The food had been at the tables for ten minutes before Saran started to ask questions.

She had her cup in her left hand, and her right arm rested on the table, angled toward him, close enough that her shoulder brushed his when she leaned in. She was not performing anything. She was simply close, the way someone is close when the thing that interests them is in that direction.

"Who is managing the city while you’re gone?" she said.

"Khulgen, as Ikh Jarghuchi. He holds civil and administrative authority across the whole western territory."

Batu reached for his cup. "Mahmud ibn Nasir manages the civil accounts and the construction effort. He came from Bukhara, and he’d run urban administration for more than a decade under three different authorities. Orel handles the tribute tallies and the census records."

Saran looked at him. "And... where does my role sit inside that hierarchy?"

"Theoretically, above it," he said. "On civil matters, they answer to you when I’m in the field."

She pondered that without responding right away. By theoretically, she understood that he would personally confirm she was capable to the task first. Which she was.

The feast was loud around them. Tangqut on the far side of the table had been telling Berke something about the Kipchak pastures in the expansive voice of a man on his second cup.

Somewhere behind them, two of the Toluid household riders were arguing the finer points of something she could not hear clearly.

"What are the three main priorities for your city?" she said.

He told her. The scribal capacity was not deep enough for the correspondence volume the tribute network would generate. The market district’s infrastructure had begun, but the merchant quarter still needed a permanent regulatory body. The craftsmen from Bulgar knew their trades, but nobody had built the guild structure that made a craftsman population sustainable across generations.

She was nodding before he finished the second one. She already had the third.

"I have a idea. Or well, a plan, for the guild problem."

"Explain," Batu asked.

"If we bring in two administrators from the Khwarezm guild system and give them authority to impose the same structure on our craftsmen. It should take one winter to implement, and I doubt many will resist the change."

Batu looked at her. "Do you know where to find them?"

She blinked once. "I could find out."

He picked up a piece of meat from the nearest dish and said nothing else. She was already carrying the idea somewhere, and he did not need to be in that part of it.

Then Tangqut arrived at the table. 𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

He came from the far end in the rolling manner he had when he’d been drinking and was satisfied with how the day was going. He planted both hands on the table and looked at Batu with the expression of sibling who has watched another one finally do the obvious thing.

"You know what I like about this?" he said. "It’s that you’ve stopped being impossible to argue with about everything."

"I wasn’t aware I had started."

"You started at birth," Tangqut said.

He turned to Saran. "He was the worst one. Orda was organized. I was easy. He was impossible."

He raised his cup. "You’ve my sympathy and my admiration. Both."

Saran looked at him with something near amusement. "I appreciate the warning."

"Too late," Tangqut said, already backing away. "But I mean it about the admiration."

From farther along the table, Toqa-Timur lifted his cup without standing.

"My household has eleven children," he said. "I offer this as encouragement."

"I didn’t ask for encouragement," Saran said.

"Nobody does," Toqa-Timur replied cheerfully. "Yet here it is."

She snickered to him and turned back to Batu. "The tributary system. How many clans, what’s the collection rate, and who enforces it?"

He walked her through it. Burjin, Tergesh, Ulus, Sartat, the original submissions, and then the Kipchak clans counted in the census, the Bashkir line, the southern territory under Dorbei’s consolidation.

The rates were fixed under the wolf’s track seal. Enforcement was through the tribute riders on the western steppes, coordinated through Khulgen’s office. If a headman missed a window, a rider arrived within the week.

"What happens if Khulgen has a dispute he can’t resolve without your direct authorization?" she asked.

"He sends word. If there isn’t time, he makes the call and I read the result."

"And if my call conflicts with his call?"

He looked at her. "Then you both find a common ground."

She held that for a moment. "Fair."

Orda appeared at the table shortly after that, without Tangqut’s approach or Toqa-Timur’s commentary. He stood on Batu’s side, looked at Saran across from him for one moment, and said, "You’ve been asking the right questions since the feast opened. I commend the initiative."

Saran gave him the flat attention of who understood that it was an observation rather than a compliment and valued it accordingly.

"It wouldn’t be right for me to arrive without knowing anything," she said.

Orda looked at Batu. "Good," he said, and walked back.

