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Marriage stories in the Fire Nation focus on the beauty of the bride, but this is a discreet distraction.
In truth, for five hundred years, marriages have political occasions: families manoeuvring for influence, seeing who will inherit what power and positions. Fertile daughters, firebending sons, talent, taste, accomplishment: the hoops they all jump through in their personal lives to ensure their acceptability for promotion.
When it comes to love and bloodlines, they forge alliances, linking up lines of wealth. A woman, it is said, looks beautiful in gold. A man is more handsome with land.
There are many, many affairs in the Fire Nation, and the agony of forbidden love echoes through their greatest tragedies: the Sun-queen, who loved her king and his lieutenant, and who brought a golden dynasty crumbling down. The oni who longed for a mortal girl, leaving flowers on her window, but when she hung them in her room it was a charm against spirits, and he visited her until it killed him.
The prince whose father forbade him to marry outside the tribe, and the girl who left her people to live with him in secret amongst the dragons.
If Fire Nation love stories have a happy ending, they always have a sacrifice.
*
Marriage traditions in the Water Tribe vary between the North and the South.
In the North Pole, a man must prove his strength and skill. He must win his wife from her father and her brothers.
There are many angry women in the North.
In the South Pole, there is a saying. Life is a voyage, and there are always storms.
A hundred years of war and the erasure of their population has eroded their rituals to something very simple. The stealing, everyone agrees, is what matters most.
Anyone who wants to prove they are an adult must steal a ship, sail it away, and survive for at least one day and one night on their own wits, alone. They are permitted to take only what they can carry with them.
Anyone who wants to build a hearth and live with someone else – whether they are brothers, lovers, friends, family, or intent on marriage – must steal a ship and survive for a week with the person they want to live with. In the long run, the elders agree, it leads to stronger ties within the tribe.
Sokka and Suki were tired and bruised when they returned, somewhere between furious at each other and joined at the hip.
When Zuko asks Katara to marry him, it is for love. But it’s also an alliance that shows the world that the war is truly over, and everyone wants to get in on the fun.
Everyone also wants them to observe every single tradition that the Fire Nation and Water Tribe have ever thought up for marriages, “to honour each others’ cultures and encourage a new era of harmony and understanding”.
It sounds reasonable until Iroh and Hakoda start handing them helpful transcriptions of ancient ethnographic texts.
“You must show,” Iroh says to his nephew, “that the Fire Nation respects the cultures of the other nations. It is a strong message to send after the ideologies of the war.” He passes him a book written on otterseal vellum and bound in the leather that comes, he has been told, from the mighty caribear, it is a treasure of the Southern Water Tribe, where scrolls fall apart after a few winters.
“That makes sense,” Zuko nods, opening the first page.
“And you, Katara,” Hakoda says to his daughter, “are being honoured by Chief Arnook. He will adopt you as his heir, so that the blessings of all the Water Tribe are shown to be on this marriage.”
Katara is taken aback. Their sister-tribe has always been embarrassed about the decimation of the South during the war, and the decay of the millennia of culture when there were so few people to carry on. They try to pretend that, of the two tribes, they are the true civilisation. “That’s… very kind.”
“You are a symbol of our future,” her father says. “You must learn the rituals and perform them well, so that nobody can cast doubt on this alliance.” He looks from Zuko to Katara, his fine-boned face stern.
“Dad,” Katara folds her arms. “We’re getting married because we want to.”
“I know,” he says. “And marriage for love is a fine tradition of the South. But you’re sending the world a signal with everything you do, and people will be watching.”
Zuko sighs. “It’s true. The Fire Nation court and all of the ambassadors will be eyeing us like hawks for the first sign of a misstep. We’re going to need,” he sighs again, more heavily, “to have public cultural events.”
Iroh’s nodding, sagely. “Make sure there’s plenty of tea,” he says. “Now, Katara, come with me. I will take you to the Fire Sages’ library, and you can begin reading about what you will be expected to know.”
He whisks her out of the room, leaving Zuko alone with his fiancée’s father. They look at each other for a moment.
“Please tell me that we need to go on a culturally sensitive hunt of some kind,” Zuko says. “I’m supposed to be reviewing evidence of embezzlement in my father’s government and I want to burn the palace to the ground.”
