He must confront what he is.

Hard on the heels of his father’s death Batu had ceased to be much of a match; and by this stage, an engagement neglected for a year and half, a man with no installment of livestock or other articles to put towards a bride price... war and neglect, and the oblivion they live, consign his once-engagement to the ruin of non-events.

It is in a distracted way that khaan comes upon a man in desperate sprint, a smattering of red roan, and kicks into following lope.

“Hoi!” A twist in his gut flies out with the scented wake; a scent held in tight remembrance. Batu quickens.

“Ochir?!”

Surmounting joy, so rarely ever held, fills him but for the moment when Ochir’s face turns. Batu is oddly removed from himself, yet at a finite peace.

“Cousin!” His own stop is a hard break which upends dust and seed heads. Khaan circles the roan, brushing flank to flank; the gesture verboten when ranks had superseded. It is when his gaze looks deeper on Ochir that he slows to still his stride, head shaking over and back.

“It is gone, Ochir.” Everything. “But some of us have recovered. We are rebuilding here, as a single band. Oyun— she is alive.” But not Subutai. Not Chagatai. Not Jochi.

Most, he thinks, but will not say.

There will be a time for the ugalz to move them. A call to war, to speak for their dead. Soon, the khaan will enlist the roan for his opinion, where his strengths lay.

But it is not this time, not when a young wife is hopeful. “She is here, and waiting for you.”

Batu laughs— what passes as a laugh in these days. “Go. They pitch near here. Go see them.”

The camp, the river, the herd. He would not keep Ochir.

But later, they would speak.