Two Crows Watch from the Gallows Tree (part 7)

“It does.” Ky nodded quickly, afraid she was sounding ungrateful. She shouldn’t bring up her past at all. It always made her sound entitled, which she didn’t mean to be. “This family has been absolutely wonderful to me and I could never express how much I appreciate them.”

They just weren’t part of her past. And it was hard to reconcile the present with the past. And gods only knew about the future.

"Then I bet they'd let you go down South to visit your father. Tomhas Loquitur has a good reputation; I've heard he's kind. So why not ask, when it's safe?"

“I might.” Ky shrugged. “It’ll just be odd to see everyone again. It’s a very, very small township. And the kid that left isn’t anything at all like the woman that would be returning. They don’t know me anymore… and I don’t know that they want to.”

That was perhaps a bit harsh. She had no doubt the villagers cared about her as much as she felt like they did when she was young. But would they like the new her? Would they want to put in the effort to deal with her trauma? And, worse yet, would they be resentful that she got out when all the rest of the kids didn’t? She didn’t want to rub salt in their wounds.

Ada nodded thoughtfully. The Isi might already have moved on, assuming she was dead. That would be a bit like what Ky was feeling now, she guessed. All the more reason to get home quickly.
"Why would you think that? You're still Ky, right?"

“Heh.” Ky kicked at a clump of snow, watching as it exploded in a puff around her boot. Was she still Kylia? Or had Kyber sank his claws too far into her identity?

She kept walking, shivering. "That's no answer. Come on, we're nearing the grove."

“I don’t know what I am these days.” She pulled her furs tighter around her. “But it’s not the person I want to be… and I guess I’d rather leave them with the memory of who I was, than let them see what I’ve become.”

"But then they don't know if you're alright or not," Ada pointed out. "I've only been away from my family a short time and I've changed a lot. I still want to get home to them, so they know I'm okay. Surely that counts for something, even if you're different?'

“Perhaps,” she agreed, thankful that Ada didn’t lecture her about needing to be the person she wanted to be. “But it might also just open old wounds for no reason. It’s been three years, and I’m the only one who’s gotten freed. Me randomly showing up will no doubt pain all the parents of the other kids who were my age when we got taken.”

"You could find the other kids," Ada suggested. "Do you have an idea of where they went?"

“I think they’re all still with him,” she murmured, flushing and looking at the ground rather than at Ada. “And I don’t want to have to report that to their parents… I think I’d rather not know what happened to my child, than have confirmation he raped my eleven year old daughter and has continued to do it since. They were all… so very, very young.”

Ada tensed at that, hesitating before she asked. "Who took you?"

“Makata,” she murmured. “He was - is? - the ruler of our sector… I think he was getting worried about a potential rebellion, even though there wasn’t even a whisper of it in our township, so he took all the kids eleven to fifteen. So now there’s a big gap between the adults too old to lead a coup and the kids too young to help with one. So he doesn’t have to worry about it for another few years… and I’m sure he’ll do it again, once they get older.”

That thought hurt her. She’d never said it aloud before now. Were all the tiny children in her township at risk now that they were growing up? Had their parents gotten them to safety? Were they even able to? None of them had money to make their way out on their own.

Ada stared at her, appalled. This was beyond anything she'd heard before--and she heard a lot, living with the Isi. "We'll all go kill him," she said quietly. "We'll travel to Austraka and kill him."

Ky shook her head glumly. “Tomhas doesn’t have any authority at all in the South. He can’t stop him.”