Demesne

"I'm never, ever, ever, ever leaving my demesne again," Lori groaned as she laid her head down on the table, listening to the sounds of people settling for dinner. "For any reason!"

"That's what you say every time we go to River's Fork," Rian said with annoying cheer that made her want to tear his face off with her bare hands.

"I mean it this time!" Lori declared. "I don't care what Shanalorre offers me to make repairs, I'm not going back there!"

"Hmm…" Rian hummed in a way that implied he had a smirk on his face. "Well, that was the last trip. It took most of a month, but all the people who got wounded when the dragon passed over and had to be left behind are back with their families now, and you've finally finished raising those supports for the trees that got damaged so the dome's less likely to collapse. Except for having to stop by there when we head for Covehold, our balance sheet with River's Fork is even. So you don't have to go back there unless you want to."

Lori sniff. "Why would I want to?" she said.

"The bread?" Rian suggested. "They managed three whole harvests before the dragon happened, so they'd got a lot of grain for it." He gave her a challenging look. "How's that deadspeaking coming along?"

"I'm working on it," Lori grumbled.

Rian sighed dramatically. "I still think you should have worked out a deal to get Shana–"

"Shanalorre," Lori corrected.

"– to teach you," Rian said. "At least learn how to heal. If anyone gets seriously injured, you're going to have to bring them to River's Fork for treatment."

"We're not going to ask River's Fork to heal our people for us," Lori said stubbornly. "We have more doctors than they do, we'll be fine. Especially since all the people not worth keeping left."

"You realize we lost one of our big saws because Missus Naineb's husband was one of the sawyers and didn't think living in a demesne where the Dungeon Binder had threatened his wife was a good idea, right?" Rian said.

"Not worth keeping," Lori repeated staunchly. "They're Shanalorre's problem now." Twenty three people, about four families, had left as word had gotten out about River's Fork Demesne's existence, and how its binder was a child, leaving group by group.

"If they made it," Rian said. "I still don't think it was right, making them walk to River's Fork when we could have brought them along with us on the boat."

"Lori's Boat," Lori corrected.

Rian rolled his eyes. "Yes, that. They could get hurt out there walking to River's Fork. We saw beasts along the river."

"They want to leave my demesne, they can. They have feet, they can use them," Lori said dismissively. "We can barely make the whole trip back and forth in a day, I'm not going have Lori's Boat be slowed down by useless dead weight."

"Are you ever going to get tired of doing that?"

"Doing what?"

"Referring to your boat by name. You don't need to use a proper noun ALL the time."

Lori actually raised her head form the table to look at him. "What's a proper noun?"

"A basis for grammar jokes," Rian said.

"What kind of sad person makes jokes about grammar?" Lori said, confused.

"The kind of sad person who tries to feel they haven't wasted their life." Rian moved, probably to look around. "I'll go get our food. You try to wake up some more."

"I'm perfectly awake," Lori protested.

"Lori, your eyes have been closed during our entire conversation."

"I don't need my eyes to be open to be awake," she declared, but reluctantly raised her eyelids. She hissed. "Why is it so bright?"

"Apparently, it's what happens when a Dungeon Binder makes light with their eyes closed," Rian said, getting up. His hair had grown long over the last few weeks. So had hers, come to think of it. She had to borrow a pair of scissors again. "Fix it, please?"

Lori grunted, changing the binding on the lightwisps so they wouldn't be so bright.

"Thank you," Rian chirped annoyingly as he headed over to get them breakfast.

Lori sighed and laid her face on the table again.

The last few weeks had been…busy. She'd spent the next day after arriving from River's Fork restoring the bindings on the lightwisps, waterwisps, firewisps, and airwisps she'd allowed to lapse while she was gone from the demesne, and left the inquiries of why Grem wasn't with them to Rian. According to him, there had been general disbelief from the probationary citizens, until the next batch of people from River's Fork had shown up and confirmed their story.

