Nameless White Horde Rider POV
The contingent was five hundred riders working the main road north of the river, and by the fourth day the men were loose about it. They'd done this enough to know what a militia formation looked like from half a kilometer and what it meant.
The ground was flat and wet, the spring thaw still working out of the soil, the grass coming up pale through the mud. The smell of smoke from the warehouse they'd burned two hours back was still in the air when the road bent north and the militia appeared from behind a low rise.
Three hundred foot soldiers, maybe more, spread across the road and into the fields on both sides. They'd formed a block with spears pointed south.
On each flank, sixty or so riders sat their horses and watched the steppe riders coming up from the direction of the river. Someone in that group had tried to organize them.