Hakoda grins.
The Chief of the Southern Water Tribe and the Fire Lord are not seen again for some time, and there are some fresh deerfalo steaks delivered anonymously to the kitchen for supper.
So far, Zuko thinks, so good.
*
“We are not picking a fire orchid from the lip of Mount Kwaon at dawn,” Katara says, flinging a gold-patterned scroll down onto Zuko’s desk.
Zuko looks up from his summary of Whale Tale Island’s taxation reports for the last ten years. “What?”
“Mount Kwaon is five hundred miles from the western coast of the Fire Nation,” she says, impatiently. “It’s practically part of the Southern Air Temple.”
“My advisors won’t like it,” he says, dubiously. “But I suppose it would mean I have to be away from the palace for a long time…”
“I don’t care,” Katara folds her arms. “It’s ridiculous. And we’re not going to fill one golden cup with the waters from the hot springs on Ember Island and drink it at sunset with our hands bound in red silk.”
“That’s one of the most sacred symbols of Fire Nation marriage,” he protests, standing. “I thought we could take a few days, go and stay at my house – ”
Katara pinches the bridge of her nose, looking pained. “It does sound nice,” she admits, “but if we have to go through every little ritual of your people and both the Northern and Southern Water Tribes, it’ll take ten years! We’ll never get married at all!”
He nods, realising that there’s space to negotiate here. He moves to sit on the low day-bed, relieved when she falls in beside him. “So… no anointing each other in the spirit water from the North Pole on the night of the full moon closest to the winter solstice?”
Katara laughs. “I think that’s just one from an old story. Besides, it’s springtime! If you want to wait until next year…”
“Absolutely not,” he smiles. “Okay, so… no Mount Kwaon, no spirit water… can we avoid searching for ambergris to bless our union in the North?” he’s relieved when she nods, because he knows how important ambergris is to the perfume industry but honestly, the concept of going looking for whale vomit is disgusting and frankly it’s a wishful notion that they’ll find any before they’re thirty. There’s a reason it’s so valuable, after all.
“Yeah, that seems chancy at best,” Katara says, settling back against the cushions and closing her eyes.
“And no hunting elkseals and building a tent out of their skins to prove we can survive the worst that marriage has to offer?”
Katara shrugs, awkwardly. “That’s what we believe makes a couple fertile,” she sighs. “It’s a spiritual metaphor for childbirth… I’m worried that people will say that you’re showing the world that you don’t want children with me.”
Zuko rubs his eyes. “Okay. We hunt elkseals.”
And it goes on, through the books and the scrolls, the legends and the little superstitions.
“The strip of ribbon binding our hands?”
“That’s during the ceremony, it won’t take long. We should probably have red and blue, though.”
“And green and yellow, let’s go all the way.”
Katara smiles at him, delighted. “That’s nice. A marriage for the whole world.”
“If we managed to jump through all the world’s hoops.” Zuko picks up a map, scrutinising it for a minute. “If you’re worried about time, why are we spending a week stealing a boat and sailing it around the South Pole?”
She backs up as if she’s been slapped. “How can you say that?”
Zuko startles at her tone. “What? It’s a whole week, Katara, and you’re the one who’s concerned about how long it will all take!”
She flings herself to her feet. “That’s the most sacred ritual of my people,” she snaps, “The one that proves you’re an adult! Our marriage won’t be valid without that! We’re doing that one first!”
And so he agrees, and a date is set.
They sail to the South with as much ceremony as he can muster, but his bride-to-be is still not appeased.
“I can’t believe you wanted to skip the stealing,” she says, again, as they sit in the long, intricate construction of ice that Katara and Pakku raised as a town hall when they returned to rebuild the South at the end of the war.
All around them, the shouts and cries of the Water Tribe at banquet fill the columns and arches of the blue-white hall.
“I can’t believe you’re making me wear blue furs,” Zuko grouses, tugging at his parka again. “I look sickly. At least you look good in red.”
But he slices her the best cut of the swordfish, as is traditional, and he gives her extra because he knows it’s secretly her favourite, and she quietly swaps his stewed sea prunes for the lobster that she knows he much prefers.
