I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Chapter 714: Ayame’s Demand (2)

”If you want to take me,” she said quietly, ”then take me.”

Nathan looked at her in silence after she said it.

”You have the strength to take me,” Ayame continued, her voice unchanged, neither defiant nor conceding — simply stating the mechanics of the situation with the clarity of a woman who had spent years thinking clearly in circumstances that invited panic. ”I understand that. But once I am in the capital, placed on the regent’s throne by force rather than by choice, what you will have is a woman sitting in a seat with no will behind it. A throne held by obligation rather than intent is not held at all. The capital will drift without direction for whatever years remain before my nephew is old enough to rule.”

Nathan’s eyes had narrowed during this.

She wasn’t wrong. A reluctant Queen was worse than no Queen — a passive figure at the center of the court while the nobles read the vacancy in her posture and moved accordingly. He had come this far specifically to avoid that outcome.

”Unprotected,” he said. The word had snagged in his mind, slightly off from everything around it.

Ayame’s smile returned, brief and precise. She had noticed him catch it.

”I will go to the capital willingly,” she said. ”I will take the throne and hold it and keep everything intact until my nephew comes of age to take it properly. Gladly, even. I have no love for this town and no great attachment to this life.” She let a beat of quiet fall. ”However.”

”However,” Nathan repeated.

”I need protection in that court. Personal, reliable protection. Not Kaguya’s guards — I trust no one in the capital who didn’t come from outside it. The nobles there have long memories, and they know my proximity to what happened to the previous King. The shinobi assassination and my departure may have been coincidence in fact but it will never be coincidence in their minds.” Her gaze was level. ”I could be dead within a month of arriving without someone at my back that I trust absolutely.”

Nathan said nothing, but the logic of it settled in without resistance. She was right about the court — a queen regent who made powerful people nervous, without a personal guard they couldn’t easily buy or frighten, was a target with a timeline. Kaguya’s resources were real but they were institutional, subject to the same factional pressures that infected every layer of the capital’s structure.

”What do you want,” he said. ”This is the last time I ask.”

”The shinobis.” She said it simply. ”Bring them back to the capital. There are none more loyal to me — they loved my sister, and I helped remove the man who made her miserable while he sat on her throne. They have cause to protect me. And they are the finest protection Kastoria has ever produced.”

Nathan was quiet for a moment.

The shinobis. The ones who had vanished from the capital after the previous King’s death, scattering like smoke after a fire, their former leader’s fate coloring every calculation they’d made since. They were not an easy proposition — enemies of every major samurai clan, deeply political, deeply proud, carrying the weight of their last failure like a stone that hadn’t yet finished sinking. Getting them back into the capital required more than an invitation. It required convincing.

”You could contact them yourself,” he said.

Ayame exhaled. ”They appreciate me. But they will not walk back into that capital on my word alone after what happened there. Their previous leader—” She paused, selecting her words carefully. ”He had been executed by the previous King. That wound is still fresh. What they need is not my reassurance. They need to see that the power behind this movement is real, that Kaguya’s position is strong enough to protect them if they return.” She looked at him steadily. ”You took care of Morosuke in his own fortress. You walked up a mountain and came back with a Daimyo’s death on your hands before the day was over. That means something to people who understand what those things actually require.” A slight pause. ”They will listen to you in a way they will not listen to me.”

Nathan turned it over.

Shinobis in the capital — bound to Ayame, loyal to her by history and sentiment, answering to no samurai lord and no faction of the court. Brought back not as fugitives but as reinstated protectors of the regent. The samurai clans would despise it. Which meant Kaguya would have a counterweight against precisely the people most likely to maneuver against her. Haruka’s position would strengthen. The balance of the court would shift.

It was, looked at plainly, not a bad arrangement.

”So be it,” he said. ”Where are they?”

The satisfaction that moved through Ayame’s expression was real, unperformed, the look of a woman who had played a long game and watched the final piece find its place. She turned from him toward the room, her bearing shifting into something more active, more directed.

”I’ll take you to them myself,” she said. Her eyes swept across her women — those loyal, watchful faces that had followed her into this underground life without complaint. ”Prepare the carriage. We are leaving.”

They moved immediately, the hesitation of minutes ago dissolving into purposeful action, the room reorganizing itself around a new direction. Whatever fears they carried about leaving Minato, about the road ahead and the capital at the end of it — they set those aside, because Ayame had said we are leaving, and that was enough.

