Kirsa had entered through the eastern gate.
Batu set aside the morning tallies as soon as he heard. Kirsa would not have come in from that direction unless he had returned straight from the outer routes, and that meant answers or trouble. Possibly both.
Batu went to find him.
Kirsa stood at the horse lines in the same place he had occupied every morning since the column returned from the campaign.
The fodder allocation moved past him in steady order. Riders checked counts, shifted sacks, argued over portions. Kirsa paid none of it any attention.
He was looking north toward the treeline.
That told Batu more than the stillness itself. A man could ignore noise for a few breaths. To stop seeing the work around him entirely meant he had been standing there long enough for his thoughts to close around something specific.
Batu stepped up beside him.
"Come inside."
Kirsa turned at once. He did not ask why.
That meant he had expected this conversation too.
They walked to the command tent without speaking.
Orel waited near the entrance with a document question already in hand. Batu motioned him toward the supply quarter instead. Whatever matter Orel carried could wait.
The gesture was enough. Orel left without protest.
Inside, Kirsa sat across the table. Pale morning light filtered through the felt walls, enough to show the strain around his eyes.
Batu began with the immediate problem.
"The senior riders."
"Three still hold by conviction."
Kirsa kept both hands flat against the table as he spoke, as though holding himself steady.
"Two are from my father's time. The third is younger. He lost a brother at Sarat."
A brief pause.
"He holds harder than the old ones."
Batu considered that.
"The difference."
"The old ones inherited it. He earned his."
That mattered.
A man who inherited a grievance carried it one way. The anger came wrapped in old stories, family obligations, names repeated long enough that practical concerns could still compete with them.
There was room in that kind of inheritance for calculation.
A man who had built the grievance himself at Sarat Ridge was different. Recent losses stayed sharp. Specific memories resisted compromise because they still felt unfinished.
Men like that did not yield easily when reality pressed against belief.
"The three stay outside the formation," Batu said at last.
He needed them separated without making the separation look like punishment.
"There's a function on the western screen that operates outside normal unit structure. Put them there."
He weighed the next decision before speaking again.
"If the younger one refuses the assignment, send him back west."
Kirsa nodded once.
No surprise crossed his face. He had already worked through the same answer before entering the tent. The nod only confirmed Batu had reached it too.
"The rest," Batu said. "How long."
"Ten days."
Fast enough to matter. Slow enough for resistance to gather if left unattended.
Batu turned to the second problem.
"The territorial promise the rider brought you. What exactly did he offer?"
Kirsa lowered his eyes to the table before answering, as though putting the memory in order.
"Whatever ground we held at the time of your removal. He said Guyuk would legitimize the position of any clan that moved."
His voice remained controlled, but Batu noticed the care in the phrasing.
"But he named the upper crossing territory to prove he knew it. Between the river fork and the second ridge running south."
Kirsa looked up slightly.
"Thirty years ago that was Khotor land before the campaign that broke our main line. He knew the boundary markers by name."
That changed things.
Every headman west of the Volga knew the Khotor dispossession story. Stories traveled easily across the steppe.
Boundary markers were different. A man who knew the markers by name either knew the land himself or had reports from someone who did.
The offer had been broad.
The knowledge beneath it had not.
"The crossing family," Batu said.
"The Hasal."
Kirsa's voice flattened further at the name.
"They've controlled the fee arrangement at the upper crossing since before my father's time. Western approach. Both banks."
He searched briefly through memory.
"Two seasons before the attempt on your tent, one of my outriders reported a rider leaving the Hasal post after dark. Eastern-built horse. No clan markings."
He let the words remain between them.
Silence stretched for several seconds.
"I assumed it was contact with a Rus merchant," Kirsa said at last. "The crossing families often track cargo movement for them."
He did not say he no longer believed that.
He did not need to.
Batu leaned back and worked through the shape of the information.
Yusuf had already identified two families controlling the upper crossings, both loyal to whoever held authority over the fees.
If those families had been sending reports eastward, the structure made sense. Cargo traffic gave them reason to observe every movement through the region. Who crossed. What they carried. Which direction they traveled.
The night rider Kirsa's outrider had seen fit the same pattern.
A service node.
The same role the supply rider at Kerait had performed for Temur's chain.
Which meant Guyuk's network had not improvised after Batu arrived west. It had placed observation points across the western steppe years earlier, at the places where movement naturally narrowed.
"The Tergesh route," Batu said. "What can the Hasal post observe from that side?"
Kirsa met his eyes.
"I can tell you what they see toward Khotor country."
A short pause.
"The Tergesh pasture route I don't know as well."
Incomplete knowledge.
Which meant Batu needed someone who did.
He rose and crossed to the tent entrance.
Outside, he instructed the guard to find Jaran and bring him immediately to the command tent.
Kirsa remained silent while they waited.
He looked down at the unmarked felt covering the table, his attention turned inward again.
Beyond the tent wall, the horse lines carried on with their work. The late morning allocation had reached its final distribution run.
Jaran arrived twelve minutes later.
Before he reached the table, his eyes moved across the room in sequence. Kirsa first. Then Batu. Then the empty felt between them.
Measuring tension. Looking for the trouble before anyone spoke.
He sat without waiting for permission.
"The Tergesh seasonal camps above the Hasal crossing," Batu said. "How visible was the fee post from those positions?"
"On clear days you could see it from the high ground above the third fold."
Jaran answered immediately.
"The approach road follows the river nearly two hours before the crossing itself. Any column moving there stayed visible most of that distance."
His gaze shifted briefly toward Kirsa.
"From either direction."
Kirsa returned the look.
Something passed between them then. Recognition, not familiarity.
Batu understood it before either man spoke.
Two men who had never met had just realized they knew the same land from opposite sides of the border.
Useful.
"You'll work this together," Batu said.
"Every crossing between your territories. Which families control them, how long they've held them, and what each position could observe."
He looked from one man to the other.
"I want the full map before the end of the week."
Enough time to make it accurate. Not enough time for the matter to drift.
Batu left them there to begin.
The wolf's track guarantee had gone out only days earlier.
Under the Yusuf arrangement, authority over crossing fees now passed to Jochid control at every signed location. By now the Hasal family would know whose seal governed the arrangement. Men who lived by tolls learned new authorities quickly.
But another question remained.
If the eastern network had placed instructions there years before Batu's arrival, before the consolidation and before the Sarat campaign, then the map Jaran and Kirsa were building could not answer the important part.
A map could show what those crossings were positioned to see.
It could not show whether reports still moved east beneath the authority of the new seal.
Nor could it reveal whether the network had gone dormant the moment the guarantee arrived, the way Arslan had withdrawn after the channel changed hands.
The Kerait grain merchant was one thread.
The Hasal family was another.
And the Hasal family still sat at the crossing post, watching both approaches, while the wolf's track guarantee rested over their arrangement because Batu had approved it before understanding what those positions had originally been built to do.