Hakoda and Iroh glance over their heads, and nod – and try hard not to smile.
*
It is dark in the compound, two hours before dawn, and most of the celebrators are fast asleep – or in the banquet hall, still drinking.
He stumbles, and a pile of snow rises up to catch him. “You’re the Blue Spirit,” Katara hisses, as they inch towards the harbour. “Aren’t you meant to be stealthier than this? Also, you’re an hour late!”
“Sealskin boots are hard to sneak in,” he mutters back, as they move around the house. “And Sokka waylaid me with absinthe.”
“You woke him up?” Katara squeezes her eyes shut. “Nobody’s meant to know! Some start to a stealing this is.”
“It was fine,” Zuko said, “I convinced him that if I was drinking with him I wasn’t going to steal a boat tonight. Eventually he fell asleep,” he shrugs, as casually as he can, and hopes she never knows that he actually sent Sokka to sleep by singing Leaves on the Vine.
Katara just shakes her head. “Infiltrating Fire Nation territory was easier than this,” she mutters, making her way forward through the shadows between the houses.
Zuko looks at the moonlight glaring off the snow, and blinks. The absinthe is doing something to his insides. “I swear breaking into the North Pole was easier than this.”
She glares at him. “Are you saying that you’d rather be alone?”
He holds his tongue.
They make it to the boats.
“This one has a fishing pole!”
“This one has a better knife!”
“We can cut things with bending, we need a fishing pole to eat!”
Katara’s glare is like the sun on the ice. “My culture,” she says, “my choice.”
Zuko holds up his hands, and climbs in where he’s pointed – and leans over to snag the fishing pole from the other boat.
“Contents of one boat, Zuko!” Katara sighs, but before he can put it back, she raises her arms and bends them out into the bay.
He swallows a yelp as freezing seawater slops over the side.
Across the harbour, on the balcony of the hall, Iroh and Hakoda watch the little ship leave. Silvery ripples fan out behind them as they slip out onto the silver-etched sea.
“Thank goodness,” Iroh sighs, and toasts them with his sake.
Hakoda fervently agrees.
*
That first night, she’s still annoyed with him for waking up her brother and for breaking the rules of the stealing. As they’re hauling the boat up onto a spur of land two miles from the city, Katara pulls a bundle of blankets from the deck and goes to lie down alone, muttering about honour. It’s almost dawn.
When Zuko wakes up, the sun high over his head, he’s iced into his sleeping bag.
“Katara!” he says, aching, hungover, and well aware that he can’t just heat his body up without risking burning the animal skins he’s wrapped in. “Did you do this?”
“How dare you!” she yells, and then she’s bending a pile of snow onto him. “No, I didn’t, but this is what you get for asking!”
She storms off. Eventually he gets his hands free, and melts his way out.
His sleeping bag is still damp hours later, and she still isn’t talking to him when she returns with fish and begins, expertly, to gut them. The purloined fishing pole, Zuko notes, is still poking over the edge of the boat.
She offers him a fish, though, and says, “I still love you. Even if you’re a jerk.”
It burns his tongue, but it’s delicious. “Thank you,” he says, “I love you too,” and she smiles despite herself.
*
The second night, still with an awkward, annoyed silence between them, they settle down to sleep about three feet apart. Zuko stares, for a long time, at the way the sky is almost black, and the bewildering beauty of the stars, and wonders what on earth his admirals and generals would think of him sleeping on the snow.
After a while, he realises that Katara’s shivering, and that she’s too proud to tell him. He knows that she thinks that would be like giving in, and he adores her more than anything else in the world.
He sneaks up behind her and wraps his arms around her. She shrieks – and then rests back against him. “Ooh, you’re so warm,” she coos, and then she kicks her sleeping bag over towards his.
They lie down, together, and that’s a thrill in itself, to feel the length of her pressed up against him – something they’ve assiduously been avoiding because of all the eyes on them.
She snuggles into him, and even though she’s infuriating, he loves her so much that it feels like his chest is expanding. “This is nice,” she says, and he hums into her hair. After a few minutes, she says, “I’m sorry I was a jerk.”
“You probably learned it from me,” he quips, and she laughs.
