I Enslaved The Goddess Who Summoned Me

When the preparations were finished and the farewells were brief, Nathan and Hanzo left the shinobi village together and let the road swallow them.

They rode on horseback, keeping a steady and unremarkable pace along the sandy path that wound through the trees and eventually opened into the broader stretches of countryside beyond. No escort flanked them, no formation traveled at their backs. To any eye watching from the roadside they were simply two travelers moving through the morning with no particular urgency. Other shinobis had departed separately, taking different routes and different timings, bleeding into the landscape the way only shinobis knew how to do. If things went the way they were supposed to, none of them would be connected to one another until it was far too late for that information to matter.

The political landscape had shifted considerably since Yorimasa’s death and the fall of Minato. Norihiro had read the situation clearly and responded to it. His men were everywhere now, spread across roads and checkpoints and the outskirts of villages that had nothing to do with him beyond geography. They moved in groups, alert and deliberate, carrying themselves with the particular tension of soldiers who had been told to be suspicious of everyone and had taken the instruction seriously. Losing a fellow daimyo and losing control over a strategically valuable city in such short succession had rattled him, and rattled men tended to make the world around them smaller and more dangerous.

”It would be better if we don’t shed blood until we reach Norihiro’s domain,” Hanzo said, her eyes ahead, voice low and even.

”It will be difficult to avoid if they find us and decide to make it a problem,” Nathan replied.

”That’s exactly the point. The moment blood is spilled on the road it sends a signal. Norihiro has enough men watching enough ground that word would reach him faster than we could ride. Right now we have the advantage of his ignorance. He doesn’t know where we are, he doesn’t know when we’re coming, and he doesn’t know what we look like today.” She kept her gaze forward. ”That advantage disappears the moment we make noise.”

”And you think riding horses down the main path is the quiet approach?” Nathan asked.

”For now it is,” Hanzo said, with the patient tone of someone who had already thought the objection through before it was raised. ”We look like travelers because we are dressed like travelers. Ordinary people use the main roads. Suspicious people avoid them.”

She had a point. Nathan had exchanged his black kimono for something considerably less distinctive before they left, muted colors and plain fabric that drew no second glances. More importantly, Kyomei was tucked away inside his space ring. That had been a deliberate calculation. By now the name Ryo had spread far enough and stuck firmly enough to a very specific image: a black haired ronin in a black kimono carrying a black katana. A dead daimyo and a liberated city had a way of burning a picture into people’s memory. He had stripped away every piece of that picture he could. The kimono was gone, the sword was hidden, and even the marks he had been carrying were removed.

The black hair remained, but black hair was common enough that it barely registered.

What was not common, and what Nathan was quietly aware of, was his face.

Aphrodite’s disguise had given him the appearance of a half-Kastorian, blending the local features of this land with something distinctly foreign. It was a precise and deliberate construction, designed to make him plausible enough not to raise alarms while still obscuring what he actually looked like. The problem was that half-Kastorian faces were unusual enough in this part of the country to catch the eye. They had already passed three separate groups of Norihiro’s soldiers on the road, and each time Nathan had felt the weight of their attention land on him a beat longer than it had on Hanzo. Curious looks rather than hostile ones, but curious was its own kind of problem if it accumulated.

He noticed Hanzo glance at him from the corner of her eye more than once as they rode.

”Is it your mother who is Kastorian,” she asked eventually, her voice carrying the careful neutrality of someone asking a question they have been sitting on for a while, ”or your father?”

”Neither,” Nathan said.

Hanzo absorbed that without immediate response. She was clearly aware that he had not offered her the explanation she was actually looking for, and equally clearly aware that pressing directly was not the way to get it.

Nathan considered her for a moment, then decided there was little harm in giving her something.

”This isn’t my real appearance,” he said.

Her head turned toward him. The surprise on her face was genuine and unguarded, which was unusual for her, and it lasted only a second before she smoothed it back into her usual composure and looked ahead again.

”I see,” she said simply.

She did not ask anything further. That was the shinobi in her, knowing when to let a silence do the work that questions couldn’t. But Nathan could see the shape of her thoughts moving behind her eyes anyway. Someone foreign, not from Kastoria and not from anywhere nearby. Someone that Kaguya had trusted deeply enough to hand Ayame’s safety to without hesitation. Someone who had walked through Yorimasa and Morosuke as though they were inconveniences rather than threats, who carried power that didn’t fit neatly into any category she had a name for.

