Speaker 1: The scum Kings, a broad Sword Studio production created and
written by Mike Daltrey.
Speaker 2: Chapter seven, The Closed Door. I wake up because my
stomach is trying to eat itself. The hold is pitch black.
The only sounds are stigging, slow breathing, or So's occasional mutter,
and the creak of the hull. Even Gix's humming is
nowhere to be heard. The river laps against the planking
like a tongue. One more night, That's what Brenns said
through the hatch at sundown. One more night and we're free.
Forty eight hours of nothing but dark and thirst and
the taste of my own teeth shift against the hull,
trying to find a position where my ribs don't press
against the wood. The ropes on my wrists have rubbed
the skin raw. Every movement is a small fire. Then
I hear something soft, scrape wood on wood, not the hull, groaning,
something deliberate, a door. I open my eyes, but keep
my head still. In the dark. Movement is louder than sound.
A thin line of orange light appears across the hold.
The storage room door cracked open. A body slips out.
One of Brynn's crew. I can't see her face, but
I recognize the way she moves, quick, low, practiced at
being quiet. It's the rigor Lynn, the one Stiggin messed with.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Then she straightens her shirt, tucking it back into her belt.
Something cold settles in my chest. A moment later, Selaine
steps out. I close my eyes, I slow my breathing.
I make myself a sleeping man. I wonder if Selaine
got singled out for a middle of the night beating
a traitor to the women, or something like that. Through
slits in my eyes, I watch Lynn looks down at Selaine,
and there's something on her face that I can't quite
read in the thin light. It's not disgust, it's not anger.
It's comfort, familiarity. She takes Selaine's wrists gently and wraps
the rope back around them. She ties the knot, but loosely,
a knot that could be slipped in seconds. Then she
touches Selaine's shoulder a brief, almost tender gesture, and disappears
up the ladder without a sound. Slaine sits down against
the hull, three feet from me. She settles in adjusting
her bindings. She doesn't know I'm watching. I see her face.
She looks tense, nearly distraught, wired with what. My first
thought is that my eyes were fooling me earlier, and
that Lynn did drag her to a hole to beat her.
Typical Selaine. She said something sharp to the wrong woman
and got her teeth rattled for it. It wouldn't be
the first time her mouth wrote a debt her body
had to pay. But that's not what I'm looking at.
I finally see it. She doesn't look hurt. She doesn't
look angry or afraid or humiliated. She looks satisfied. Her
lips are slightly parted, her eyes are half closed, not
in pain, but in something like contentment. She licks her
lips slowly and leans her head back against the hull
with a small, private sigh. She's been fed. The realization
hits me like a fist to the chest. While we've
been rotting in the dark, gnawing on our own tongues,
Selaine has been eating, drinking maybe more. Was she trading something?
Was Lynn the payment or the pay? Were they lovers?
Or was this commerce a negotiation conducted in whispers and
closed doors while the rest of us starved. I look
at her in the dark, really look, and I see
it now. Her lips aren't as cracked as ours. Her
skin isn't as gray. She's thinner, yes, but not hollowed
out like Orso, who looks like a scarecrow someone forgot
to burn. She's been surviving in a way that we cannot.
Part of me wants to be furious. She's supposed to
be suffering with us. That was the deal, the collective
punishment that saved Stigan's life. But another part of me,
the part that still knows how to think through the
red fog of hunger, recognizes something worse. She found power
in a cage in the dark, with her hands tied.
She found a lever that none of us can pull,
not me, not or So, not stiggand with his mountains
of muscle. I think about the redhead who tied my hand,
The way she grabbed me, the way it made me
feel small.
Speaker 1: That was cruelty.
Speaker 2: What Selaine is doing, that's strategy. She is the only
one of us who understood, from the moment the hatch
closed that this boat runs on a currency we don't carry.
I close my eyes. Power The only power I showed
in three days was the willingness to starve