The three pieces were where he had placed them. Ryazan covered from two directions, the route north and the route south both sealed. He had answered the opening problem. What the board was showing him now was the next one.

He picked up the Jochid piece from Ryazan and held it above the Vladimir-Suzdal region’s northern path.

After Ryazan fell, the Vladimir prince would face a choice. Two options, and neither of them worked.

If he sent his field army south to meet the Jochid force at Kolomna, that army marched toward the Jochid main body advancing from the south with the Toluid wing already positioned on the road behind it from the northeast.

The Vladimir force would find itself between two bodies of riders with nowhere to withdraw toward its own city.

If the Vladimir prince kept his army inside Vladimir’s walls, Ryazan fell without a relief attempt and the Jochid force turned north at full strength against a city whose defenders had chosen to wait.

Either choice had the same outcome on a different route. That was the correct kind of plan, one that worked regardless of what the opponent decided.

He set the Jochid piece at Kolomna’s position and picked up the Toluid piece. He moved it from its blocking post on the Vladimir road and curved it northeast, closing the path behind Kolomna from above.

Then he moved both pieces north and set the Jochid piece at Vladimir.

After Vladimir fell, the prince would withdraw northeast to the Sit River with whatever he could still mobilize. Perhaps fifteen thousand men. The last organized military force the northern principalities could produce.

The prince had camped on the Sit in the other life and waited for something to arrive that would change the situation.

Nothing had arrived. The Mongol force had found him there.

Batu had the intelligence network that had found the Hasal family’s rider in the dark. The three-layer screen that had tracked the Ulfar raiders in the delta before they knew they had been found.

He knew from the other life where the Sit River position was, and he had the tools to find it before the Russian army had finished bunkering down on its banks.

He moved the Toluid piece northeast from its Vladimir position to the Sit River location. The Jochid piece came along the northern arc.

He set both pieces on either side of the river’s position. The encirclement made physical on the felt.

Then he took the smaller pieces from the pouch and distributed them across the Vladimir-Suzdal territory’s upper section. Suzdal. Rostov. Yaroslavl. Tver. Torzhok.

A wave of riders moving through the smaller cities in a row, each one falling to whatever force of the secondary army arrived at its walls first. None of them had garrison forces worth mentioning after Vladimir was gone and the Sit River was finished.

His eyes moved to the map’s northwestern side. Novgorod.

The wealthiest city in Russia, perhaps the wealthiest in the north of Europe. He knew the reason it had survived the original Mongol campaign, and the reason was not strategic thinking. It was spring thaw.

The ground north of Torzhok turned to swamp when the temperature rose in April, and cavalry armies in swamp were useless. The original force had arrived northwest of Torzhok in early April and turned south because the ground had told it to.

The ground would tell him the same thing.

He did not place a piece on Novgorod. He marked its position in his mind and put it as a late objective. The city would exist after Kiev, and what came after Kiev included returning for what the first campaign phase had left standing.

He looked at the upper Oka basin. Kozelsk.

He knew what Kozelsk had done in the other life to an army that let it run on its own terms. A city that size should have fallen in days.

It had held for seven weeks because the besieger had not concentrated enough force to end it quickly and had allowed the campaign’s momentum to stall against stone walls and a garrison that understood it had nothing left to lose.

Seven weeks on one small city at the end of a long campaign, with the army extended and worn and needing the steppe.

He would not do that.

At the end of the northern sweep, before the army dispersed south, he concentrated. The Jochid main body did not move toward the steppe until Kozelsk was finished.

He set a piece on the upper Oka position and held it there a moment, committing the intent.

Kozelsk was a siege to execute in days, not a siege to absorb over weeks. The difference was force applied immediately at maximum intensity.

It would be sufficient.

He left the piece there and gathered the rest.

The northern pieces came south one at a time, the smaller pieces from the city sweep, the Toluid piece from the Sit River position, the Jochid piece from Kozelsk.

The board emptied of the north.

The army needed the steppe. Two seasons of it. He was not going to argue against the logic of that.

An army coming off a Russian winter needed its horses fat and its men rested before he pointed it at anything else.

The Volga city would grow through those seasons. He would have extracted what he needed from the Bulgars. He moved on.

He looked south.

The Ogedeid piece had been sitting at its blocking position since he placed it through the entire northern campaign, a wing in position while the north was cleared.

He picked it up.

Pereyaslavl first. A principality on the steppe margin, south of the forest zone.

The Ogedeid wing was three tumens against a garrison force.

He set the piece at Pereyaslavl’s position, then moved it west along the Desna toward Chernigov.

The second major southern principality, positioned northwest of Pereyaslavl.

He set it there.

The southern principalities would fall one by one.

He looked at the map. The Ogedeid piece at Chernigov. The Jochid and Toluid pieces massed at the Volga for recovery. Everything the campaign had cleared was marked by the positions on the felt.

He picked up the Jochid piece.

Kiev was not like the other targets in the campaign.

The mother of Rus cities. The original capital before the princes divided the federation into competing lines.

Its symbolic significance was a military fact. A garrison defending something irreplaceable resisted longer than its numbers alone would justify, and that needed to be in the plan’s accounting.

The Dnieper was the problem before the siege began.

He traced the route with his eyes. West from the recovery position, across the steppe, toward the great river.

In late autumn the Dnieper froze. He had crossed enough frozen rivers to know what his horses could do on ice.

The defenders would know it too, which meant they had to watch the ice and the eastern routes simultaneously, and watching two things at the same time was harder than watching one.

He moved the Jochid piece to the Dnieper crossing east of Kiev. He held it there for a moment, reading the position.

Then he moved it to the western bank and set it down on Kiev’s position.

He looked at the board.

Volga Bulgaria, Ryazan, Vladimir, the Sit River, the northern cities, Kozelsk, the recovery period, Pereyaslavl, Chernigov, Kiev.

The first major phase of the campaign was complete on the felt.

Three years of war planned in a lamp-lit ger in summer 1235, which was the kind of thing you could do when you had read the ending before the story began.

He looked west of Kiev.

The Carpathian mountains. The Hungarian plain beyond them. Poland to the north and Hungary to the south and the great flat cavalry ground where everything the Jochid force did best, it did best.

He had been thinking about that ground since the first night.

He did not reach for the remaining pieces in the pouch.

The plan ended at Kiev because the plan had to end somewhere, and it ended there because what came after Kiev required the campaign itself to create the conditions.

The army’s state after three years of Rus operations. The response of the western powers. The supply lines extended past the Volga by a distance he had not yet built.

None of those could be planned from a lamp and a felt map in summer 1235.

You planned to the end of what you knew and stopped.

He left his hand on the table beside the pouch and looked at the board for a long time. Then, he put it down for the night.