I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

Nathan had not stayed inside the night.

The guest quarters had been fine — clean mat, good lamp, the castle’s interior woodwork carrying the quality of a domain that had been prosperous long enough to spend money on the details. But the forge district’s heat had not fully left the air even at night, and the castle’s walls held it in and turned the enclosed space into something close and heavy that had no interest in letting him breathe properly.

So he had gone up.

The roof tiles were cold at night, which was exactly what he wanted. He had crossed the sloped section near the east wing, found a flat ridge where two roof planes met, and lain down with his arms folded behind his head and Kyōmei beside him and the open sky above spreading from one horizon to the other in the deep, unobstructed dark of a territory with no lights above the treeline.

He had fallen asleep looking at the stars.

He woke to pale grey light and the forge district already beginning its day below — the first hammers striking up before the sun had fully cleared the trees, the smoke from the relit furnaces rising in thin early columns, the domain resuming its relentless rhythm as though the previous evening had simply been an interruption in the schedule rather than anything structurally significant.

Nathan lay on the tiles for a moment with his arms still behind his head and looked at the sky brightening above him.

Then Medea’s voice arrived.

It came the way it always came — not through his ears but directly, the telepathic thread she maintained across impossible distances arriving in the space behind his thoughts, warm and clear and carrying the particular texture of her voice that distance could diminish but not remove entirely.

He felt himself smile before he had decided to.

“Don’t push yourself,” he said immediately, his voice low and even, aimed at nothing visible. “This magic at this range is dangerous for you. We are in different kingdoms.”

“I’m fine,” Medea said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “How are you. What about Idena.”

He heard it before Medea answered — a small sound in the background of the connection, soft and high, the sound of a very small person making their presence known without words.

The smile returned and stayed.

“She misses you,” Medea said.

“I know.” He looked at the brightening sky. “I miss her too. All of you.” He paused. “I’ll need to stay longer here. Kastoria has more underneath it than I understood going in.”

“Do you need me to come?” The offer arrived without hesitation. “I can send Scylla. Charybdis as well, if you need them.”

He thought about it honestly.

The three of them would be useful — genuinely useful, not incidentally. Medea’s magic, Scylla’s capabilities, Charybdis — he would be able to move faster and with considerably more force available if any of them were here. The calculation was not complicated.

But.

“No,” he said. “All of you stay in Tenebria. Protect the capital. Protect everyone there.” He said it with the particular weight he applied to things that were not negotiable. “That is what matters most to me right now. Nothing goes wrong there.”

In the Tenebrian capital he had people who were everything — wives, children, the accumulated heart of everything he had built. The thought of Tenebria unguarded while he was moving through the south of a foreign kingdom dealing with daimyos and their weapons and a dead soldier in a stable was not a thought he was willing to allow to settle into anything comfortable.

“Okay,” Medea said. Simple, direct, the way she agreed to things she understood completely.

“Have they arrived?” he asked.

He felt her nod through the connection — or the impression of a nod, the way telepathy carried intent even when the gesture was physical.

“They have. The Queen welcomed them. They’re in the castle.”

Ryuuki and Haruka and their son, safely arrived at Tenebria. Another thing in its correct position.

“Everything is stable out there?” Nathan asked.

“It is,” she said. “Don’t worry. I have my eye on everything. Nothing will happen.”

He believed her. Medea’s eye on something was not an idle reassurance — it was a statement of fact about what the situation was going to be, delivered by someone who had the capability to make it true.

“Contact me the moment anything changes,” he said. “Anything at all. I will come immediately.”

“I know,” she said.

A beat of silence — the comfortable kind, the kind that didn’t need to be filled.

Then the connection closed, the warmth of her voice withdrawing back across the distance between kingdoms until it was gone and the castle roof was simply the castle roof again and the pale southern morning was simply the pale southern morning.

Nathan lay on the tiles for one more moment.

Then he sat up.

Below, the domain was fully awake. The hammers were going in earnest now, the smoke columns thickening, the workers visible in the forge street moving between their stations with the mechanical purposefulness of people who had a quota and knew what it was and intended to meet it.

He looked out across the rooftops toward the south.

Minato was half a day from here. Past the domain’s outer gate, back onto the south road, following it down toward the coast where it smelled of salt and fish and freedom from oversight.

Ayame was there.

Today.

“Ryo-sama!”

The voice came from below — sharp, slightly panicked, the particular pitch of someone who has been searching for a person in the places where people were supposed to be and has not found them there.

Akiko.

“Where are you?! Ryo-sama—!”

Nathan rose, found his footing on the ridge, crossed the roof slope in three steps and dropped.