The conversation picked up again. She moved to the relay, the Ayas caravanserai network, what the Bukhara paper contract produced, what the supply chain from Samarkand to the Volga actually moved through on a typical month.

Then a court official arrived at the feast ground.

He was in the Great Khan’s household colors, carrying a sealed document, and behind him two grooms led a horse on a long rein. The animal was white and very large, the kind of size that said it had been selected rather than simply taken from whatever was available. It moved steadily despite the noise of the feast.

The official stopped and waited until the gathering had noticed his presence.

Batu stood.

The official read the declaration in a formal tone without inflection. The Great Khan named the western advance. He named Batu Khan as its commander. He named the horse as the Great Khan’s visible promise in the campaign and in the man who would lead it.

The declaration was forthright. The official folded it, handed it to the nearest Khar Kheshig rider, and withdrew.

Batu stood for the amount of time that acknowledging something formally required. He looked at the horse once. It was looking back at him with the unhurried attention of a large animal that had been very well managed. Then he sat down.

Saran was looking at the horse from her place at the table.

"The Great Khan doesn’t seem to want to antagonize you." she said.

"There’s no reason to. He’s not as invested in the succession as Guyuk might hope."

"But you are different." She turned back to the table.

"Yes."

"I haven’t been told anything, but I know my brother enough to tell. It’s a bold plan."

She refilled her cup and changed topics, asking about the paper supply contract.

Berke came over in the way Berke did things, without announcing the approach. He stopped at the near side of the table. He looked at Saran once with the look of who knew what this union purpose was for.

"You’ll have the harder part," he said to her. "War and conquest are easy."

He paused.

"The same can’t be said from ruling."

Saran matched his gaze. "I know."

He looked at Batu for one beat, a look that carried everything it needed without either of them having to name it. Then he went back to his position.

Siban arrived next, from where he had been standing with Mongke’s household.

"The khanate has what it needs now," he said.

He said it to the general table, to neither of them specifically, which was his characteristic delivery of anything he actually meant. Then he found something in his cup that required his attention and drifted back.

Mongke came toward the end of the middle hours, when the feast had calmed down into its lower volume and the Toluid household members were thinking about the walk back to their camp. He looked at Saran with the cold precision that was simply how he looked at things.

"If you have any doubts, you should ask mother," he said. "She has far more experience than any of us."

Saran considered that, and slowly nodded. "I will."

Mongke looked at Batu once, confirming what the alliance between them was now that it was complete, and returned to his section.

Sorghaghtani had been on the periphery through the feast. She came once, briefly, and addressed Saran directly.

"Your plans, your ambitions, everything you must do," she said.

She looked at the table rather than at either of them. "Don’t stop."

Then she walked back toward where Mongke was preparing to leave.

Kuklan appeared near the end of it, young enough that the feast had been going on long past his natural energy for formality. He stopped at the table, looked at both of them, and said, "I think it’s very good," with the sincerity of someone who meant exactly that and had decided saying it plainly was better than trying to sound sophisticated.

He raised his cup. "That’s what I wanted to say."

"Thank you," Saran said, and she sounded like she meant it.

The fire had burned lower by then, and the tables had thinned. The brothers’ voices had dropped with the fire. The Toluid household had gone back to their camp.

The two of them were in what was as private in a feast that had contracted to its last guests, and Saran’s questions had moved from the administrative to the timeline, when the tumen moved, how long the march would take, what would already be done before she reached the western steppes.

He told her. Departure in the morning. The march would go for several weeks in the northern route. The records building would be complete before she arrived, the market district’s foundations would be in by then, and the relay would be fully operational.

She sat with that for a moment. Then she reached for her cup to drink and think further, and it was the first time in the evening she had done anything other than ask a question or listen to an answer.

The night was coming in from the steppe in the low, warm way of summer nights on the Orkhon, and the camp outside was into its last sounds.

They walked from the feast ground through the camp to the ger that had been made ready for them, the Khar Kheshig at a respectful distance behind.

She went through the entrance first. It was hers now.

"I negotiated this marriage very carefully."

Saran said from inside, already pulling at the fastenings of her coat. "Every part of it. And I intend to actually have every part of it. Come and take me."

Batu did not hesitate.