by Logan Jacobs
“Oh, that?” Leif laughed. “No, don’t worry about that. Nobody uses that shit for battle here. It’s just to announce that the leaders of the city have arrived at the race, so it’ll start before too long.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” I said as I dropped my hands back to my sides. “You’d think they could have come up with a better sound to make that kind of announcement, though.”
“You know the elves,” the big gladiator said with a shrug. “They like to get people’s attention.”
“I guess an elven battle horn is one way to do that,” Penny sighed. “Come on, we better hurry, or we won’t get decent fucking seats.”
Leif pushed forward through the crowd again until we were inside the race grounds, and then I started to look around for the best spot to view the race. The stands themselves were built into one of the cliffs that overlooked the lake, so they formed a half-circle that rose at a gradual angle from the edge of the lake all the way up to the back row of the stands.
It was a solid design, since we would be able to see the boats on the lake below from almost any seat that we picked. But I also knew that where we sat was a reflection of our wealth and power in this city, and that was exactly why I started to move toward one of the private balconies that had been built into the side of the cliff.
Most of the other balconies were filled with elven nobles who had come to watch the race, but I picked this one because I saw that Lord Flavius was inside it, and if the day elf wanted to get paid, then he would be more than happy to share his balcony with us.
“Hello, Flavy,” Penny said with a smile when we reached the entrance of the balcony.
“Oh!” The day elf jumped to his feet. “Oh, hello. I didn’t expect to see you all here today.”
“Surprise,” I said with a smirk. “We just thought we’d come check on our little investment and then watch a few minutes of the race while we’re at it.”
“Of course,” Lord Flavius said. “Why don’t you come in and watch it with me? There’s a good view of the bar and the servers from here, too.”
“Oh, well, that’s very kind of you to offer,” I said. “I think we will join you, thanks.”
As we all stepped into his balcony, Flavius looked up at the big gladiator like he might piss himself, but he kept his shit together and stepped out of the way, so we could all move toward the front of the balcony for the best view.
“How long have we got before it starts?” Penny demanded.
“The mayor just sat down,” Flavius said, “so probably less than five minutes. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing you need to concern yourself with,” Penny said. “Wade, can I steal you for just a minute?”
“Sure,” I said. “Dar and Leif, just make yourselves comfortable, alright?”
I wasn’t sure what Penny wanted to talk about in private, but I took her hand and led her back over to the entrance of the balcony, where no one else would be able to overhear us.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, I’m more than okay,” Penny said with a little smile. “I’m late.”
“No, you heard Flavius,” I said. “We’re right on time. I know we didn’t get here as early as we thought, but I can already smell the whiskey on people’s breaths, so I think everything’s going exactly how we want, and--”
“Wade,” the redheaded pixie interrupted me. “Let me say that again-- I’m late. By a few weeks.”
At first, I just stared at her, but then as her words started to sink in, I felt myself grin.
“By a few weeks?” I repeated. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yeah,” Penny said. “I missed my last cycle, but I thought I might have just been a little irregular, but then this morning, I felt sick when I woke up, and then I realized exactly how many weeks it’s been since I had my last cycle.”
“But we only just--”
“It must have happened before that,” the pixie said. “I must have gotten pregnant sooner than I thought.”
I grabbed Penny by the waist, spun her around in the air, and finally set her back down.
“So we’re going to have a baby, too?” I grinned. “I couldn’t be happier, Penny.”
“Me too,” the redhead said as she bit her lip. “Honestly, it doesn’t even seem real yet.”
“Should we tell everyone else?” I asked.
“Not just yet,” Penny said. “I just want us to be able to focus on the race today, you know? Besides, I was the first person that you and Ava told about her pregnancy, so I kind of want her to be the first one to know after you.”
“I think she’d love that,” I said. “After all, you’ll both probably give birth at the same time.”
“Who knows?” Penny laughed. “Maybe it’ll even be on the same day.”
“That wouldn’t be the strangest thing,” I said. “Ava keeps saying that our child is bound to be magical, so that means ours is, too, Penny.”
“Of course it is,” the red-haired pixie said and then gave my arm a playful punch. “It’s your kid, so how would they not be magical?”
“You’re sweet, you know that?” I grinned.
“Let’s just keep that our little secret,” the redhead said with a smirk. “There’s no need to let everybody know what a big softie I am deep, deep, deep down inside.”
“I think they might already know that,” I whispered. “They just also happen to be terrified of your temper.”
“Oh, Wade, that’s the nicest thing you could have said to me,” Penny sighed. “If I wasn’t already pregnant, I’d take you somewhere private and--”
The elven battle horns rang out again to signal the start of the race, and the sound cut off the rest of the redhead’s plans.
“Well, I guess that’s our cue,” the pixie laughed. “Let’s go see how much whiskey we sell!”
“Penny,” I said and caught her arm before she could move.
“What is it?” the beautiful redhead demanded.
