, his eyes wide. No one, no one, not even his own mother, has touched his hair in years. It simply isn’t done.
He struggles, all coherent thought erased from his mind as the man wrenches on his scalp. Someone jerks his chain, a boot collides with his stomach once, twice, and then there is the weight of another human on his back, knees on either side of his shoulders. Zhao gasps, his face against the ice, and catches the glint of sunlight on metal just before he feels it cutting through his hair.
“No!” he shouts, desperate, but the man atop him merely grunts and continues to saw through the thick strands of flinty brown. An uncomfortable and unfamiliar sensation takes over his head, a sort of weightlessness, and then with a soft thud, his entire topknot is thrown to the ground before him.
Zhao howls, and finds himself trembling -- in disbelief, in rage, in despair.
For weeks he has been contemplating how he might escape, how he might return home, regardless of his failure in the North. That burning determination, his dirty little secret expertly hidden even from the prying princess, had been what sustained him through the beatings and the mortification of being used as a grunt. Now it lay before him, a sad little bundle he watches get crushed under a Water Tribe boot.
It might only be symbolic, but it’s rather as though they’ve amputated him, cut him off from any chance of returning to his family, his home, denied him his ability to perform his duty to his lord and nation.
When he recovers from the momentary shock, every instance of violence he has absorbed over the past several weeks coalesces into something infinitely uglier. A roar gusts out of him, an accompanying wave of heat erupts from his chest and back, burning the men that had subdued him and causing them to scramble back even as the ice around Zhao begins to melt.
He takes immense satisfaction in their sudden fear, the unexpected and volatile reactionary bending. It’s not healthy, not normal, but under certain circumstances it comes about involuntarily. His is the kind of fury to trigger such immolation – his body heat already rising to dangerous levels of fever – and through the pounding of his blood and the red of his rage, Zhao realizes the Water Tribe know exactly what they’ve done by shearing him.
After all, three days ago the theme of his nightly interrogation with the princess had been hair.
He rises from his knees, the collar around his neck glowing with the emanating heat of his body, yellow eyes sparking as they land on Yue.
“You stupid, treacherous cunt!” he screams at her. “I’m going to grab you by that pretty face and burn your eyes out. And then I’m going to fuck the smoking sockets, one right after the other!”
Yue pales visibly as she takes in his words, and Agni, he wants to taste that fear, so he steps forward, his fists enveloped in flame and smoke rising up from his body, only for a guard to bludgeon him in the back of the head. Wave after wave of freezing water is bended onto him, hot steam wafting up in a thick cloud, until at last they are satisfied and the admiral is suppressed.
The princess’s shoulders drop as he is hauled away, unconscious and sopping. Her father assumes it to be a sign of relief.
Zhao is kept chained in his cell after that. No daylight excursions, no demands upon his strength and dexterity. He snarls and bares his teeth at any of the guards who come to bring him food, more mad animal than man, and for several weeks the princess does not visit him. That suits Zhao just fine.
Her people have taken something from him that was never theirs to take.
He hates them all. Regrets that his fleet failed to slaughter every last one of them.
But most of all he hates the princess for sparing his life and subjecting him to this, thinking it the better course of action. Yue, who struggled to grasp his nation’s concept of honour, cannot possibly know what she’s done to him, even if indirectly. Even if she had no intention of it ever happening.
After a month of the cold and the dark, the hatred dissipates a little, like a last licking flame, clinging to embers. The guards return from their brief trips to his cell and report that he has stopped growling profanities, that he no longer antagonizes them with vile and violent threats. The princess listens to these reports, wonders what it is, exactly, that has dampened the proud and rancorous admiral. She regrets ever telling her father about her visitations, is horrified by what was done with that information even if she cannot fully appreciate it. It’s just hair, after all, she thinks. It will grow back, eventually.
She contemplates the matter for a few days, mulling over the sheer audacity of his threat against her, dismissing it as side-effect of the fever. The Zhao who spent hours explaining the different names of Fire Nation constellations to her would never utter such a thing, would never mean it even if the words were to somehow cross his lips. She misses that man, misses the indulgent and exasperated way he would answer her questions.
After enough thought, she makes her way down to him one evening, bearing a bowl of rich and meaty stew. Poor consolation, perhaps, for what has been done, but Yugoda has reassured her repeatedly that the stomach is the surest way to the heart of a man, and Yue cannot deny that the admiral has always had an incredible appetite. He may be willing to accept her apology with such an offering.
Zhao has his arms resting on his knees when she enters the cell, the position highlighting just how long-limbed he actually is. He’d almost be lanky, were it not for the broadness of his chest and shoulders, the generous mounds of muscle he has cultivated for himself. He raises his head to glower at her, yellow eyes bright in the gloom, but then he looks away.
