The riders near the fire were from two different mingans and hadn't thought about it in some time. Three of them were working on tack, a fourth sitting with his back against a saddle doing nothing in particular, and two more were talking across the coals in the low volume men used when nothing was scheduled and they weren't in a hurry to find something to fill it.
One of them said something and the others reacted, and the sound went across the open ground without the specific words making it.
Batu was reading what the fire showed him.
Men who'd come through the Suvar operation together rested differently beside each other than men who hadn't. It wasn't in any specific behavior he could point at directly.
It was in how they occupied the space around the fire, how no one checked before speaking, how a hand went out for something and the thing was already there before the receiver had looked for it. The ease of men who'd been in something difficult and come back from it to this.