The distance from the roofline to the courtyard stones was not trivial. He landed in front of her without sound, rising from the landing’s crouch in a single smooth motion, arriving in her line of sight from directly above.

“Kyaaaa—!”

Akiko stumbled backward, both hands flying up, her feet doing a frantic negotiation with the ground before she found her balance and stopped. She pressed one hand to her chest and looked at him with the wide eyes of someone whose heart had just done something dramatic.

“You scared me completely—” she managed, breathing too fast.

“Did the Daimyo summon us?” Nathan asked.

“Y — yes.” She collected herself with visible effort, smoothing her kimono, pressing the expression back into something more composed. “All of us. He wants everyone in the throne hall.” She hesitated, and the nervousness underneath the composure came through clearly. “For his judgment on yesterday.”

His judgment.

Sadamasa in his throne hall — or what remained of his throne — delivering the official position on a ronin who had dismembered his son in his own castle. Nathan considered what that position was likely to be, knowing what Sadamasa knew now and knowing what Nathan had told him the previous evening about what would follow any answer he didn’t like.

He walked past Akiko toward the main building.

She followed, hurrying to match his pace.

The corridors of the castle looked different in the morning light — the bodies had been removed overnight, the blood on the floors cleaned to the degree that the wood had allowed, which was not entirely but considerably. The castle had apparently spent the dark hours setting itself back in order. Nathan walked through it and observed the work without comment.

At the entrance to the throne hall corridor he found them.

Sakura stood near the closed doors with her hands clasped in front of her, her cherry blossom hair pinned up this morning in a careful arrangement that had clearly required effort and time — the effort of someone who had slept badly and woken early and had decided that presenting themselves correctly was the thing they could control, so they had controlled it. Her pink eyes were on the closed doors.

Beside her, Takefusa stood with his arms at his sides and his face in the controlled neutral expression of a veteran preparing to manage an outcome he couldn’t predict.

They both heard Nathan and Akiko approaching and turned.

Sakura’s eyes found Nathan immediately.

She looked at him — at the dark kimono, the sheathed Kyōmei, the complete absence of anything in his expression that resembled concern about what was behind those closed doors — and something in her own expression shifted. Not relief exactly. Something quieter than that.

“Ryo-sama,” Sakura called softly, glancing back at him.

Nathan looked at the closed doors. Then at the three of them standing in front of them.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked.

Takefusa opened his mouth and then closed it again. He had been in service for thirty years and had developed an answer for most situations that presented themselves. This ronin had systematically dismantled every category he had available.

The man was too casual about this. About all of it. About everything.

He said nothing.

At that moment the doors opened slowly, drawn back by the guards from inside, the heavy wood swinging inward without announcement.

Sakura drew a breath that she kept entirely private and walked in first.

Her sandals found the floor and she moved forward with the composure that had been her most reliable tool since childhood — the straight back, the measured pace, the expression that gave nothing away about the night she had just spent and what it had contained. Takefusa followed a step behind her left shoulder, his face its professional neutral. Akiko came after, her hands clasped, her eyes moving immediately to Sadamasa on his throne and then quickly away.

Nathan came last.

He walked through the doors and looked around the hall with the same unhurried assessment he applied to every room he entered — the new arrangement of the space, the cleaned floors, the repaired lamp that had been knocked from its hook during the previous evening and had been restored overnight. The throne had not been repaired. It sat in its broken state on the raised platform, the lacquered wood split and scattered, Sadamasa occupying what remained of its central structure with the particular stillness of a large man who had decided that the wreckage of the seat was less important than the authority of the person sitting in it.

He looked different this morning.

The thick layered kimono covered everything — the chest wound, the bruising, whatever the night’s aftermath had looked like underneath the composure he was currently presenting. His face was controlled and his eyes were even and nothing in his posture betrayed what Nathan had left him lying in the previous evening.

A man of the south. Whatever else he was, he knew how to present himself.

“Daimyo-sama.” Sakura bowed — deep, respectful, carrying in it every ounce of the grace her upbringing had installed in her.

Takefusa inclined. Akiko followed.

“It is fine,” Sadamasa said, raising one large hand. The gesture was measured — not dismissive, not warm, the careful middle register of a man conducting a formal proceeding he wanted behind him. “Before anything else — I owe you an apology for my son’s conduct last evening. Your ronin explained what happened and why he acted as he did.”

Sakura straightened.

“There is no need, Daimyo-sama,” she said immediately. “It was my fault entirely. Please do not place blame on anyone else.” She said it without hesitation — the instinctive move of someone pulling consequence toward her own shoulders where she could manage it, protecting the people around her before herself.

“Perhaps,” Sadamasa said. He looked at the side door. “But there is still an apology owed directly.”

