The Last Coin

The Scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written by Mike Daltrey. Episode fifty one, The Last Coin. Cobb's voice was the sound of. A dying animal. There's no point. The word hung in the cold, thin air of the barren hills. The march stopped. The fragile thread of my will, the only thing that had been pulling them forward snapped. They turned on me. Not with blades, not yet, but with their eyes. Or So was the first to speak. He was not angry, he was just done. He's right, dre Where are we going? His voice was flat, a cold statement of fact. You've marched us into a graveyard. There's no food, there's no water. Gray Mark is behind us, and the sea is probably already putting a bounty on our heads. Your plan has failed. He's right, stick and rumbled, his voice a low growl of pure, exhausted misery. He gestured at his bandage to burned hands. I can barely hold my axe. What are we doing here but walking to our own graves? I had no answer. I was a king of nothing, my authority a hollow, ringing echo. I had led them from one disaster to another, and now I had finally led them to the end of the line. They were broken, and I was the one who had broken them. The pack was dissolving. In that moment, I knew I had lost them weight. The voice was Slaine's. It was quiet, but it cut through the despair like a shard of glass. We all turned to look at her. She stood apart her face mask of grime, but her eyes held a cold, calculating light that had been missing for days. She was not broken, She was just calculating. He's right, she said, nodding it. Or so the plan has failed. We have nothing almost She slowly deliberately reached into a hidden pocket sewn into the lining of her tunic. My heart, which I had thought was a dead stone in my chest, gave a single, hard thump. With a surgeon's care, she pulled out a small, folded scrap of cloth. I kept one, she said. She unwrapped it. There in the palm of her hand lay the last silver coin. In the chaos of the gutters. I had forgotten her claim to the last piece of silver, the one she now held in her hand. It was a beacon in the gray twilight. It was a single, perfect, impossible coin. Cobbs weeping stopped. Stigan took a half step forward, his eyes wide. She held it up for us all to see, our last hope. This is not a treasure, she continued, her voice all business, the Quartermaster back in control. It is a tool. It is our way out. She laid out the plan. It was logical, it was practical, and it was the most pathetic, soul crushing thing I had ever heard. We are not warriors. We are not kings, she said, her eyes meeting mine, a cold, final judgment. We are scavengers, and we have forgotten how to scavenge. Her plan was simple. She would go alone. She was the only one who could pass for a villager. She would walk to the nearest settlement, one a full day's march away from us and when we were avoiding due to it being so close to gray Mark, and find a place to break the coin, A danger difficult task in itself. She would use the coppers to buy hardtack salt, a few new waterskins, and maybe a cheap sharp blade or two. We go back to what we know, she concluded, her gaze sweeping over us. We find a quiet, forgotten road. We stop hunting kings and start hunting merchants again. We become bandits. We survive a return back to the beginning, back to the tangle, to fighting over a single pig, to being routed by a caravan. It was a full circle. I watched the faces of my crew. I saw the look in their eyes as they stared at that coin. It was not hope. It was resignation. Cob stiggand even or So they were beaten. They were ready to accept this. They were ready to go back to being bottom feeders because it was a life they understood. It was in its own miserable away or return home. I looked at the silver salary gleaming in Selaine's hand. I looked at my broken crew, ready to follow this new sensible path back into the mud. And I realized, with a cold, terrible certainty that this plan wasn't a path to survival. It was just a warmer, slower, more pathetic way to die. It was a grave they were digging for themselves, and they were going to climb right into it.