Some people had voiced their opinion that Grem was right for trying to kill Binder Shanalorre– at least, that he had the right reasons– but thankfully hadn't taken it beyond that and asking Rian to bring along letters to friends remaining in River's Fork, trying to convince them to move to Lori's Demesne, Lorian. Given they didn't have a papermaking industry of any sort and seel skins were too useful to be used for mere letter writing, Rian had to lug around a huge sack full of rocks, leaves, beast bones and occasionally planks with charcoal writing on it.

Lori had also reorganized her dungeon. The latrines had been altered so that people could manually empty them, and people, usually those with no other useful skill, had garnered some sort of minor punishment from their parents, or just people who didn't have anything else to do and had to make themselves useful. Lori wasn't sure how it worked– Rian was in charge of that– only that people on latrine duty were allowed to skip the line for the baths.

Despite how unsanitary she thought the whole thing was, pools of warm water in the bath houses were surprisingly popular, though she had to bind more wisps so that the water in the pools would be gradually replaced to keep them from becoming breeding grounds for disease. The third bathhouse– which Rian was actively designing so it wouldn't be 'an underground tube with stalls' as he called it– was due to be built, and in the meantime, there were 'shower stalls', outdoor stalls where a raised stone aqueduct constantly sent down a stream of water like a waterfall. Lori supposed it was a good stand in for real showers, since she didn't have the patience, time or inclination to make individual stone piping and shower heads. Rian was surprisingly imaginative about things like that.

There was a thump, and Lori reluctantly opened one eye. Rian was back, holding two bowls of breakfast. It was… well, it was still stew, but the new vegetables and such they had available to them now meant it was a different kind of stew. She was amused at the look of distaste on Rian's face as he looked at the vivid blue cubes of some sort of cut up gourd vegetable, before his face settled in resignation.

"I would never have pegged you to be a picky eater," she said, reaching for one bowl, then grabbing the other one at the last moment.

"All species are picky eaters, lest they eat something poisonous to them," Rian said loftily. He grabbed his spoon and began to eat.

Lori stared at him. "Are you actually holding your nose so you can't taste the food?" she said. "What are you, a child?"

"I'll eat it, but I can't pretend to like it," Rian said. "Life is too short for that kind of self-deception. The best I can do is be thankful it's keeping me alive." He had to stop eating to breathe, since he was still holding his nose. "Ugh. Why did these have to be edible?" He gave Lori a pleading look. "Can you please exclude this from the dungeon's farm?"

She allowed one side of her mouth to twist into a smirk. "I rather like it."

"I choose to believe you're just saying that to annoy me," Rian said flatly. "Consider it successful. Besides, it wouldn't be efficient if we're farming for the winter. Roots and tubers grow much faster than gourds."

Lori made a face.

The two stared at each other.

"How about we just agree to never to cook for the other unless it's meat?" Rian suggested.

"Excellent idea," Lori nodded.

They went back to their food, one enjoying breakfast much more than the other.

"If you hate gourds so much, why are you eating them first?" Lori asked, gesturing at the pile of blue, mushy cubes in Rian's spoon.

"Better to get rid of them first so I can enjoy the meat," he said, putting the whole spoon in his mouth, chewing quickly, and swallowing.

"If you choke, it'll be your own fault," Lori warned.

"That's a risk I'm willing to take," Rian said.

"Well, I'm not. Eat slower and chew more."

Rian rolled his eyes. "Yes, mother."

They ate, Rian at one point reaching for his cup of water and visibly washing his mouth out. At least he had the good taste to swallow instead of spitting it out.

"So, what's on your agenda today?" he asked, getting started on the meaty, leafy, and rooty bits of his stew.

"You realize just because you ate the gourd bits doesn't mean its flavor didn't soak into the stew?" Lori pointed out.

"Ignoring that!" Rian said. "Agenda? Please? Still working on the dungeon?"

