Dorbei POV

The forest sprawled northeast from the ford, birch and oak mixed in the way the Volga-Kama country grew them, the trunks pale in the spring light with the branches still half-bare.

The new growth had not filled in enough to close the line of sight through the outer stands, and from a hundred and fifty meters on the open ground, a rider watching could see twenty or thirty meters into the forest before the cover became dense.

Dorbei was on a low rise at the perimeter’s center. His tumen spread in a wide arc around the accessible side of the forest, each section at the distance the plan required, close enough to perceive movement at the forest, far enough back that a volley from cover had spent most of its force before reaching them.

The relay riders were at their intervals between sections, ready to notify about any encounter.

The forest ground showed use, cut with hoof marks in the mud where horses had moved through repeatedly. Branches were broken at consistent heights, the damage that came from riders pressing through at pace rather than grazing animals.

They had been here all winter, and they knew he was here now.

He rode the perimeter to watch his sections before the contact came. Near the northern section he found a mingan commander standing in his stirrups, looking at the forest. The man’s attention moved to a clearing in the forest about forty meters northeast, a gap between two dense clusters of trees where the ground was lower and the line of sight was clear for fifty meters before the trunks closed it.

He moved two riders from the section’s center to the right, covering the clearing’s eastern side, without any command reaching him to do it.

Dorbei marked the man and rode on.

The relay brought a report from scouts pressed close to the northern margin, horses gathering inside the trees, further back than the visible area, audible enough to realize the noise was of an organized force.

Dorbei turned back toward the northern section and looked at the commander who had adjusted his spacing without being told. He sent the bait order.

The dispatch named him. Jüken.

Jüken POV

Jüken read the order and looked at his left flank. He shifted in the saddle, then said, "Pull back twenty meters, walk pace. Don’t look at the trees while you move."

His riders moved back at a walk, the spacing between his section and the section to the west increasing as the left-side riders adjusted their position. From inside the forest it would look like a thinning at the siege, a place where the coverage had weakened and was not what it had been.

He watched the forest and counted.

The trees gave nothing for two minutes.

Then the first group came out at the clearing.

They came in a line, Bulgar cavalry on steppe horses, brown and gray animals with the stocky build of good breeding, the riders low over the necks the way men rode when they meant to cover ground fast.

Their coats were gray-brown, padded at the shoulders, and they had composite bows in their hands before the horses were out of the outer trunks, shafts nocked and the bows rising as they left the cover behind.

Between forty and fifty of them, coming at the apparent weak point at a canter, and there was sureness in how they moved, the sureness of who had ridden this ground through the winter and knew exactly where the open grass began.

Jüken raised his arm.

The left flank pivoted back toward the line. The center and the right pushed forward simultaneously, closing on both sides of the emerging cavalry before the Bulgars had finished reading what had changed. The weak point was gone. The Bulgar riders were on open ground.

The exchange opened at sixty meters. Jüken’s riders were set and firing into a cavalry still committed to the momentum of a charge that had nowhere to reach. The Bulgars brought their bows up and fired back, and for the seconds it happened the exchange was hard from both directions.

A Bulgar horse took a shaft through the front of the chest at forty meters, the point driving between the neck muscles into the cavity behind them. The animal’s front legs gave together and it went down chest-first, the rider thrown forward over its neck and into the earth.

A rider in Jüken’s left flank took a shaft through the upper arm, the broadhead entering the outer face and exiting below the shoulder joint. He dropped his rein hand, transferred to the right, and held his position. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

The Bulgars saw the ambush close and saw the fire coming from both sides. The riders at the eastern edge pulled their horses south. The rest followed, turning back through the open ground and into forest cover.

Jüken’s riders stopped.

Then his right section reported contact.

The second group came out at the region he had moved riders to cover when he first read the field. They emerged at the same pace as the first group, a tight line of forty riders, already firing into his right section while it was still partially oriented toward the northern skirmish.

Two steppe riders took the first volley while they were still turned north. One took a shaft through the upper back as he was completing his turn, the point entering below the left shoulder blade driving forward through the rib cage. His horse continued east with an empty saddle.

The rider beside him took a shaft through the right thigh and stayed in the saddle by grabbing the mane with both hands, his bow falling into the grass.

The right section turned and fired back. The range closed to thirty meters and the exchange went flat and hard. A Bulgar rider in the second group’s front rank took a shaft through the jaw, driving upward through the back of the mouth. He went sideways off his horse without releasing his bow.

Another Bulgar horse took a shaft through the upper neck and dropped at a canter, the rider clearing the saddle an instant before the animal’s weight came down.

The right section pushed the rate of fire. At twenty meters the second group pulled back through the open ground and was gone.

The forest was silent for five minutes after that.

Jüken took the count from his jaghun leaders.

Dorbei POV

The relay brought the account to Dorbei on the rise.

He read it once. The autumn had been groups hitting individual raiding parties, each acting on its own timing. What had happened at Jüken’s skirmishes was different in kind. Two raiding groups had emerged simultaneously from separate points, timed so that the second contact arrived while the steppe riders were already handling the first.

The second group had hidden inside the trees until the first group committed to the open ground and the riders’ attention was already divided. They had coordinated the assault.

The winter had given them the time to think through what the autumn had shown them. They had watched the counter-movement and built a plan around it.

What Jüken’s section took was what that plan was supposed to cost.

Dorbei sent the adjustment through the relay. Each section’s watching area expanded, the arcs overlapping between sections. A second assault would now find riders already prepared toward it.

The density per meter of forest perimeter decreased, but the doubled coverage was what the next contact required.

They were still in the trees. The siege continued.