“You’re too nice to me.”
“No, I’m not nice enough,” he says, ruefully, remembering how he’d lost his temper. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you.”
She lifts her head, blushing. “I didn’t bend ice onto you… but I did bend it off myself. That was mean.”
He laughs, and laughs, and then leans forward and kisses her. “You’re going to make a wonderful Fire Lady.” She looks astonished, and then extremely pleased.
She icebends an igloo around them, closing in the fire, and then she says, “Help me with these laces, please.”
The second night is much, much better than the first.
*
She’s a waterbender. When they travel, the little ship skims across the surface of the sea, eating up the miles, and they have ice houses to sleep in every night.
He’s a firebender. He lights their way when the fogs descend, keeps them warm when they sleep, and fries the fish she catches in his hands.
They hunt a caribear on the southern tundra, slick, silent, deadly. It’s not an elkseal, but they’re only found in the North; it will do. As they skin it, Zuko dries it, gently, running it through his hands. Katara slices the meat with daggers of ice.
They build a tent, and stay in it, and much prefer their igloo, whispering for a long time in their blankets as the stars sparkle overhead.
One night in the caribear-skin tent is enough, Katara decides. It’s her culture: she can change it if she wants to.
On the fourth morning, she slices the caribear skin into smaller squares. They catch as much fish as they can, and carve up the caribear into steaks. They chuckle like children when they discuss just what they’re going to do. Katara packs the fish and meat into the caribear skins, and tamps them down with snow.
Zuko kisses her there on the ice and feels the thrill of adventure rising in his chest.
They navigate by the sun and the stars, seeing how far and how fast they can go, east and mostly north. After two days of nothing but the flat blue ocean, Zuko sights a smudge on the horizon, and whoops.
“Land!” he sweeps her up into his arms.
They’re both exhausted – there isn’t much sleep to be had in a shallow-water fishing ship out on the deep ocean – but they grin at each other.
Nothing compares to the elation of landing on Mount Kwaon, of the leisurely climb to the top.
They stand there, surrounded by fire orchids. The breeze of the beautiful spring evening is chilly, so he wraps his arms around her.
“I’m going to pick a whole bunch,” Katara says, smiling up at him.
“I picked you,” he says, and it’s ridiculously romantic and he should be sickened by his own sweetness, but she just giggles, and kisses him, and everything is all right.
*
It takes them another three days to reach Ember Island. They’re out of caribear, but they stumbled across a feeding frenzy of sharks and sardines and between them they managed an excellent haul.
When they pull up on the sandy beach and splash into the warm sea, Katara sighs. “I’m so sick of fish, I could even eat a papaya,” she says, dreamily, staring up into the clifftop town. “Did you bring any money?”
Zuko gathers her up and says, “I have a house here. Let me make you lunch.”
They spend the day bathing, eating, and laughing, wandering the halls of the place they stayed when they were hiding from his father. She washes the salt and grime from her hair; he scrapes the last of the caribear’s meat juices from his arms and hands.
As they dress, he retrieves something from his blue Water Tribe outfit, and takes it with him when he collects new clothes from the wardrobes in his room.
He has carried a strip of scarlet silk the whole way, tucked against his breast.
They stand on the cliffs while the sun is slipping under the sea, and drink from a goblet they grabbed from Zuko’s house, and pledge that their love will always be an adventure.
When they drink from the same cup, he ties the silk around their hands, and they stand there, together, until dark.
Then they go down to the harbour and reveal themselves. Zuko orders his fastest ship to take a note to the South Pole, and then immediately return with passengers.
“At once, Fire Lord,” says the captain. “Do you need me to send men to bring up your… skiff?”
He recoils from Zuko’s glare. “Nobody is to touch that boat,” he says, “excepting the Lady Katara and myself. And no, we will not be travelling with you this time.”
A midshipman runs up with a parchment and brush, and bows. Zuko takes the parchment and scrawls, Have been unavoidably detained by the world. Come back to the Fire Nation on this ship. We’ll see you for the ceremony.
He remembers to add, because Katara asked, And tell Chief Arnook to bring spirit water.
Fire Nation soldiers watch, bemused, as the Fire Lord and their future Fire Lady climb back into a tiny, battered boat and race them out of the harbour.
