I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Shigeru watched his group from a few steps back, arms folded, saying nothing. Yuwa was already deep in an argument with Taku about whether the archery competition was worth entering and Sana was reading the wrestling listings with a focused expression she usually reserved for menus. They were loud and half-drunk and entirely in their element.

He didn’t want to be here. He’d made peace with that fact sometime around the second day of travel, when Yuwa’s excitement about the festival had reached a pitch that made declining feel genuinely cruel. He’d relented, as he usually did when it came to his group, and told himself at least the timing was useful.

He felt the tug at his sleeve before he saw who it was — light fingers, tentative, the kind of touch that was already preparing to let go if he pulled away.

He turned.

A small cloaked figure, dark fabric pulled close around features he couldn’t read, stood just at the edge of the crowd’s reach. She held his gaze for half a second, then turned and walked away without a word, slow enough for him to follow.

Shigeru looked back at his group. Yuwa was now gesturing at the archery board with her whole arm. Nobody was paying attention to anything but themselves.

He walked after her.

She moved with purpose for someone dressed so conspicuously wrong for the heat, steering them away from the open grounds and into the narrowing streets behind the main structures, where the crowd noise became muffled and the gaps between buildings ate the light. He’d told her he would be here, had mentioned it almost as an aside during their last correspondence, not genuinely expecting her to act on it. But he should have known better. Opportunities to meet like this were rare enough that she treated each one as something that might not come again.

The narrow street she led him to was cool and shadowed, tucked between two storage buildings where the festival noise barely reached. He’d already spotted the other figure waiting there before they arrived — a young woman standing very still with her hands folded, her eyes dropping immediately to the ground when she saw him.

”Akiko,” Shigeru said. ”I see you’re still attached to her side no matter the circumstances.”

”Shigeru-sama.” Akiko’s face flushed and she bowed her head further.

Beside him, Sakura lowered her hood.

She looked the same as she always did — that particular pink hair catching even the thin light in the alley, her expression bright in the way that seemed to cost her nothing. She smiled at him like they had all the time in the world.

”It’s been a while, Onii-sama,” she said.

Shigeru exhaled. ”I’ve asked you not to call me that.”

The brightness in her face dimmed just slightly, the smile holding but something behind it going careful. He noticed it, as he always noticed it, and it always cost him something he didn’t have a name for.

She was his half-sister. That was the plain fact of it, the thing that had rearranged both their lives without asking permission. He was the first thing Norihiro had produced, before the legitimate line, before the wife, before the version of himself the Daimyo wanted people to see. An illegitimate son born first was the specific kind of problem that powerful men solved in specific kinds of ways, and Norihiro’s solution had been to keep Shigeru close but invisible — a child living in the castle under the fiction that his mother served the household. For years that was the arrangement. For years he and Sakura had moved through the same spaces, shared the same corridors, and built between them the easy affection of siblings who didn’t yet know they were siblings.

When Sakura found out the truth, she had been happy. Genuinely, simply happy, in a way that had surprised him. She’d wanted the connection formalized, wanted to call it what it was.

When Shigeru found out, he was ten years old and his mother was already sick.

Norihiro’s response to the discovery was swift and clean. Both of them gone within the week — Shigeru and his mother turned out from the only home either of them had known. His mother had been ill before the expulsion and she was worse after it, worn down by a winter without the castle’s resources to cushion anything. She died two months later. Shigeru had done the arithmetic on that sequence of events many times over the years and always arrived at the same answer.

He didn’t blame Sakura for any of it. That was important and also true. He loved her, had always loved her in the uncomplicated way that existed before he understood who their father was, and that love had survived everything that came after. What he couldn’t fully bring himself to do was stand close to anything connected to Norihiro, even the parts of it that were innocent, even her.

But he couldn’t refuse her either. He never had managed that.

So this was what they had instead — stolen hours in shadowed streets, a servant girl blushing at walls, his group oblivious a few hundred meters away. Sakura smiled at him from under her hood and called him by a name he kept asking her not to use, and Shigeru stood in the cool dark of the alley and said nothing for a moment.

