Nathan walked the corridors of the castle until they opened onto the street again, and then he kept walking.
He was not particularly interested in the south's internal politics. The daimyos, their territories, their alliances and grudges and the tangled arrangements they made between themselves — that was the south's business and the south had been conducting it without his input for a long time. He had no investment in any of it.
Except for the part where it might reach north.
That was the question sitting at the center of everything he had observed since the carriage had entered this domain — whether what was being built down here in the smoke and heat and hammer sound was something that stayed south, or something that had designs on the capital, on the royalty, on Kaguya and everyone around her. And the second question sitting underneath that one: whether any of it connected to Takehiko.
Those two questions were worth answering.