Nathan took the chair like he’d been sitting in it for years, one arm resting across his knee. Yukihime settled beside him — not seated, simply present, standing at his shoulder with her hands folded and her hood finally down, her expression carrying the mild, distant disinterest of someone who has decided the room doesn’t merit her full attention.

Ayame’s eyes found her immediately.

”And who is this?” she asked, her curiosity open and unashamed, the tone of a woman who has learned that directness saves time. Her gaze moved across Yukihime’s face.

”Does it matter?” Nathan said.

”Not in the slightest. I’m simply curious.” Ayame tilted her head slightly. ”You left alone and returned with her. She doesn’t carry herself like anyone from this region, or anywhere ordinary, frankly. Was she connected to Yorimasa somehow?”

The temperature around Yukihime dropped by a perceptible degree. It happened without drama — no gesture, no sound — just a sudden sharpening of the cold in that corner of the room, and an expression on Yukihime’s face that had gone from indifferent to something considerably more dangerous in the space of one sentence. The glacial stillness of someone who has heard something offensive and is deciding how much to respond to it.

”No,” Nathan said. ”She is with me. She has always been with me.”

The cold retreated.

Yukihime’s face did something that it rarely did in the presence of strangers — it softened. Quickly, involuntarily, the frost in her expression dissolving into a warmth that climbed immediately to her cheeks, her dark eyes dropping for just a moment before she gathered herself back. The shift was so fast and so complete that it looked almost like two different people occupying the same face in rapid succession.

Ayame watched this with visible delight that she made no effort to conceal. She looked between them — Nathan, unmoved and facing forward, Yukihime quietly flushed and staring at a fixed point on the wall — and filed it away with the ease of someone who has spent years reading the spaces between what people say and what they mean.

Her attention returned to Nathan.

She had met powerful men throughout her life — lords, generals, the shinobi leader, men who carried their strength in their bearing and their history. Nathan sat in a borrowed chair in a hidden room in a criminal town and somehow managed to make every other presence in it feel peripheral. He was young — strikingly so for what he had apparently done in the past handful of days — and yet the weight around him was not young at all. It pressed against the room the way old things press, things that have been sharpened repeatedly and know exactly what they are.

He reminded her, she thought, of the shinobi leader. Older in the eyes than in the face.

”I keep wondering,” she said, ”where exactly Kaguya found someone like you.”

Nathan said nothing. But something moved across his expression — not an answer, just a faint tightening at the corner of his jaw, and thaen a sharper quality in his stillness that she recognized a moment later as pain being managed rather than absent.

”Your face is pale,” she said, leaning forward slightly. ”Are you all right?”

”Why did Yorimasa want you?” Nathan asked, redirecting without acknowledging her question.

Ayame let him have it. For now.

”The usual reasons, I’m afraid.” A light shrug, self-aware rather than vain. ”I am a Princess of the royal line. I am, by most accounts, quite beautiful.” A small, dry smile. ”A Daimyo with ambitions finds both of those things useful in a wife. A claim to legitimacy and something pleasant to look at across the table.” She glanced toward Yukihime. ”Though I will confess, your companion rather exceeds my own claim in that department. Where are you from, if you don’t mind my asking?”

”Not so far,” Yukihime said.

The tone was polite in the way that a closed door is polite — it didn’t slam, it simply didn’t open. Her eyes had moved back to Nathan, and there was something in them when they rested on Ayame that was not hostility exactly but was adjacent to it.

Ayame noticed. She was very good at noticing. And rather than finding it irritating, she found it charming in the specific way that things are charming when they confirm what you already suspected.

She was still quietly enjoying this observation when the door opened and one of her women appeared, slightly breathless from hurrying.

”Ayame-sama. Everything is prepared. The carriage is waiting.”

Ayame rose with grace. She looked at Nathan with a small, composed smile.

”Then shall we, Ryo?”

Nathan stood. The motion was controlled and clean but Ayame caught, in the half-second before he settled into his stride, the briefest press of his hand against the side of his neck — fingers touching a spot between his collar and his shoulder, a touch too deliberate and too quick to be casual. His color, she noted again, was not what it should be.

She said nothing. But she watched him move toward the door with the careful attention of someone cataloguing information for later use.

They filed out into the passage — Nathan first, Yukihime at his shoulder, Ayame behind them, her women falling in around the group. The destination had already arranged itself in all of their minds, even those hearing it for the first time.

The Shinobi no Sato.