Demesne

As Lori dragged a seel out of the river using a binding of waterwisps, she made an idle note to ask Rian if there was room in their cold rooms for more meat, since she might as well draw out some more seels to butcher while they were still around. While there was no such thing as too much food, there was such a thing as not enough space. The seel itself was a large adult, and was very fat, which was why she'd picked it in the first place. If she was going through all this trouble, it might as well be a seel that was worth it.

People seemed surprisingly enthusiastic about preparing an impromptu seel roast. The grills were being brought out and cleaned, wood was being gathered, firepits were being prepared, plates were being washed, and Lori tried to desperately ignore the fact this seemed to be the first time she was seeing that happen.

"Uh, your Bindership?" Rian said as the waterwisp binding pushed the struggling seel onto land while Lori watched from several paces away. The binding increased the surface tension and viscosity of the water, allowing her to use it as a conduit for the force of the river's flow to propel the seel. "Not that seel and please don't freeze it."

Lori sighed. "And why is that, Rian?" she said.

"Because I think it's pregnant," he said as he stepped up next to her, "and it seems like a bad idea to keep the future generations that are going to feed us from being born." He paused. "Or it might just be fat. Honestly, for all I know they might not even get pregnant at this time of year."

She frowned. "Don't they lay eggs?"

That gave Rian pause. "Do they lay eggs?"

"Beasts and bugs do," she said. "So why wouldn't seels?"

"People don't," he said. "Ask any mother, they'll tell you no eggs were involved, except possibly at breakfast." He knelt down and peered at the seel in the grip of the waterwisp binding. That probably did absolutely nothing, so she had no idea why he did it. "Well, eggs or not, that looks like a pregnant bulge. See how it breaks the lines of the body? A bit spherical in the middle there? That means it's not normal. So it either has something living in its guts that we don't want to eat, or it's pregnant."

"It could be just fat," Lori insisted. Still, if he was right… well, it did sound wasteful, settling for one seal today when they could have multiple seels in a few months.

Sighing, she deactivated the binding of waterwisps, and the thick, viscous liquid that wrapped around the seal collapsed into water. Without the water being pushed by the redirected force of the river and acting as lubricant, the seel was able to wiggle back into the waterway, its fur-covered sinuous body undulating gracelessly until it was back in its natural environment. She watched it wiggle away with regret. At seven paces long and almost a pace thick at its thickest, it would have been very filling, and probably more than adequate to test the effectiveness of her lightning binding.

"Sorry," Rian said for some reason.

Lori frowned at him. "What did you do?"

He waved at the undulating seal, which had managed to reach the water. "Sorry for making you have to let it go."

She waved her had dismissively. "It was no great effort. And I suppose there's merit in letting the seel brats live to get fat and edible."

The next one she caught wasn't as long or as thick, but it was still an adult, although possibly just barely. It had slowed in its movement enough that Lori had been able to claim and bind the waterwisps around it, forming a binding that increased the water's viscosity and surface tension. Once the seel was encased, the water around it erupted with water jets that pushed it towards shore, which required Lori's full attention since the seel continued to wriggle and contort, and she had to keep on constantly adjusting the direction of the water jets.

Once the seel reached the shore and the water jets could no longer push in in further, she claimed the waterwisps in the river again and redirected the force of the current to push the seel further ashore, creating thick tendrils of viscous water to push it further away and add more water to the mass around the fursh. Once it was thick enough, she turned the water into ice—taking care to keep the resulting expelled heat away from the seel—and beginning to move the now-solid mass further into shore.

"Should we shave it?" Rian said suddenly as Lori moved the seel away from the children's preferred seeling spot.

"… Rian, why would we do a silly thing like that?" she said blandly.

"I don't mean shaving it completely," he said, as if that statement was somehow not still completely nonsensical, "but people are not as furry as seels are. I'm worried the thick fur might skew the results. We are testing if your binding is enough to kill something."

Lori tilted her head. It was a factor to consider, but… "It can stand in for clothes," she said. "It would be far too much effort to try to tie rags to the seel replicate that." Did they even have rags?

