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The land was not beautiful, and nobody pretended it was.
It lay flat under a pale sky — soil that would hold water, soil that would hold seed. Good for work, not much else. Zuko had picked it for that. Standing before the forty-odd men assembled in their loose and weary rows, he hoped they understood the choice.
They had the look of men who had been waiting a long time.
He spoke without the platform his attendants had put up. Small victory.
"The war my father waged was not a just one," he said. "I won't ask you to pretend otherwise, and I won't pretend otherwise myself." The words had seemed right in rehearsal. They still seemed right. "But most of you did not choose the war you were born into. You served because you were called. You bled because they told you it was honorable. And I do not believe a man should be abandoned for the shape of the world he was handed."
He went on — the land grants, the assistance, continued service without penalty for those who wanted it. He had memorized the provisions carefully, so he could say them straight.
He was partway through when he noticed the man near the back.
Arms folded. The man's jaw shifted and he spat into the dirt beside his boot. A few of the men nearby glanced over. One looked back at Zuko.
Zuko's voice caught for less than a second, and then steadied. From the edge of the gathering, Captain Ressik raised an eyebrow — Want me to handle it? Zuko shook his head, and Ressik looked away.
He finished. Some of the applause was warm. Some of it was careful. The man in the back brought his palms together twice and stopped.
Mai was leaning against a supply cart when he found her. A piece of dry grass turned between her fingers.
"Did you see him?" Zuko asked.
"The one spitting. Yes."
He was quiet a moment. "I want to talk to him."
"All right."
"Not to punish him. I want to understand. I want to — there should be dialogue. That's what's different, that's what I'm trying to build, if a man feels that way he should be able to—"
"Zuko."
"What?"
"Are you asking him, or are you summoning him?"
He stopped. The difference mattered. He knew it mattered and he had not, until this moment, sorted out which one he meant. "Asking," he said. "It has to be asking."
"And you want me to go and ask him."
"Is that — should I send Ressik? What's the—" He heard himself and stopped.
She looked at him. She had time. "You haven't thought this through."
"I'm thinking it through."
"Now you are." She dropped the piece of grass. "Tell me what to say."
"That the Fire Lord requests his audience. That it is a request. That he is not in trouble." He paused. "Make sure he understands it's a request."
"There," she said. And she went.
The tent was small. Canvas-and-dirt smell. Dorvak sat across the plain table from Zuko with the particular stillness of a man who has already decided how this ends.
He was perhaps fifty. A scar ran from below his left ear down beneath his collar, long-healed. His right hand rested on the table.
"I'm not here to reprimand you," Zuko said.
"I know." Dorvak's voice was even. "Or I wouldn't have come."
"Then tell me what I'm missing."
The man looked at him — measuring. "Under your father, I was promised four acres in Kuang province. A pension. A third-class title of service." He did not gesture to his hand, his scar. "I was at Whaletail. You know what that was."
"Yes."
"Then you know what I gave." He said it without self-pity. "Now you stand out there and tell me the war was wrong, and offer me flat dirt in a province I've never heard of. So I'm trying to understand which one I'm living in. If the war was wrong, there's no debt to pay — we get nothing. If we served and we're owed, then where is what we're owed?" He paused. "You can't hold both at once. It isn't honest."
"It isn't simple," Zuko said.
"Most true things aren't." Dorvak rubbed his thumb along the edge of the table. "But you have to come down on one side or the other. Eventually."
Zuko thought of the things he might say — that the promises had been made in the service of an empire that had destroyed a nation, that there was a difference between honoring a soldier and honoring a war. He had said all of these things before, in other rooms, and believed each of them. They did not add up to an answer for what Dorvak was actually asking.
"I don't have a clean answer," he said.
Dorvak nodded. He pushed back from the table, stood, and pulled his coat from the back of the chair. His eyes went to Zuko, held there a moment, then dropped.
"You're not like him," he said. "I believe that."
He lifted the tent flap.
"The Fire Nation is lesser for it."
The canvas fell back. Outside, someone was loading a cart.
The gathering had scattered. Wheels on packed dirt, a few low voices carrying, a crow somewhere off past the tree line.
He did not think Dorvak was entirely wrong.
He walked back out into the field, where the soil was dark and waiting.