The fastest ship in the fleet lags like a tired horse behind the wave that rises high behind Zuko and Katara.
“Water Tribe customs,” the captain says firmly. “Very ancient and sacred.”
His men nod, and turn south while the fishing boat swings around to the north. The flare of light that rises into the sky is the farewell from their Fire Lord. They follow his orders, even when they’d rather follow him out of curiosity.
A mile or so away, across the surface of the ocean, Zuko turns back to Katara. “What next?”
“We were supposed to get married twice,” she says, “on the ice and under the sun.”
Zuko shrugs. “Your customs, your choice.”
She raises an eyebrow. “I think everyone we know gathered in the Palace City will be enough for me.”
So they go north, back to the Fire Nation.
They find ambergris on Whale Tale Island, and decide to give it to Arnook as a gift. It’ll make a lot of perfume, and also suggest to the Northern Tribe that this marriage will be blessed indeed.
After two weeks wandering the world, Zuko and Katara know that, too.
*
Two weeks later, Chiefs Hakoda and Arnook accompany the Water Tribe bride into the enormous hall.
A thousand people hold their breath as she appears in the doorway.
Katara wears a sapphire silk dress wrapped around her with decorative silver chains, and a pale blue cloak, trimmed with white fur, that was a gift from the North. It would have been Yue’s. There are flowers from Mount Kwaon on in her hair.
She is followed by Toph and a fleet of Kyoshi Warriors, each holding one golden and one silver fan, painted with the symbols of the sun and moon.
Prince Iroh of the Fire Nation stands with his nephew, the Fire Lord, who wears his full ceremonial dress robes and an awed expression. Iroh is holding Katara’s newly-minted crown.
Sokka and Aang are waiting on the dais, either side of Katara’s grandmother, and beaming so brightly it looks like they might burst.
There are, in fact, five parts to the ceremony, which is a wedding and a coronation.
Katara joins Zuko in the centre of the hall with their many celebrants, and Toph raises the platform into the air. As one, the thousand guests stand and chant the ritual purification of the air and the heart that is the traditional start to marriages all over the world.
Kanna begins the cycle of elements, speaking for the Water Tribe. That is a symbol in itself, because love-matches of the South are always the choice of the women. She conducts the sparse ceremony with a shimmer of tears in her eyes.
“Life is a voyage,” she says, “and you are trusting your lives to each other.” She places Katara’s hand in Zuko’s, and weaves a long strip of shining blue silk around their hands and arms.
The Earth King steps forward to pronounce the traditional blessings for greenness and growth, a love as solid as the rocks – corrected, on occasion, by Bumi, who complains that the speeches in Omashu are shorter. Hiding their smiles, Zuko and Katara offer their wrists to Kuei, and he binds them with a ribbon of green.
The Fire Sages conduct the ceremony that Zuko knows inside and out, and their wrists are wrapped again in a strip of crimson. And then Aang steps forward.
“You will wander the world together,” he says, “and you must always stay true to your souls.” He makes quick work of the yellow ribbon, his hands resting for a moment on theirs. “Congratulations.”
And then Zuko and Katara kneel. The Fire Lady, the last waterbender of the Southern Tribe, is crowned by the Avatar she found in the ice, and with whom they saved the world.
*
Later, when a thousand guests are fed and drunk and still roaring with the energy of a wedding that encompassed the world, two dark figures slip out of the palace and run down to the harbour.
By the light of his fire (and he is a Prince of the Water Tribe now, too), they uncover the boat that was hidden under the grand dock, and they slip out onto the moonlit ocean with all the speed a master waterbender, a just-married wife, a brand new Fire Lady can muster.
*
Zuko has the fishing ship lifted from the ocean, waxed by hand, and hung from the rafters of their improbably large drawing-room.
Katara dries the fire lilies, gently, and weaves them into a garland. She hangs them, with a strip of red silk, on the wall above their marriage bed.
They paint a map of the world on the ceiling, and each time they disappear together, never long enough for their Nations to miss them too much, new verses are added to the ballads that have been written about them.
Sacrifices lead to happy endings, after all.
Theirs is the story that the new generation will tell.