”You shouldn’t have come yourself,” he said finally. ”I would have found a way to reach you.”

”You’ve been saying that for years,” Sakura said. ”And you never do.”

He didn’t have an answer to that. Mostly because she wasn’t wrong.

Shigeru had no clean answer to that, and they both knew it. So he did what he always did when a conversation pressed too close to the thing sitting at the center of all of it — he moved around it.

”The engagement with Daimyo Sadamasa’s son,” he said. ”I heard about it. You met him. How did it go?”

He watched her face as he asked it. He was good at reading people — years of surviving on instinct had made sure of that — and what he saw happen to Sakura’s expression in the half second before she composed it told him everything before she opened her mouth.

The color left her face. Just slightly, just enough. Then the smile came up like a door closing.

”It went fine. Everything was fine.”

Shigeru looked at Akiko.

The servant girl met his eyes for exactly one moment, glanced at Sakura, and then told him everything. Quickly, quietly, with the particular efficiency of someone who had been waiting for a trustworthy audience.

By the time Akiko finished, Shigeru’s expression had gone somewhere that had nothing to do with the easy calm he usually carried.

”Are you alright?” He looked at Sakura directly. ”Tell me honestly. And I hope at least that they killed him.”

”It’s fine,” Sakura said. ”The engagement stands. They apologized. It’s handled.”

”It’s thanks to the ronin,” Akiko added.

Shigeru turned. ”Ronin?”

Sakura’s expression changed again — something quieter coming into it this time, something that sat differently than the forced smile from a moment ago. ”Yes. There was a man. He helped me.”

She described him the way someone describes a thing they’ve turned over in their mind many times since it happened. Black hair. All black clothing. A black katana. The name Ryo.

Shigeru went still.

That description. The katana, the name, the way she placed him — it lined up exactly with the accounts coming out of Minato. The man who had walked into that town, killed Daimyo Yorimasa in his own domain, killed Morosuke, and walked back out again. The story had traveled fast and far enough that even Shigeru, who made a habit of not caring about famous names, had heard it in detail.

”Wait.” He looked at her carefully. ”You met him before you even knew who he was?”

Sakura nodded. ”He isn’t what people say. I don’t believe he is a bad person. He saved my life, Onii-sama.”

Shigeru absorbed that for a moment, then exhaled slowly through his nose. ”Whatever he is or isn’t, if your father gets eyes on him, it ends one way. A man who killed two of his people and made a spectacle of it in Minato doesn’t get a trial.”

Sakura’s face went pale and quiet. ”He’s probably already gone,” she said, and there was enough uncertainty in it that it sounded less like a statement and more like something she was asking the alley to confirm for her.

Shigeru let it go. He looked at her for a moment, then shifted again.

”The engagement still stands, then.” He said it flatly. ”So Norihiro is serious about it. The war.”

It wasn’t really a question. Shigeru had understood Norihiro’s logic the moment the engagement was announced — offering his daughter to the son of the biggest weapons supplier in Kastoria was not a gesture of goodwill. It was procurement dressed in ceremony. Any reasonably clear-eyed person paying attention had seen exactly what it meant.

Sakura’s face fell in a way that was different from sadness.

Even before Ryo hinted at what her father was preparing but she refused to believe. Yet after she went back, her father confirmed it to her and even to his own people his intentions.

And a lot of people were supporting it. That was the part that seemed to sit worst with her.

A War between the South and North of Kastoria...

She didn’t even want to imagine it.

”A catastrophe,” Shigeru said, and his voice had gone low and even in the way it did when he meant something without decoration. ”That’s what your father is building. Not glory, not a stronger Kastoria — a catastrophe. The bloodshed from a full war against the North won’t stay contained to battlefields. It will come apart everywhere. Towns, trade, ordinary people who never asked to be part of any of it.” He paused. ”Kastoria doesn’t need that war. Nobody does.”

Sakura said nothing.

There was nothing to say. She knew he was right and that knowing it didn’t give her any power over the fact of it, and they both understood that too.