The carriage rolled out of Minato’s gates in the grey morning light, its wheels finding the mountain road with a rhythm that settled into the background of the enclosed space inside. Through the lacquered panels came the muffled sound of hooves — Ayame’s women riding escort, disciplined and quiet. The town fell away behind them.

Inside, the three of them sat in the arrangement the carriage had assigned them — Ayame composed on one side, Nathan and Yukihime across from her, Yukihime having managed to reduce the gap between herself and Nathan’s arm to something approaching zero without appearing to have done so deliberately.

Ayame’s eyes moved between them with the pleasant attention of someone who finds the dynamic genuinely interesting.

"So then, Ryo," she said, settling back with a small smile. "Tell me about yourself."

Yukihime’s expression tightened almost imperceptibly. She shifted closer.

Nathan looked at Ayame for a moment — the unhurried assessment of someone deciding how much a question merits.

"I am an ally of Kaguya," he said.

Ayame’s eyes narrowed slightly, though the smile didn’t leave. "An ally of Kaguya-sama." She repeated the phrasing with deliberate care, as though turning it over to examine its underside. "Not an ally of Kastoria. Not a servant of the throne. Of Kaguya personally." She tilted her head. "That’s an interesting distinction to make. Either you feel some personal debt toward her, or—" she paused, scanning his face "—no. That’s not it either. You speak of her too evenly. Almost as an equal speaks of an equal." Another pause, something recalibrating behind her eyes. "Whatever category I had assigned you when you first walked into my room, I’ve revised it upward considerably since then."

"Does that change anything?" Nathan asked.

"That depends entirely on you." Ayame laughed softly — genuine amusement, not performance. "Does it change anything for you?"

"If you take the throne and hold Kaguya’s side," Nathan said, "then you will have me on yours."

The carriage moved through a stretch of quiet road, the mountain air coming through the gaps in the panels cold and clean. Ayame was silent for a moment, watching him with an expression that had lost some of its practiced quality and become something more direct.

She didn’t know who he was. She knew his name was probably not Ryo, that he was not from Kastoria, that he had done things in the past few days that men twice his age with armies behind them had failed to do. She knew almost nothing concrete about him. And yet the words he had just spoken — simple, unadorned, offered without theatre — landed in her chest with the weight of something real and reliable in a way that very little had in a very long time.

It was almost disorienting, how safe she felt hearing them.

"Then may I hope," she said, her voice a shade quieter, "that you’ll be at my side in the capital?"

"Why," Yukihime said, in a tone that was perfectly polite and completely glacial, "would Ryo-sama be at your side?"

"Protection, of course." Ayame’s smile shifted fractionally — not less warm, but more deliberate, directed now squarely at Nathan with the full, unhurried attention of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing. "Having a man of such capability close by — I can’t imagine feeling anything but entirely safe."

"You just said you wanted the shinobis for that," Nathan said.

"I want the shinobis, yes. But I wouldn’t say no to you as well." A slight, elegant lift of her shoulder. "Would you?"

"I’m not from Kastoria," Nathan replied. "Remaining in the capital wouldn’t be possible."

Ayame studied him for a moment — his features, the quality of them, the way they didn’t quite belong to any lineage she could place. "No," she said slowly, "you don’t look as though you are, now that you say it. There’s something different about you." She let it settle. "Which kingdom, then?"

"A distant one."

She exhaled quietly. "You are remarkably consistent in saying very little."

Nathan shifted the subject the way he always did — without transition, without apology, simply placing a new thing in the air for the room to orient toward.

"If you take the regent’s throne, you understand you’ll be moving against your nephew."

Ayame’s expression didn’t collapse, but something in it settled into a more sober register. "I’ve heard Takehiko takes after his father in temperament." A pause. "In that case, I find I have very little sentiment to spare for him. Haruka and her child come first. They always will."

"Even against the full weight of the samurai clans?" Nathan said.

She looked at him.

"All three of them," he added. The great houses of the north, east and west — the pillars that the old order stood on, deep-rooted and formidable, each one carrying names that had meant something in Kastoria for generations. Kaguya had already told him: Demigods walked among them. The kind of strength that didn’t announce itself until it was already inside your guard.

