Varok rode past them without a glance.
"Numbers!"he bellowed at his second.
"Still unclear!"The man rode hard to keep pace.“They're scattered—no central command responding—"
"Because there's no one to respond."Varok grinned through blood that wasn't his."Keep pushing.Don't let them regroup."
For an hour, it seemed like the sort of victory that songs were written about.
Then the eastern tree line lit up with torches.
Hundreds of them.Moving in organised formation, cavalry, by the sound of the hooves, was coming fast from the direction of the Main Continent.
The camp survivors heard it first.Those still standing turned toward the approaching lights with something shifting in their expressions: relief.And there were more than Varok would have liked.Ten thousand was simply a number that took time to reduce regardless of surprise.
"Reinforcements!"The shout went up, and it was taken up by a dozen voices, then a hundred."Reinforcements!They've sent reinforcements!"
Varok raised his fist and his riders pulled up, reforming into rough lines.He watched the torches approach and did the arithmetic quickly.The column was large.Large enough that if it was what the surviving soldiers believed it was, the battle’s balance would shift considerably.
He kept his sword drawn.
The army emerged from the tree line.
Varok's eyes narrowed.
The banners were wrong.
Not Orda Naiman's.A sigil he didn't immediately recognise, riding beside a Borjigin banner that had no business being in this forest at this hour.And at the column's head, two figures rode side by side: one broad-shouldered, his braids catching the torchlight, and the other younger, his posture stern.
The Naiman survivors went quiet.
One of them—a sergeant, by his armour, with enough rank to know what he was seeing—said something in his own language.A question, by the tone.
The man with the braids answered in the same tongue, loud enough to carry.
Varok didn't speak that tongue—the steppes alone had nine, but he had enough campaign experience to read the effect of words on a crowd.He watched the sergeant's face go from hope to confusion and then, eventually, despair.
The sergeant translated for the men around him.
Varok looked at his second."What did he say?"
His second, who had been traded between enough tribes to pick up fragments of most regional languages, had gone slightly pale."He said their reinforcements won't be coming.They've been slaughtered."
Varok looked at the column, at the man with the braids.Blue eyes found Varok's across the camp's wreckage and he inclined his head in greeting.
Varok raised his sword in acknowledgement.
The first man from Naiman’s camp to drop his weapon did so without ceremony — he simply let it fall, raised his hands, and knelt in the mud.
The second followed.Then a third.Then it moved through them like a wave, the sound of steel on wet earth replacing the sound of fighting, until the forest camp had gone quiet again.
Varok sheathed his sword."Secure them," he told his second.Then he rode toward the column's head.
"You're late," he said when he reached the man with the braids.
Borji looked at him.Something flickered at the corner of his mouth."We had to make a stop."
"The reinforcements."