“You know I love you,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” Penny replied. “Do you think I’d have let you get me pregnant if I didn’t know that you loved me? If I didn’t know that you would always take care of me and protect me? If I didn’t know that you would make the best possible future for us and for our child?”
“Careful,” I laughed. “Your soft side is showing again.”
“Ugh, maybe it’s the hormones,” Penny said, but then she went up on her tiptoes to kiss me. “And Wade?”
“Hm?” I asked.
“You know the feeling’s mutual,” the redhead whispered.
Then the pixie thief slipped her hand into mine and pulled me back into the balcony to watch the start of the boat race.
“Everything okay?” Dar asked when we got back.
“Oh, yeah,” I said with a grin. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“You’re not gonna give me any more details, are you?” my halfling friend demanded.
“Not a chance,” I snickered.
“Fine, then let me at least distract you with what we’ve seen so far,” Dar said.
“Go right ahead,” I told him.
“We’ve already seen a bunch of tipsy people in the crowd,” Dar said, “and the caterer just dropped off a few complimentary glasses for us, and they said whiskey sales are already higher than they ever were for the temple wine.”
“No surprises there,” I said, “but good to know, especially since the race is just getting started.”
“Just wait until the first ship sinks,” Leif said. “Then people will really start to drink.”
“What do you mean, when the first ship sinks?” Penny demanded. “I thought this was a race, not a battle.”
“You know the Gold City,” the big gladiator laughed. “They never do anything half-assed, and that means their races are like mini-wars.”
“So they attack each other?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Lord Flavius chimed in. “They’re not al
lowed to attack each other directly, at least not with weapons, but they can do pretty much anything else they want to.”
“But how would that make somebody sink?” Dar asked.
“Usually, they just have to run their ship into someone else’s, and as long as they don’t use weapons, then--” Flavius stopped himself and then gestured to the lake. “Look, the first one’s about to go down.”
I followed the day elf’s gaze toward the lake below. A dozen oared boats were all spread out in a rough line across the lake, but they had all started to pull apart from each other now that the race had started. The boats had to go across the lake and back three times, and then they had to travel around the perimeter of the lake five times in a row, and whoever made it back first would be the winner.
But as I began to watch the boats, I realized that they were all much faster than I would have guessed. The crews rowed furiously for any advantage over each other, and just now, the two boats on the far right tried to push past each other to gain the middle ground, but the sides of both boats were so close together that it seemed like they would smash into each other at any moment.
And then, sure enough, that was exactly what they fucking did.
At first, the sides just scraped against each other, but then the pilot on the right very clearly rammed the side of his boat into his competitor, pulled away from him, and then started to steer the side of his ship at him again. The crew lifted their oars out of the water right before their boat smashed into the other one, but the other boat didn’t react in time, so half of their oars splintered or broke in half.
Even though some of its oars were broken, the injured boat still should have been able to pull or maneuver away, but before they could make a move, the pilot on the other side of the injured boat saw what was happening and decided to join in, too. When the pilot on the far right smashed into the injured boat again, he was joined by the other boat, so the poor fucker in the middle got rammed by both sides.
“That doesn’t count as a weapon?” I asked.
“No, that’s just a creative way to use your ship,” Lord Flavius said with a shrug.
I turned my attention back to the lake, just as the injured boat started to take on water through the holes in its hull. The crew on board kept trying to fill buckets and dump them over the sides of the boat, but the water came in faster than they could get rid of it. And as the wooden craft started to sink further down into the water, the two boats who had attacked it just sailed right on past it and then started to vie with each other for who would get ahead next.
Finally, the pilot and the whole crew of the injured ship jumped overboard, flapped their arms wildly to avoid a few of the slower boats, and then swam through the choppy waves back toward the starting dock. As soon as the last visible part of the boat sank below the surface of the water, the entire crowd burst into shouts and cheers, and there were calls from every direction for more drinks.
“I guess it’s just bad luck if you sink in the middle,” I muttered.
“Oh, yes, those crews and pilots usually die,” Flavius said. “If their muscles don’t cramp or give up, then another boat runs over them.”
“Accidentally?” Dar asked.
“Sometimes,” Leif grunted.
It seemed like a waste of perfectly good boats and pilots to me, but it made sense that this was how people in the Gold City liked to spend their free time. And if it meant they would drink more of my whiskey, then that was just fine with me.
One day, the elves might regret sinking their fastest ships and best pilots, but I knew that they didn’t think they were important right now. I was sure that they thought they were just for sport and entertainment, and only I knew that the elves might one day wish that they had boats to escape from the coming revolution.
But until then, I was more than happy to watch the caterers hand out glass after glass of my whiskey, and I was certainly more than happy to watch the elves hand over their coins for my whiskey, just as eagerly as all the other races did.
By the time the boats started their five laps around the perimeter of the lake, only eight of them were left, so I decided to take a quick walk through the stands to see how whiskey sales were going. I left my friends with Lord Flavius, and as I started to walk through the crowd, I thought about what Penny had said.
