Chapter 204: The Mordvinian Forest
Most of the canopy still had its leaves, but the light beneath it had changed. Summer’s deep green shadow was gone, and what remained was thinner and yellowed, shifting whenever the branches moved and never fully stopping in any way.
The ground beneath the Nüden camp matched the season. Wet leaves layered over clay, soft enough to keep a clear footprint but firm enough that a man would not sink.
Sound behaved differently here than it did on the open steppe. Wind pushed the branches together in a constant low grinding sound, and beneath that came stretches of silence when the birds stopped singing entirely.
Siban had learned those silences meant something.
The camp sat in a shallow depression between two old oaks. No fire had burned since before first light.
Everything remained where it belonged. The packs lined against the northern root, while bows stayed strung and wrapped in felt to keep the damp off the strings. The horses were tethered farther back where the route between this position and the secondary camp had continued for days.
Weeks inside the forest had turned routine into instinct. Most tasks no longer required orders.
Tabar sat on the camp side repairing a fletching that had started to peel away from the shaft. His head stayed down while his hands worked with the steady precision of habit.
He did not look up when Siban crouched to study the trail Orus and Temei had taken the previous afternoon.
"Still nothing from that direction," Tabar commented.
He pressed the feathering back into place with his thumb. "Same as an hour ago."
"I am aware," Siban answered.
Tabar held the fletching in place a moment longer. That was how he handled information, by saying the problem once, then leave it to whoever needed to deal with it.
Chanat entered through the east at a forced walk. Siban recognized the pace immediately, he had news.
"Orus and Temei missed the second check-in," Chanat reported.
He crouched beside Siban before continuing. "The check-in point had nothing since yesterday morning."
Siban stayed motionless for a moment while he sorted through the possibilities.
Orus and Temei had been covering the observation point in a particular trail, watching for Rus scouts moving from the Oka river direction. Now two scheduled check-ins had passed with no trace left behind.
There were only two interpretations that made sense.
If they were dead, the problem stayed acceptable.
If they had been taken alive, that was a problem. Weeks of movement routes, camps, fallback routes, and check-in timetable could now belong to the enemy.
"Tabar, Aydos, Sorhat, Yilbars," Siban called them name by name.
He rose to his feet.
"We move"
He left Chanat and another man behind to hold the camp, then led the four through east at the fastest pace the forest allowed.
The route to Orus and Temei’s last position stretched roughly two kilometers through increasingly dense oak growth.
The team moved in pairs. Siban stayed at the rear of the forward pair, keeping enough distance for hand signals while leaving enough space that one volley could not strike all of them at once.
Weeks in the forest showed in every movement they made. By how their feet lifted instead of dragging through leaves, and how weight shifted carefully to the outside of each step. Their eyes stayed at every tree mid-trunk, where movement usually revealed itself first.
Tabar led from the front with efficient caution.
Twenty minutes out, Siban closed his fist.
The team froze immediately.
The birds had stopped. All at once.
The way they stopped when something in the forest was in position and waiting. The canopy still moved overhead in the wind, but beneath it everything had gone quiet.
Sorhat stood one pace behind Siban.
"Something’s weird," he whispered softly.
Siban watched the trees forty meters ahead.
There was something about the undergrowth that looked wrong. The branches near the base bent too smoothly, while wind left irregular breaks and bends. These had been pushed aside by bodies moving through them. More than one body.
Someone had tried to set the branches back afterward, but they no longer matched the way the brush naturally grew.
Farther down the line, bark at chest height showed a fresh pale scrape where somebody had slammed against the trunk hard enough to strip the surface.
Near the base of the closest oak, the leaf cover had compressed deep into the clay.
A knee print.
Old enough for moisture to settle into it. Someone had knelt there for a long time watching the trail.
Siban understood the situation a heartbeat before it began.
Ambush. Multiple men.
The first arrow came from the right. Low and fast through the undergrowth.
It struck Tabar directly through the throat.
Tabar’s hands jerked upward and he pitched forward without catching himself, collapsing face-first into the leaves.
The repaired fletching still remained clutched in his right hand when he hit the ground. He was dead before the others fully understood what had appeared through the bushes.
Two more arrows followed almost immediately.
Sorhat took one through the outside of his arm. The impact punched clean through the muscle and forced a hard grunt through his clenched teeth.
Yilbars caught another low through the left ribs and folded around it, dropping to one knee with both hands pressed against the wound.
At the same instant, the left flank burst open.
Four figures charged through the brush wearing Mordvinian coats and carrying Rus weapons.
They moved quickly because the ambush had worked perfectly. Archers pinned the trail from one side while the assault group trapped the forward pair in exposed ground between both attacks.
Siban reacted before the first attacker fully charged from the brush.
He moved left and back behind the nearest oak. A blade caught his forearm as the closest man rounded the trunk.
The cut sliced across the outside from wrist toward elbow, sharp and hot, and blood started running immediately.
He turned into the strike instead of away from it.
That denied the man room to recover.
Siban stepped inside the reach of the blade and drove his knife into the side of the attacker’s neck.
The man made a choking sound, like air forced through the wrong passage, then collapsed against the oak root.
Siban moved past him without stopping.
Behind him, Aydos had grabbed Yilbars by the coat and was dragging him toward a fallen trunk ten meters back through the leaves.
Sorhat braced himself against another tree with the shaft still through his arm. His bow arm hung nearly useless already, but his free hand had gone straight to his knife.
More movement sounded from the right trees.
The archers were repositioning through the brush, searching for a clearer shot now that the open ground had emptied.
Another arrow punched through the undergrowth and struck bark a meter from Siban’s left side. The crack echoed sharply through the compressed silence beneath the trees.
The fight was just starting.