Nathan held the facts plainly in his mind without dressing them in anything more comfortable. He was currently on the side that, assessed by the visible weight of assets alone, was losing. Takehiko had the samurai clans. He had Demigods. He had the institutions and the names and the architecture of the old order behind him. Kaguya had her position, her intelligence, Nathan himself — and now, perhaps, Ayame and a scattered band of shinobis who hadn’t been home in years.

The arithmetic was not flattering.

"Even so," Ayame said, after a moment. Her voice was quiet but there was nothing uncertain in it — the stillness of someone who has already made their peace with a difficult calculation and is no longer revisiting it. "I’ve spent enough years surviving without the samurai clans’ goodwill to know I don’t require it." She met Nathan’s eyes. "What I require is the right person to make the rest of it possible."

Nathan looked at her in the quiet of the moving carriage and reassessed what he was looking at.

She had built something real in Minato — not borrowed, not inherited, not propped up by a powerful man’s name. She had walked into one of the most dangerous towns in Kastoria, a place where Morosuke ran his empire of violence and Yorimasa’s shadow stretched down from the mountain, and she had carved out a functioning sanctuary inside it. Women who had nowhere else to go had found somewhere to go. Years had passed without either man managing to reach her, despite having every structural advantage. That wasn’t luck or charm — that was the work of someone who understood power clearly and knew precisely how to operate within it.

Now he understood why Kaguya had said her name without hesitation.

Ayame on the throne willingly, oriented in the right direction, listening when it mattered — that was an entirely different proposition from Ayame placed there by force and quietly working against everything around her. The difference between a foundation and a trap with a throne sitting on top of it.

"The tensions have been building since my nephew was born," Ayame said, her tone conversational but her eyes sharp. "And these last few days — whatever you’ve been doing out here — haven’t exactly calmed them." A small smile at the corner of her mouth. "The probability of my being assassinated somewhere between the capital gates and the throne room seems, I would estimate, quite high. Does that seem fair to you?"

"Maybe," Nathan said.

She laughed softly — not at the word but at the complete evenness with which he delivered it, as though the prospect of her assassination was a weather condition worth acknowledging but not dramatizing. "Then you understand entirely why I want capable people physically present beside me. It isn’t sentiment."

"I’ll get you the shinobis," Nathan said.

The simplicity of it — stated the way someone states that they’ll pick something up on the way home — produced another quiet laugh from Ayame, genuine this time.

"And the samurai clans?" she said, the lightness in her voice settling into something more careful. "If they are fully committed to Takehiko’s side — and from everything I’ve seen, they are — do I need to fear them moving on the capital directly? Because that is not a theoretical question, Ryo. That is what keeps a regent awake at night."

Nathan was quiet for a moment.

She was asking the right things in the right order. She had probably been thinking through this sequence since the moment she’d decided to stand up and walk toward him in that hidden room — mapping the dangers, identifying the gaps, testing whether the person she was about to trust with her life had actually thought past the immediate objective. He could respect that.

"You don’t need to fear the samurai clans," he said, and the weight he put behind it was not reassurance performed for comfort but the flat, forward-looking certainty of a man stating his intentions. He held her gaze. "I will deal with them." 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Ayame looked at him for a moment without speaking.

It was, objectively, an enormous thing to say. The three great samurai houses — the north, east and west pillars of Kastoria’s old order, ancient names with deep roots and Demigod blood running through their senior ranks — and a single man in a carriage on a mountain road saying I will deal with them with less affect than one might use to discuss a road condition.

And yet.

The same wordless certainty that had settled over her when he’d offered his protection a few minutes ago settled over her again now, unreasonable and complete. She didn’t know his full measure. She wasn’t sure anyone did. But she had looked at enough men across enough years to understand the difference between bravado and weight, and Nathan carried no bravado at all. What he had instead was something quieter and considerably more convincing.

After the capital was secured — Ayame installed, the court stabilized around her, the immediate dangers managed — the north would need addressing. Takehiko’s foundation was built on those three houses. The Demigods within them, the armies behind them, the legitimacy their names lent to his claim. Dismantle that support and the edifice above it would lose its footing.

That had always been the direction this needed to go. Ayame on the throne bought time. The samurai clans were the clock running against it.

And to get rid of Takehiko he will have to start with the Samurais clans first. If he had to kill all of them, so be it, he will do it.