I couldn’t believe that two of my women were pregnant at the same time, and I wondered if Cimarra would tell me in a few weeks that she was late, too. It made me proud to think that both Ava and Penny would mother my children, and it was enough to drive me crazy when I thought about how close we were to the future that we wanted.
I didn’t know what kind of revolutionary tendencies my father had been involved in or why the elves had investigated him in the first place, and I knew there was a chance that I might never really find out. But I did know that meant he had wanted a better life for his children, and he had done his best to make that happen-- even if it had gotten him killed, in the end.
But I planned to finish what he had started.
After all, I had the Rainbow Keys on my side, and just as importantly, I had my friends. There was nothing that would stand in our way, and so far, nothing had. We would make the future what we wanted it to be, and we would make damn sure that it was what we wanted for our children.
An elven soldier suddenly tripped right in front of me and almost tumbled headfirst to the bottom of the stands, but he caught himself on my arm at the last second.
“You alright there?” I raised an eyebrow.
“This shit,” the soldier hiccuped as he waved an empty glass of whiskey around. “This shit is… the shit. The shit is the shit!”
The elven soldier collapsed into laughter at his own joke, so I just rolled my eyes and moved past him. I was glad that even some of the elven soldiers had decided to drink my whiskey, and as I looked around at the crowd, I saw that it wasn’t just some of the elven soldiers.
It was almost all of them.
Damn near every elf that I saw, plus almost every other race in the stands, had an empty or half-empty glass of whiskey in their hands, and I couldn’t help but laugh. The more coins that the elves handed over to us, the more ready we would be to rise up against them.
In the end, it would be good old-fashioned human whiskey that would bring about the end of their whole goddamn empire.
I didn’t really care about the results of the race, but I wanted to stay and see the end of it, so I headed back to the balcony to wait. When three of the boats finally crossed the finish line at the same time, Leif explained that meant those three boats would have to immediately start the whole race again, but that just meant the caterers would sell more whiskey, so I didn’t mind.
By the time the winning boat crossed the finish line again, the early afternoon had turned into late afternoon, and then by the time the closing ceremonies finished, it had turned into early evening. People began to stumble toward the exits, but almost every one of them staggered forward drunkenly, and I had a feeling that the caterers had managed to drain all the whiskey barrels completely dry.
It was a good fucking feeling.
“Alright, Flavius,” I said as the crowd continued to leave. “You earned your first month’s payment, that’s for sure.”
The day elf licked his lips and held out his hands for the coin, so I handed him a sack of one hundred gold, just like I’d promised him.
“Thank you,” Flavius said, “and whenever you need anything next, you know how to find me, so don’t hesitate. You just let me know whatever--”
“We’ll be in touch, don’t worry,” I said. “Now you go have yourself a good night.”
Lord Flavius nodded, gave a little bow, and then hurried out of the balcony.
“What do you think are the odds that he’ll still have any money left after tonight?” Penny smirked.
“Not great,” Dar said. “Flavius doesn’t look like he’s ever held onto his money for longer than an hour before he spends it on clothe
s or perfume or some stupid bet.”
“Well, then, it’ll just keep him coming back for more,” I said with a grin. “He’s in my pocket now.”
No one seemed to care that we weren’t going anywhere, so I just sank back onto one of the benches and watched the sun start to go down over the lake. Dar and Leif sat on the bench next to mine, and Penny came over to sit right beside me.
All traces of the boats that had sunk that day had vanished beneath the surface of the lake, and the last of the crowd was on its way out of the stands, so only the four of us were left behind. We watched as the sky turned all different shades of purple and pink, and then we kept watching as the wind grew still enough that the lake looked like a perfect mirror image of the sky above it.
“Well,” I finally sighed, “I’d say that was quite a success, wouldn’t you?”
“Hell yes, it was,” Dar said.
“So what happens now?” Leif asked. “I know you want to train humans all over the empire to prepare them for the-- uh, you know…”
“It’s okay, you can say it,” I laughed. “There’s no one else around.”
“To prepare them for the rebellion,” the big gladiator whispered. “But what do we do in the meantime?”
“Well, the way I see it is that the Gold City was like our test run,” I said. “So now we’ve got our playbook.”
“Our playbook for…” Leif trailed off.
“For how we take over the empire,” I said with a grin. “After all, now that we almost have things running themselves here, it’s almost time for us to do this with the next city, and then with the next one, and then with the next one, until--”
“Until we’ve got all the cities in the empire under our control,” Penny said.
“Exactly.” I nodded. “We’re established in the Gold City now, and we’ve got all our distribution channels open and working, so we just need to make sure we have some people who can run things for us while we’re not here. Then we can go replicate what we did here in all the rest of the cities.”
“That sounds like a dream,” Leif said.
“It’s more than a dream, my friend,” I said. “It’s the reality that we’re going to make happen.”