“I brought you something warm,” she says gently, kneeling down before him and holding out the stew. Zhao keeps his head stubbornly turned away, though Yue can see his nostrils flare when the first wisp of fragrant steam rises up within range.
Obstinate man, Yue thinks. Still, she doesn’t want to push him.
“I’ll come back tomorrow.”
She rises gracefully, leaves him to his morose solitude, tries to shove down the feeling of foreboding that stirs restlessly in her gut. Silence, she decides, is an eerie sound on the admiral.
The stew is a cold, congealed mass in its bowl when she returns the next day. Zhao ignores her as before, and when she leaves one of the guards quietly confesses that the man hasn’t touched his food for several days. That sometimes they hear him pounding his head against the wall of his cell for hours at a time.
Yue frets, paces her room until her feet feel numb. She needs to rectify this, needs to do something. He is her responsibility, and it is not a duty she takes lightly. Her eyes fall on the ulu resting on the top of the chest at the foot of her bed, and again the princess finds herself thinking, it’s just hair.
Late that night – quite possibly early the next morning – Zhao is hauled out from his cell and strapped to a sledge. He trudges and moves slowly, almost stupidly, but is otherwise resignedly cooperative. The sledge driver keeps their hood up, thick fur parka and the dark obscuring any other identifiable features.
The cool wind on Zhao’s cheek is startling and soothing all at once. He gasps in the clean air, bathing in it, taking in the smell of a world he hasn’t seen in almost two months. Not his world, though, not the mountainous expanse of islands he once called home.
With a shrill whistle, the sledge driver coaxes the team of reindeer dogs into a full gallop, and then they are skidding across the ice, out across the open tundra. Zhao finds himself looking up desolately at the stars, recalling his conversation with the princess about the constellations and their various names. He had been surprised to find that he liked some of the Water Tribe’s versions better. Not that it mattered. Not now.
Another whistle, and the reindeer dogs slow, the sledge runners scraping and scratching noisily against the hard crystals of snow as they come to a stop. The driver steps down, begins to untie the bonds holding Zhao in the bed of the sledge. He realizes it is the first time he hasn’t been shackled to something since his capture. Even the collar is gone.
His days have been like that, lately. Whole stretches of time that barely register.
“Is this how your people do it?” he asks the driver, his voice hoarse with disuse. “You bring your unwanted out to die, away from the city?”
His tone is entirely devoid of fear, sounds far too full of hope.
The driver takes a step back from him as though burned, then throws something at him. It lands against his chest with a soft noise, sliding down to his legs like silk.
Zhao looks down at it in confusion for a moment, then his brows rise and comprehension slowly dawns on him. He reaches out with a hesitant hand – what he is about to do would be scandalous under slightly different circumstances – and lifts a skein of silvery white hair from his lap, the braid still held together by a carved bone adornment dyed blue.
The driver lowers her hood, and the princess reveals herself, her hair now choppily cropped just beneath her ears. Abruptly, Zhao gets to his feet, the old urge to acknowledge royalty and salute suddenly surging through him. He works his throat, eyes wide.
“What – ” he almost asks, but then the sky erupts above them, sudden ribbons of dancing light nearly blinding him. A strange noise fills his ears, a tinkling, whooshing sound, like glass come alive and breathing.
Drenched in shifting light – violet, crimson, green, magenta – Yue looks at him with both solemnity and shyness.
“In the South I’m told our sister tribe see the Spirit Lights as the reflection of sky children, playing with a turtleseal shell. We think of them differently in the North.” She tilts her head up, looks at the dazzling display with concern, perhaps even apprehension. “Here we think that they really are spirits, ones that have been trapped in the mortal world and are trying to return home. Sometimes… sometimes those that can’t make it decide they want company, and will snatch up anyone caught outside.”
Zhao drags his eyes away from the lights, brings them to the princess’s face. Belatedly, he realizes his mouth is still hanging open and he closes it.
“Is that what you want, Zhao?” Yue asks him, stern and sad all at once. “To be amongst the spirits? To leave, forever?”
The admiral takes in a deep breath, tries to name the strange twinge he suddenly feels in his chest as he looks again upon the utter wreckage of the princess’s hair, everything about her painted in ever-shifting kaleidoscope. It’s too much, and without warning he sobs, thick tears welling up from tired eyes. He sinks to his knees, still cradling the white bundle of braids in his hands.
“No,” he manages to choke out between gasps and sniffles, “not really.”
Yue drops beside him, holding him by the shoulders.
“Good,” she says soothingly. “I don’t want you to go, either.”