Lori had devoted herself to that in the past weeks, when she hadn't been dragged with Rian to get people from River's Fork to Lori's Demsne, Lorian. With the increase in their population– even with the people who'd gotten it into their heads they'd rather live in River's Fork– they needed a larger dungeon that would accommodate the entire population comfortably– that is, comfortable for her– when it inevitably happened again. Making the lavatories manually cleanable and moving them to the front of the dungeon near the entrance was only part of it.

After the first near-collapse, Rian had gathered every stoneworker, everyone with any sort of masonry or building experience, and even two former militia engineers, and had sat them down with Lori so they could discuss how to prevent such a thing from happening again. Fortunately, Lori had not been hurt, but was clear her strategy of binding the earthwisps to greater cohesion to reinforce the stone wasn't working as effectively as she wanted when she had the weight of a whole hill to bear.

Regular pillars, with arching supports to transfer the weight to the ground, were now to be found in her dungeon. They didn't need to be that close together, but they were apparently needed to prevent any more collapses. She'd also been advised not to put floors of the dungeon directly beneath each other. They'd had to make a small, earthwisp-formed model of her plans for the dungeon so she could be advised about the design.

So far, there wasn't much. Just the original open space, which had some of the tables and benches returned to it for people to eat, the so called 'treasure room' where the metal materials not actively being used was stored, so that they wouldn't need to move it there again in case of a dragon, the long-term storage cold room next to the kitchen area where food was only supposed to go in, and not out until winter, the more open pantry and everyday cold room that they tried to keep stocked with at least a week's worth of food in case of another dragon, the lavatories (and she still had to figure out where the contents would go in a dragon situation), and the pit that was the reservoir, which she'd drained (removing anything loose in it with the water), and partially sealed off as a dark room. She had plans for a larger, less accessible reservoir, but that, along with everything else, were still just plans.

What she HAD done was to build an isolated set of rooms for herself, where she'd moved her private bath, private lavatory, private bedroom, private study, private living quarters, private treasure room– consisting of the gold and other metals and materials the dragon had shed, at least those no one else had been able to drag off because it was too big– private ventilation, and a long hallway and private stairs that she could block off with stone for privacy and security. She'd dug upwards, putting her bedroom just above the pillar of stone hiding the dungeon's core, near the front of the cliff face, so that she wouldn't have to walk far to leave, as well as put it just that bit further up from floods. Rian had declared it 'paranoid on a self-entombing level' and had advised her to devise a way to escape her own rooms in case someone decided to besiege her.

Half the second week had gone into building just that.

"I'm going to get started on digging out the second level of the dungeon," Lori said. "Hopefully it won't flood, but…"

"But if it did, at least we'd have a new reservoir," Rian said cheerfully.

"Right. Sure. That," Lori said, as if that had always been plan.

"Once that's built, are you going to open up a second entrance?" Rian said brightly. "So that people can evacuate into the dungeon faster?"

Lori coughed. "Of course I am. It wouldn't be an efficient evacuation if people get bottlenecked by the dungeon's entrance."

Rian nodded, seemingly satisfied about something, though Lori had no idea what. Maybe he was just being strange again. "Well, if you need help, you know where to find everyone," he said. He blinked and tilted his head. "You, uh, do remember who all the engineers and stone masons are, right? I mean, you probably don't know their names, but do you at least remember their fa–"

Lori hurriedly finished her stew. "Well, time flows, I have to get to work," she said hurriedly, grabbing her staff and binding the nearest group of lightwisps to the end of it. "Need to go on digging, and you need to supervise people building houses and things!"

"You have a terrible memory, Lolilyuri," Rian said blandly.

"Can't talk, dungeon needs to be built!" Lori declared, heading for the corner of the dungeon where she'd decided the stairs down to the next level would be.

"See you at lunch then, I guess…" Rian shrugged, and finished eating his breakfast.