The camp was still ahead when Kirsa asked the first question.
The other riders had spread to their natural intervals on the return, Bayan at the outer edge, eyes on the open steppe beyond the gate, the remaining in loose formation ahead.
The frost still stood on the grass in the places the sun hadn’t reached. The cold sat in the open air with no wind to move it. Two horses side by side on the flat winter steppe, moving at an easy pace, the eastern channel behind them and everything else ahead.
They had not spoken since Batu nad him mingan commander. The silence had the texture of completed work. The kind that did not need filling.
Then Kirsa asked.
"Why did you trust as much as you did."
He asked it flatly, with no angle behind it. Batu had learned this about him early. Kirsa never asked for sothing he did not actually want.
He had no use for ceremony. He was asking because the honest answer mattered to him and because he understood Batu was the only person who would give it.
Batu looked at the ground ahead of his horse’s ears.
He thought about it in the order the evidence had arrived. Kirsa at Sarat, reading the southeast angle of the encirclent and finding the gap before anyone else did. Kirsa at the northern fence, offering to surrender the na and keep the cohesion, which was the correct analysis.
Kirsa in the long weeks of raiding and screening and movent, his riders going where they were sent without requiring explanation, functioning in the formation as a unit that had learned itself.
And at the duel, at the secondary channel, Kirsa trying to close the gap when Berke’s rider brought the horse, the gap not closeable in ti, Kirsa living with that.
"You had knowledge of the western steppe that the formation needed," Batu said. "Your n held together as a unit that knew itself. You made the right offer at the northern fence."
He kept his eyes on the horizon. "You were correct that scattering them would cost more than it gained. That analysis was right before I confird it."
Kirsa said nothing for a mont. He rode with his hands easy on the reins. His eyes were on the middle distance.
"I knew the answer," he said.
"Yes."
"I wanted to hear you say it."
A pause opened between them. The horses moved through it without changing pace. Sowhere to the north a hawk was working a slow arc against the flat sky, a dark blur against pale gray, before it dropped below the treeline and was gone.
The frost on the near grass was beginning to soften where the low sun found it, the stalks easing fractionally from their overnight stiffness.
Batu had thought about Kirsa before, in the margins of larger problems, because Kirsa was the kind of man who appeared in margins and then occupied the center of things. A captured commander who had told him he was wrong on the day he lost.
Who had paid attention to function while everyone around him watched for defiance. Who had given his n a future at the cost of the only thing their fathers had left them.
He had never fully nad to himself what Kirsa was.
"What are you building toward," Kirsa said. "What’s the end of it. Your dream."
The question landed differently from the first. Batu felt it land. He did not reach for an answer imdiately because he did not have one ready.
And the reason he did not have one ready was worth sitting with for a mont.
The horses kept moving.
He had the long objective. He had always had it. Split the empire, hold the west, keep the march going when Karakorum called the armies ho.
He could see the future of it from where he stood. He had been working toward it since the bodies were still on his tent floor and Khulgen’s boots were scraping the ground outside. In that sense it was sothing he was moving toward.
Dream was the wrong word. What he was doing ran on what he knew to be true and on what followed from acting on that knowledge.
The empire would divide. The west needed a structure that did not depend on a single man dying in the right order in Karakorum. That was reading the situation.
"Conviction," Batu said at last. "Principles. I live by them."
He looked at the open steppe ahead. "I have a prediction for the empire. I also have a plan to deal with this prediction. I’m producing that through action."
Kirsa said nothing for a mont. He was taking it in without comntary, assembling what he’d heard.
"That’s not a dream," he said.
"No," Batu said.
Another pause.
"What’s yours," Batu said.
Kirsa looked at the horizon for a long ti. The open ground ran north. The cold air ca against their faces at the pace of the horses.
"My n spent two generations carrying sothing their fathers handed them," he said at last. "The na. The grievance. The story of what Genghis took from the rkid line. What was ours and isn’t now."
He kept his eyes forward. His voice stayed level. "My father carried it. I took it from him. I built a coalition on it and rode it into a ridge and found out how much it was worth."
A pause.
"It was worth thirty-one of your dead."
A figure that had been tallied and could not be changed.
"An inheritance like that is for carrying. Carry it until it wears you down or you set it down. My n’s fathers gave them the na and the story instead of land or position or a future that belonged to them."
Kirsa exhaled, "I want them to be sowhere they can build from the ground up. Their own work. Their own ground. Their own direction. Sothing they made. That’s what I want for them."
Batu looked at him.
He registered it and said nothing.
"Conviction, then," Kirsa said. He said it without apology.
"No," Batu said. "It isn’t."
They rode.
The frost was gone from the grass where the sun had found it. The lower river would co up ahead shortly, the eastern approach, the ice at the margins.
Behind them the eastern channel ran south with its flood line and its worn bank and the site confird in Batu’s mind to the elevation of a specific mark on the bark of old trees.
The camp was still so distance out, invisible in the flat cold.
"Am I a tool," Kirsa said.
He asked it flatly. No edge in it, no injury behind it.
He was asking because the answer was important enough to na clearly and because he understood that Batu was the kind of man who would na it as it was.
Batu looked ahead.
The past life surfaced. A texture beneath thought, without scene or image. In that other life he had known n who had served together through one campaign and then another, past the point where they were individuals fighting alongside each other and into sothing that functioned as one thing.
A company. A squadron. A unit.
There was a word for what n were to each other after that process. The right word for it. It nad a specific relationship, specific enough that the language had made only one word for it.
He had not reached for it since the first night.
He reached for it now.
"Brother-in-arms," he said.
Flat. A conclusion, stated once. His eyes stayed ahead. It was accurate. He had nad it.
The horses moved through the silence that followed. It was a different kind from the ones before it. Those had been the silence of processing.
This was arrival.
Kirsa looked ahead. His hands were still easy on the reins. His horse held its pace.
His right hand ca first.
He reached over and gripped Batu’s left forearm with a single firm grip. Certain.
He held it for the space of two strides and released it and his hand went back to the reins and his eyes stayed on the horizon.
That was all.
They rode north. The camp resolved out of the pale distance, the horse lines and the periter posts and the cook fires already going against the cold.
Bayan ca back from the outer route and settled into his position without a word. The group tightened around the approach.
The winter steppe ran in every direction, flat and enormous and saying nothing.
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