We’d had too much to drink. She slept in a pile of covers. I exited the room, and gently closed the door behind me, locked it. My fingers slipped the key into my pants pocket.

  I felt wired, head to toe. It was the most exhilarating night I’d had in a long time. Short of when I got in a car wreck that one time. Or the first day I got here. Or taking that level in Bard. Okay, I've had a lot of crazy nights.

  But this was one of the good ones.

  More people were out on the deck now. It was deep into the night, and the stars still swirled their milky radiance above. Faint talk, and lamplight spilled from the staircase leading down.

  With not much else to do, I walked to the railing. Here, also, was Cal the Ranger.

  “Good evening,” I said on approach.

  Cal just nodded.

  “Thanks for the assist back there,” I continued, referring to the arrow he’d shot during my fight with the pirates.

  “You are welcome,” he said, not turning to regard me.

  “You doing alright?”

  He turned to look at me finally, and gave me an annoyed smile.

  “I am doing as well as I can,” he said. “The past couple days have been eventful.”

  “Yeah? Caleb not believe you?”

  “Quite the opposite,” he said. “He accepted me as his son almost immediately.”

  “What does the Queen think?”

  “She seems to be ignoring me for now.”

  “Probably best,” I said. “So that’s good! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “I don’t know what I wanted,” he said, eyes narrow in the lamplight as if he were trying to spy something on the horizon. “But I think I would have preferred condemnation. Or disbelief. I’d gone so long imagining that I would have to fight for his acceptance and… he just accepts me right away?”

  “Easier to be angry, huh?”

  He laughed darkly.

  “Far easier. Now I have to deal with the fact that I actually like the son of a bitch.”

  “He’s accepting and kind. What an asshole.”

  “Right?”

  My slate buzzed in my pocket. I took it out thinking it was maybe Rachel checking in. It was not.

  Huh. I hadn’t thought about the DM in a while. But that sounded pretty helpful.

  “It’s like you go through all this time building up this moment in your head, and in some ways it lives up to it, but in others it’s like — ‘now what?’” Cal stopped talking when he noticed me staring at my slate. “What’s that?”

  I figured it wouldn’t kill him to know.

  “It’s a magic slate of crystal,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know that. Caleb showed me.”

  “Really? Right away?”

  “Yeah. Likes to show everyone his stats when he’s drunk. Apparently, I’m a temporary member of your party. So, what’s so important?”

  “It’s got a new function now,” I said. “What else did he say about it?”

  Cal patted his hair, rubbed his beard, and frowned.

  “Well, he said it was some kind of magic information mirror. But a lot of the way it conveyed information was in the form of a game. And everyone had statistics in it. Now that I’m in his party, I have stats too.”

  “That’s close enough. Want to see everyone’s stats?”

  “Sure,” he said with a shrug.

  I scanned the party’s stats real quick before handing them over.

  Bernadette’s stats were mostly the same, but for an ability score increase to her dexterity. This meant that her main stat was the highest it could be for a human. Presumably she could raise it later through magic items or boons. I’d have to ask the DM about it.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Radiant Reach was new. Kind of excited to see how that worked. Next was me. I’d leveled up earlier in the day.

  Nothing new really, outside my dexterity increase. Hopefully I could actually hit something with my new bow. I also picked up the ‘ward’ spell. It protected either me or an ally from a single attack. A little pricey on spell slots to use, but I think it could really be a game changer.

  Next was Caleb. A little disappointed he didn’t have any of his magic weapons equipped, but his stats were impressive enough.

  My big takeaway from this is that the safest place to be in a fight was right next to him. His auras were powerful. And his stats were such that he’d be a serious threat even unarmored. Last was Cal’s stats.

  They were respectable.

  After handing Cal the slate, I heard him say, “Caleb Junior? What the hell does that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “That’s not your name?”

  “I’m not a junior! If anything my last name should be Afon! Not his.”

  “I didn’t write this,” I argued.

  “Who did?” he asked.

  I just shrugged to avoid lying.

  I was still buzzing from all the alcohol, and the fact that I got to touch a girl’s boobs tonight, so it took me a while to realize that the next couple of days was going to be a lot of work. The fun was over, for now.

  We had to prepare for some kind of attack, and we had no idea what it was, how large the scale, or from what direction it would come. Cal was part of the group now, but did he even want to be? What if he was a weak link?

  “What do you think about being part of the group?” I asked. “We took you in to fight a dragon. Now you’re just here. Do you even want to be?”

  “I do,” he said. “I’ve seen Caleb’s kingdom. It’s beautiful. People are happy and safe. I’m not sure I agree with how he maintains it, or even that we wouldn’t be happier without any kingdoms at all. But then I hear about what happened to the people in the Kingswood, how the monsters overran them. And I want to make sure it doesn’t happen here. If that means I must protect a goodly tyrant, then so be it.”

  “So you’re with us for now?”

  “For now.”

  “And this isn’t just an excuse to get to know your dad?”

  “It’s certainly an excuse to get to know the King. But he is a good man. And he is doing a worthwhile project.”

  “Good enough for me,” I said.

  I left him to his thoughts, and spent the next couple of hours staring at the stars in silence, holding close the memory of Bernadette under me, and the way her tongue swept across the back of my teeth. If I had nothing else, I had that.

  I eventually headed down into the hold to get some sleep in a hammock. On the way, I passed the King and Queen asleep together. She lay on his massive chest, and he on the hammock, and for a moment she didn’t look like a hundreds of years old elven queen. She just looked like a woman.

  Two royal guards, a man and a woman, passed a bottle of coffee between them as they talked quietly, seeking to keep the other awake while their charges slept.

  I also saw Brealyn asleep against Rachel’s shoulder, slate still in hand. In fiction and in games there was this whole thing about elven trances. In this world, they just slept, like the rest of us. Though maybe they needed less of it than we did.

  Rachel’s eyes snapped open as I passed. She extricated herself, and grabbed me by the arm.

  “Everything okay?” she asked, voice low. Braelyn didn’t stir.

  “Yeah.”

  “What are you doing down—”

  “We hooked up, but not like, all the way.”

  “Ah. Too much pressure for a first date?”

  “Yeah. We had fun though.”

  “I bet,” she replied, waggling her eyebrows.

  I slapped her shoulder lightly.

  “Get some sleep,” she said, “we’re gonna need to be sharp tomorrow.”

  “Right,” I said. “Wait, do we have a plan for tomorrow?”

  “All the queen’s spies and all our luck and we only just managed to stop Mia, but we still don’t know what’s gonna happen at the ball.”

  “So, no plan?”

  “The plan is to protect Caleb, and his sons at all costs. Mark will be there. If we have to, he can teleport up to 8 people out at a time before he runs out of spell slots.”

  “We’re essentially using Caleb as bait?”

  “No. Maybe? Caleb won’t cancel the ball for anything. He’s stubborn like that.”

  “Well, this didn’t reassure me at all.”

  “What can we do?”

  I said goodnight again.

  Rachel fished a flask out of her backpack. I nodded to her as I settled in. She drank and gazed at Braelyn, eyes dark with some emotion I was too tired, or stupid to read.

  I’d have to ask her about it later.

  I slept, and I dreamed of dragons.