Speaker 1: The scum Kings, a Broadsword Studio production created and written
by Mike Daltrey, episode fifty three, The Icon.
Speaker 2: They were twenty paces away, but it felt like a mile.
I stood at the edge of our miserable, fireless camp,
a king in exile, and watched them, my crew, my pack,
or at least they had been. Now they were Orso's.
He was the new center of gravity. He was kneeling,
scratching a crude map in the dirt with a stick.
Selaine was beside him, her head bowed in concentration, pointing
at a mark he'd made. Brinn sat nearby, her back
to me, her attention fixed on Orso's plan. And Cob,
the sniveling, weeping coward, was huddled behind them, as if
for warmth. They were the pragmatists, the survivors. They had
made the logical choice. Even Stiggant, my great loyal Northmen,
sat near them. He had his back to me, a silent,
brooding mountain of betrayal, staring at his burned hands. He
hadn't joined them, not officially, but he hadn't stayed with
me either. Dix was the only one who seemed unbothered,
sitting apart from us, both idly sharpening a jagged piece
of flint, humming a tuneless airy dirge. He was a
spectator at my execution. I turned my back on them.
I couldn't look at them anymore. A king, a scum king,
what a fucking joke, A king of ashes and dust,
a king of nothing. I began to pace a caged animal,
my boots crunching on the loose gravel. The rage in
my gut was a cold, sick thing. It had no target,
or so. I wanted to hate him, to smash his smug,
scarred face in, But I couldn't, because he was right.
His cold, miserable logic had won his plan to become
a common Bandit again was pathetic, but it was a plan.
It was more than I had. My fire, my gut,
my will. It had all led us here to this
barren graveyard of rock. I had failed. The walk was
a torrent of my own failures. I thought of the
priest's bloody, laughing mouth mocking my six copper prize. I
thought of Corven's calm, pitying smile as he dismantled my
pride without throwing a punch. I thought of stiggand hurling
the lantern and turning our one true victory into a
blazing pillar of smoke and ruin, which was my fault
as much as his cale was dead, rat was a
scream in the smoke. And now this the pack was broken,
my authority. The only thing I'd ever truly built was
a lie. It was a thing I'd held together with
my fists and the iron in my voice. But what
good is a strong voice when your stomach is empty?
What good is a fist when the enemy is a cold,
hard fact Orso's words echoed in my head, a hammer
blow on an anvil. Where are we going, Dre? I
had no answer, I had nothing. I stopped pacing. The
wind was a cold knife, and for the first time
I truly felt it. I wasn't a king, I wasn't
even a leader. I was just a man, cold and
hungry and alone in the middle of nowhere. A failure,
my hands trembling slightly from cold, from rage, I didn't
know which went to my pouches. It was a desperate, final,
pathetic act, a fool's inventory. I was searching for anything,
a single copper I might have missed, a forgotten crust
of heart attack, from the pilgrim's pack, a loose thread,
anything to prove I wasn't completely and utterly empty. My
fingers fumbled in my belt pouch, nothing but worn leather
and lint. I jammed my hand into the deep pocket
of my tunic, the one I used for my most
private possessions. Nothing weight, not nothing. My fingers, numb and clumsy,
brushed against something hard and smooth, tucked into the seam
at the very bottom. It was small, oblong, and cold
as the stones around us. I'd forgotten it was even there,
forgotten in the fire and the blood and the running.
I'd buried it under the weight of my own failures.
My heart, which I had thought was a dead stone
in my chest, gave a single, hard, unfamiliar thump. Slowly,
I pulled my hand from the pouch. I uncur old
my fingers. There in the grimy palm of my hand,
resting in the lines of my own failure, was the
Pilgrim's ivory icon Worthless. Selaine had called it a token
of a dying faith. I stared at it. The light
of the pale, dying sun was just enough to see
the carving, the severe, judgmental face of the stern visage.
It stared back at me, its expression as cold and
unforgiving as Orso's. It was the last thing I owned
in the world.