The side door opened.

Yasumasa came through it.

He was walking — which was more than the previous evening had suggested he would be capable of at this hour — but the walk was not the walk of the man who had led Sakura through the estate yesterday with his hand at her back and his voice full of comfortable confidence. It was slow and careful and pale, each step placed with the deliberate attention of a body managing more than one source of difficulty simultaneously. The stump of his right arm was wrapped in thick clean bandaging, the dressing tight and recently done, the arm ending where it ended with the neatness of professional medical attention applied through the night.

His face was the color of unglazed clay.

He made his way across the throne hall floor to the point in front of Sakura and stopped there.

His head was already lowered before he arrived.

Sakura looked at him.

This was not the man from yesterday. Whatever yesterday’s Yasumasa had been — the warmth and the confidence and the hands and the cold threat delivered outside a closed room — it was not present in the figure standing in front of her now. What was present instead was something reduced, hollowed, the expression of a person who had been taken entirely apart by an evening and had not yet begun to reassemble himself.

“What I did to you was unforgivable,” Yasumasa said. His voice came out in a trembling register, barely above a murmur, as though producing it at full volume required something he no longer had. “I ask that you accept my apology.”

Sakura looked at him for a moment.

She was aware of everything — the night she had spent, the fear that had driven her down that corridor, the room and the closed door and what had been inside it before the wall of it had ceased to exist. She was aware of all of it and she was standing in a throne hall with it and being asked to receive an apology from the person who had put it there.

“I..It is fine,” she said. Her voice came out steady. “I forgive you. Please raise your head.”

Yasumasa lifted his face slowly.

His eyes found Sakura first — and then moved, the way eyes moved when something in the peripheral field was pulling at them regardless of where they were supposed to be pointed — and settled on the figure standing behind her.

Nathan was looking back at him.

Black eyes. Completely still. The same flat, patient expression that had been looking at him across a lamplit room when the wall of it had disappeared and everything Yasumasa had been in the middle of had stopped.

“Hiihh—!”

The sound came out before Yasumasa could stop it — a high, involuntary shriek, his body moving backward a full step before his conscious mind had issued any instruction, his remaining hand coming up in a bracing gesture that had no object.

The throne hall went absolutely silent.

Sakura stared.

Akiko stared.

Takefusa stood with the expression of a man watching something he was going to be thinking about for a very long time.

Yasumasa was shaking. Visibly, completely, the tremor moving through him from his shoulders down, his eyes locked on Nathan with the wide, fixed stare of someone who has been thoroughly and fundamentally shown where they stand in the order of things.

Nathan looked at him.

The expression on his face did not change at all.

That was the most frightening part.

“Take him out,” Sadamasa said.

His knights appeared from the sides immediately and moved to Yasumasa with the practiced efficiency of men who had clearly been posted there for exactly this eventuality. They guided him toward the side door — not roughly, but firmly — and Yasumasa went without resistance, his eyes staying on Nathan until the door’s angle took him from the sightline.

The door closed.

Sadamasa looked at the space his son had occupied for a moment.

“What happened was my son’s doing entirely and he will not repeat it,” he said. “The alliance proceeds as arranged with Daimyo Norihiro, unless you wish otherwise, Princess.”

“No,” Sakura said. “It is fine. Thank you, Daimyo-sama.” She bowed again.

“Then I will not keep you.” He looked at Takefusa. “You are returning to give Norihiro the news?”

“Yes, Daimyo-sama. We leave today,” Takefusa said.

“Safe road to you.” Sadamasa stood.

He was careful about it — the movement contained, deliberate, the controlled rising of a man managing something underneath the kimono that he was not going to allow to be visible in this room. He descended the platform steps at his own pace and walked toward the side exit without looking at Nathan once.

Not from ignorance.

From the specific choice of a man who had made an agreement the previous night and was honouring it by directing his attention entirely elsewhere.

The door closed behind him.

The throne hall held them in its quiet — the four of them standing in the morning light among the remains of the previous evening’s work, the broken throne on its platform, the clean floors that were not quite as clean as they had been two days ago if you looked at certain angles in certain light.

Sakura turned.

Takefusa turned.

Akiko turned.

All three of them looking at Nathan with the same expression — the shared, baffled, slightly overwhelmed expression of people who had just watched something resolve itself in a way that made no sense given the inputs.

He had cut the arm off the Daimyo’s son.

And Sadamasa had sat in his broken throne this morning and apologized on his son’s behalf and wished them safe road and walked out.

Nathan ignored all three of their stares with complete ease.

“Since this is done,” he said, already turning toward the doors, “I am leaving.”