I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 687: Reaching Minato

”W — Wait, Ryo-sama!”

Nathan was already through the domain’s outer gate when her voice reached him. He kept walking. The road opened ahead of him — the south road, packed dirt and old stone, the forge district’s smoke still hanging in the air at his back, the treeline ahead carrying the cleaner smell of the territory beyond.

”Ryo-sama!”

Louder this time. He heard her sandals on the road behind him — the quick, irregular rhythm of someone breaking into a run — and he stopped.

He turned.

Sakura arrived breathing hard, her chest rising and falling from the effort, her pink hair slightly disordered from the run, her composure in the early stages of reassembly. A few steps behind her Akiko appeared around the gate’s edge equally out of breath, one hand pressed to her side.

Takefusa came last.

He was not running. He walked at his steady veteran’s pace, arriving without hurry, and when he stopped he looked at Nathan with an expression that had changed since yesterday — not the hard wariness of before, but something more uncertain, more careful, the look of a man who has revised an assessment significantly and is still working through the implications of the revision.

Nathan looked at Sakura.

”What do you want?” he asked.

”We are also leaving today,” she said, still catching her breath. ”You could accompany us. At least back to the main road.”

”I told you already,” Nathan said. ”I have no intentions of being your guard. I came this way because it was on my road. Nothing more.”

”I know.” Sakura’s voice dropped slightly. ”I wouldn’t dare keep you, Ryo-sama. I know you have your own reasons for being here and they have nothing to do with us.” She paused. Her hands came together in front of her. ”But I wanted to do something for you. Anything. To repay what you did.”

”There is nothing you can do for me,” Nathan said.

Sakura bit her lip.

She held his gaze with those pink eyes that were doing something difficult — holding back something that had clearly been sitting in them since the previous evening, since the corridor and the door and the room and everything that had happened in it and outside it. She had managed it through the night and through the morning audience.

But something in the finality of what he had just said reached underneath the composure and found the thing it was holding.

”At least...” Her voice came out with a slight tremor in it. ”Please let me thank you properly.”

She looked at him directly.

”Thank you,” she said. ”For saving me. Thank you — truly, Ryo-sama. I will be in your debt for the rest of my life for what you did.”

The pink eyes were bright. She was keeping it together through will alone and he could see the effort it required and the sincerity underneath it — not performance, not courtesy, not the managed gratitude of someone fulfilling a social obligation. The real thing, arriving in the only form available to someone who had been well-raised and was trying to express something that well-raised language did not have quite the right words for.

Nathan looked at her for a moment.

Then he gave her a small nod.

He turned and walked.

”If you ever need help — anything at all — please come to our domain!” Her voice came after him, rising to carry the distance as he moved away. ”I will do anything to repay you! Anything, Ryo-sama — you only have to come!”

He walked through the gate and onto the road without looking back.

His matters here were concluded.

Norihiro was building toward a Shogunate. Weapons flowing south to north in sufficient quantity to arm a real campaign. Sadamasa locked into cooperation by threat and marriage and now by a different and considerably more immediate threat. The whole structure of it mapped and understood and placed in the correct category — Kaguya’s problem, to be delivered to Kaguya the moment he had Ayame in hand and was moving north again.

His focus was Susanoo.

Everything else was Kaguya’s to manage with the resources she had — the three samurai clans, the royalty, the apparatus of the capital that Norihiro was apparently planning to dismantle and had no realistic understanding of how difficult that was going to be for him.

Nathan stopped thinking about it.

He walked back through the domain’s outer streets until he reached the stable.

The body was still in the hay where he had left it — undiscovered, or discovered and left alone by people who had learned in the south that certain things you found were better not found, a survival instinct that served everyone involved. He stepped past it without looking at it and moved along the stalls until he found a horse worth taking — a dark bay, young enough to have stamina, well-fed from the domain’s stores, currently regarding him with the calm assessment of an animal that was being evaluated and understood it.

Nathan untied it, checked the bridle briefly, and climbed up.

He rode out.

The forge district passed on both sides in the morning’s full working noise — hammers, smoke, heat, the workers already deep in the day’s quota, not looking up as the horse moved through the street. The outer gate opened for him because the guards had their orders about the ronin and had no wish to revisit the previous evening’s lessons, and then the road was open and the smoke of Kajiya-Hara was behind him and the south was ahead.

He pushed the horse to pace and let the distance go.

The south of Kastoria was not the north.