Whoever Ryo actually was, Hanzo was becoming increasingly certain he was not ordinary. Not by a considerable distance. She even started doubting he could be someone famous now that she learnt he was wearing a disguise.

The hours passed slowly and without incident, swallowed up by the steady rhythm of hooves on packed earth and the gradual changing of the light as the sun climbed and then began its long descent. The road north was long and largely quiet, the kind of quiet that comes from a land that has learned to be careful about the noise it makes. Rolling stretches of countryside gave way to dense treelines and then opened again into broader plains, and through all of it the territory felt watched even when nothing was visibly watching.

Norihiro’s domain sat further north and angled east, past Minato and beyond several stretches of road that Nathan had not traveled before. He had a reasonable sense of where he was going, more than Hanzo likely assumed. Sakura had described the route to him during their time together on the road, walking him through landmarks and distances with the easy familiarity of someone who had made the journey many times. She had invited him too, openly and without any apparent awareness of the irony that now surrounded that invitation. He had not taken it seriously at the time. Seeing her again had not factored into any plan he was building. And yet here he was, riding north toward her father’s city with blood already decided at the end of the road.

He kept that thought at the back of his mind and left it there.

When evening began settling over the land, painting the sky in layers of amber and fading gold, Hanzo pulled her horse to a slower pace and started scanning the treeline on either side of the road with a methodical eye.

”We stop here for the night,” she said.

Nathan glanced at the sky. There was still some light left. ”We could push further.”

”We could,” Hanzo agreed, ”but we won’t. Traveling after dark on roads this heavily watched invites problems. If something happens at night it happens loud, and loud is exactly what we cannot afford right now.”

Nathan considered arguing the point and decided against it. He suspected the practical calculation about avoiding incidents was genuine, but he also suspected that Hanzo simply recognized when rest was the right answer and had no particular shame about choosing it. The horses had been working since morning. They needed water and stillness and time off the road, and pretending otherwise to save a few hours of travel wasn’t worth it.

They dismounted mid-road and walked the horses forward with the reins in hand, both of them scanning the edges of the path for a spot that offered enough natural cover to make a camp without advertising their presence to anyone passing by.

”Something I had in mind to ask,” Hanzo said as they walked, her voice unhurried. ”Where is your companion? The other woman.”

”She will join us later,” Nathan said.

Hanzo nodded once and didn’t push it. Nathan had already sent word ahead to Yukihime before leaving, mapping out the direction and the general destination. She would find them when she found them. He trusted that completely.

Beyond that, there was something to be said for the fact that Yukihime’s presence on the road would have complicated the disguise considerably. She was not the kind of person who blended in. The silver hair alone was enough to stop people mid-conversation, and her features carried that particular quality that made it very difficult for anyone nearby to think about anything else for a while. On a road crawling with Norihiro’s soldiers who were already primed toward suspicion, that kind of attention was the last thing they needed. There was also the small but relevant matter of her temperament. Yukihime had a threshold for patience that was not especially forgiving, and when something crossed it she did not spend much time deliberating about the response.

Traveling separately had been the cleaner choice all around.

They had walked perhaps another ten minutes when Nathan heard it. The low thud of hooves hitting ground from somewhere ahead, still out of sight but closing, and the distant flicker of torchlight beginning to resolve through the dusk between the trees.

Hanzo’s hand shifted almost imperceptibly near her side. ”We stay silent and amiable,” she said quietly, not looking at him.

Nathan said nothing. He kept his eyes forward and let his posture settle into something easy and unthreatening.

The group emerged from the bend in the road a moment later. Ten of them, maybe slightly more, mounted and moving at a pace that was just deliberate enough to suggest they were looking at everything they passed. Men and women both, dressed in a way that sat in the uncomfortable space between traveler and something else entirely. Their clothes were mismatched in the way of people who had accumulated rather than been outfitted, and their faces carried a collective expression that was not hostile exactly but was watching everything with an interest that had nothing comfortable behind it.

Nathan kept his pace steady and his gaze ahead.