Two Crows Watch from the Gallows Tree (part 5)

Tomhas dipped his head in understanding. "I'll go find him for you."

“Thank you,” she murmured. “I appreciate it.”

Tomhas nodded again and hurried out of the infirmary.

Ky settled back into the pillows. Hopefully Tadaaki was doing as good as could have been expected, given the circumstances. And hopefully Tomhas’s worry had been abated. And hopefully she didn’t make any other poor choices. She glanced at Gaius.


Tadaaki had also risen early, though not as early as the rest of the early-morning-crew. He’d woken from one too many night scares and was tired of the blood in his mind’s eye. So he’d gotten up and after a quiet argument that resulted in her staying with Tasia and him going out for some air, he wandered into the hall and began wandering for no reason whatsoever. But it was easier than laying still with his thoughts.

Gaius looked back at her; he had nothing to say, but he was sure she'd find something to talk about just like she always did.

Tomhas went first to Tadaaki's room and knocked.

(Ash: I do not wish to speak but you are incapable of shutting up so come on I guess xD)

Maybe she should just go back to sleep. She didn’t know how she was even supposed to carry on a conversation after all that. But her alternative was sitting here in awkward silence and she’d rather die then do that. She also wished she’d stop using “rather die” as a phrase in her brain. And yet.

She decided to vocalize the first question that came to mind, even though even she didn’t know where it came from. “What’s it like to have a Keep?”


Tadaaki had told Aashi to go back to sleep — but she hadn’t. Instead, she’d been lying awake and fretting. Over how he was holding up. About whether he was safe now — from others as well as from himself. And whether Tasia or to a lesser degree she herself was safe now. She stood and anxiously walked to the door at the knock, fearing the worst. Tadaaki wouldn’t have knocked. She pulled the door open and her stomach dropped as she saw Tomhas. Something had happened. Something just have happened for the Lord of the Keep himself to her showing up at her door. “What’s happened?”

Gaius blinked; that hadn't been what he'd expected. He'd thought she would go for some burning question about existence, pain, something like that. But asking about a Keep?
"It's a lot of work," he mused. "Lots of people to be responsible for, lots of matters to see to."

Tomhas smiled awkwardly. "Hi, Aashi. Sorry to disturb you. Nothing urgent's happened, don't worry. I was just wondering where I might find Tadaaki? Ky is asking for him."

Ky nodded. That made sense. “It’s always seemed quite complicated. Figuring out what you need to get you through the winter and then figure out what you have to do in the mean time to get you there.” By which she meant having a cottage. But she imagined it was the same, just orders of magnitude worse for it to be an entire Keep rather than a single room house.


“I… don’t know,” she murmured. She glanced back in the room at Tasia to be sure she was asleep still and then looked back at Tomhas. “He left about twenty minutes ago — wouldn’t tell me where he was going… I’m worried about him.”

"Precisely. And to manage an entire territory on top of that is no easy feat, either."

"I'll find him," Tomhas promised, brow furrowed in concern. "Don't worry."

“Do people disobey you a lot?”


“Thank you,” Aashi murmured. “I appreciate it.” Perhaps Tadaaki would talk to him, if he wouldn’t talk to her. He needed to talk to someone. It wasn’t healthy for him to bottle it up inside. “… do you know how Ky’s doing? He said she’d been stabbed.”

Gaius thought about it for a moment. His was one of the more well-behaved territories; he'd made his position on violent crimes very clear and petty crimes were more constructively punished than in the others. If someone was stealing food, they were obviously starving. No sense in punishing someone for something to be blamed on weather, money, or catastrophe. "Not a lot, no," he said finally. "They know better than that."

"She had.
Tomhas nodded, sighing. "She'll be alright, I think. She was more worried about everybody else than herself. It wasn't too bad a wound; it just bled a lot."

Ky looked at him curiously for a moment. Was that a threat? Not towards her, obviously. But was he a cruel overseer? She hoped not. “That’s good. Must make things easier.”

Aashi nodded. “That makes sense. Tadaaki says she’s ‘a bleeder’ whatever that means. I’m glad to hear she’ll recover, though.”

"It certainly does." He paused. "Slavers are the biggest problem, I think. It's a nuisance to have to patrol my borders so often. House Barraster, House Adree, and my own have all outlawed slavery but I share borders with House Tarr and House Bledroe."

Ky took a deep breath and nodded, remembering her brief transport between her township and her first master’s estate. Sure, she’d stabbed the man trying to take her and probably deserved all the abuse he meted out. But at the same time she’d been rather small and it didn’t feel particularly fair for a grown man to be beating a little girl as viciously as he had her. She wouldn’t have stabbed him in the first place if he hadn’t literally been actively kidnapping her, anyway. “They’re truly terrible. All of them.”

Gaius nodded in agreement. "Some of them have their uses, however temporary they may be, but they've got to take their business elsewhere and accept the risk of working with me."