He had known this in the abstract since before he arrived — Amaterasu had told him, Kaguya had told him, the evidence of the road itself for two days had been telling him — but riding alone through the open territory with no carriage and no escort and no destination that had a name attached to political obligations, he felt it differently.

The north had been ordered. Managed. The landscape of a territory that had been administered continuously for a very long time, the roads maintained, the fields measured, the distances between settlements calculated for commercial efficiency. Beautiful in its way — the cedar forests and the rice paddies and the stone bridges — but the beauty of something that had been arranged by human intention and stayed arranged.

The south was not arranged.

The trees grew how they wanted. The road went where the terrain allowed rather than where a surveyor had decided it should go, curving and dropping and rising without apology, the stones of it pushed up by roots in some places and worn smooth by centuries of weather in others. Villages appeared at intervals that suggested nothing except that someone had once decided to stop here and others had followed. The fields between them were smaller, more varied, the crops mixed in ways that spoke to individual decisions rather than centralized planning.

It was calmer, in its way.

Not safer — the road carried its dangers openly here rather than hiding them, which was its own kind of honesty — but calmer in the sense that it was not performing anything. The capital of Tenebria was perpetually in motion, perpetually dense with the noise and pressure and population of a city that had accumulated everything and kept accumulating. The south of Kastoria simply existed at its own pace and had no interest in anyone’s opinion about that pace.

Nathan found it tolerable.

The tolerable quality did not last past the first shadowy figure who stepped onto the road with a hand raised.

Then a second appeared from the treeline.

Then three more.

Nathan urged the horse forward without changing his expression. The figures scattered from the road as the horse came through at a pace that made the choice between moving and not moving very straightforward, and the sound of shouting behind him diminished rapidly as the distance increased.

He had encountered variations of this six times in two days.

He had dealt with the ones that needed dealing with and ignored the rest and kept moving and would keep doing both until he reached the coast. The south’s particular class of opportunists were a fact of the territory rather than a problem requiring resolution — they existed, they assessed travelers, and they moved on to easier targets when the assessment returned unfavorable results.

He was an unfavorable result.

Hours passed.

The road descended gradually toward the south, the elevation dropping, the vegetation changing with it — the cedars thinning and giving way to broader-leafed trees, then to a scrubby coastal growth that meant the sea was close, and with it the smell arrived before anything else.

Salt. Fish. Smoke from a different source than forges — the smoke of cooking fires and lamp oil and the particular combination of smells that gathered around any place where boats came in and people gathered to meet them and stayed to do business.

The horse slowed on its own.

Nathan let it — the animal had earned the reduction in pace, carrying him longer and faster than horses were generally asked to go in a single run, and it was blowing steadily now, its sides working, its head dropping slightly as it found a walk it could manage.

Nathan sat easy in the saddle and looked ahead.

The road curved.

And at the curve’s end it dropped — the ground falling away in a long slope that descended toward the coast, and from the elevation where he sat on the blowing horse Nathan looked out over the view that opened up below him and stopped.

He had underestimated Minato.

He had been thinking of it as a town — the kind of settlement that formed at road’s end in unmanaged territory, functional and rough and self-sufficient in the limited way of places that existed because they were convenient rather than because anyone had planned them. A port, some docks, buildings enough to house the people who worked the water.

What was below him was not that.

It was large. Genuinely large — spread along the coastline in both directions from the main harbor, the buildings packed close together in the way of places that had grown without planning and kept growing because the location kept attracting people, the streets between them narrow and numerous and lit now in the evening with lamps at every level, the light of them spreading up the hillsides and out along the docks where the boats were tied and the water caught the reflection and threw it back in moving pieces.

Evening had arrived while he rode and Minato had not noticed. If anything the evening had made it louder — the noise of it reached him clearly from this distance, a continuous layered sound of voices and music and the activity of a place that had apparently never developed a relationship with quiet. It carried the texture of celebration — not a specific festival, just the permanent low-grade celebration of a place that had no curfew and no authority and had decided some time ago that the distinction between day and night was largely administrative.

Nathan dismounted.

He stood at the road’s high point with the reins loose in his hand and the horse breathing beside him and looked down at it.

Somewhere in that mass of light and noise and packed streets and docked boats and completely ungoverned human activity, a woman with a royal bloodline had been living quietly for years, having abandoned everything above her to come here.

He looked at the lights for a moment longer.

Then he led the horse down the slope toward the town.