"Ah. Yes, you're right. Though I'd suggest removing the water in the fur. That would definitely skew the results, since people generally don't have that much water on their skin."

Lori eventually managed to get the seel to the open space in front of her dungeon. She checked that the seel was still alive in the ice—it was, wiggling around trying to free itself but unable to get the leverage to move, much less get free—then hefted her lighting thrower rig.

"Um, I feel it's my duty as a lord to ask how accurately you can aim that," Rian said. "You know, now that you're aiming at something that's not the river. Did you put in the aiming sight that Riz suggested?"

"I was going to do that later, once the binding was reliable," Lori said. "At this distance, I am unlikely to miss."

"But aren't you developing this to be able to deal with wizards at a distance?" Rian gestured at the seal. "It's… what, four, maybe five paces away? Is that a safe distance to fight another wizard at?"

That gave her pause, looking at where the seel was standing. She imagined a Whisperer standing there, or even a Mentalist.

…

Ugh, she hated it when he had a point.

"We'll deal with the issue of aiming at range once we have tested whether the binding is sufficient to kill the seel," Lori said.

"And what if your binding only works up close but not at a distance, which is the range you need it to?" Rian said.

…

She hated Rian so much.

"You have a suggestion, then?" she asked acerbically.

"Well, you'd obviously need to try to hit it from further away," Rian said. "Which… would probably be easier to do it you had some way to accurately aim."

It was the obvious answer, but… "Go find…" Lori paused slightly as she instinctively glanced slightly to her right, before realizing it wasn't a meal time and reach into her belt pouch to pull out a rock, "Taeclas while I go get something."

"Oh, good idea. She might have learned how lightning affects bodies when she was learning to be a Deadspeaker, so she might be able to give us some advice."

"… no, I need her to put more anchoring points on my stock. Go get her."

"Oh… all right then."

"Gah! Teeth! Kill it, kill it, KILL IT!"

It was mildly amusing to see Taeclas, a grown woman and allegedly well-educated Deadspeaker, cowering behind Rian as if the fursh—which now had a rope tied around its neck, midsection and tail to keep it from wiggling very far, and was slowly dripping itself dry now that the ice imprisoning it was gone—was some kind of dangerous, toothy beast ready to leap and gut her open with its talons.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Tae, it's tied up, it can't hurt you. Besides, it's a seel. What can it do?"

"You've never seen seels getting fed bug scraps," the Deadspeaker said, not taking her eyes off the test subject. The wizard was crouching in an attempt to keep any part of her body from being visible to the seel under discussion, which was a futile effort because while they were of a similar height, Rian wasn't actually all that much wider than her. "I worked in a seelery, I once saw someone lose their fingers during feeding time because one of these things leapt out of the pool and bit them off. He had to have them grown back because the rainbowed thing ate them! And that one was a smaller than this!"

"So… if we asked you to put a bi—no, a meaning on it to—?" The rest of the no doubt rhetorical question was interrupted as Taeclas grabbed the back of Rian's shirt and held out her arms to keep him between her and the seel. "All right, all right, you don't want to! Please stop dragging me around as a human shield, I get enough of that from her Bindership."

"I only did it once," Lori pointed out.

"Yes, and once was enough. I should probably see about getting a real shield made for you in case something like that happens again." Rian paused and tilted his head, seemingly ignoring the way Taeclas kept angling him to be between her and the seel every time the latter moved a little. "Actually, if you had a shield with your lightning binding on it, you could both attack and defend, as long as there was a way for you to see through the shield and aim."

Lori tilted her head, considering the thought. Huh. That might actually be doable…

"Anyway Tae, I was going to ask you to use a meaning to render the seel quiescent—"

"Are you insane?-! I'm not touching that finger eater! I have a wife to think of!"

"—but clearly you don't want to do that."

"One bite, and he was down to three and a half fingers! Do you know how hard it is to bite through a thumb?"

"Through the bone or the joint?"

"Are you two quite done?" Lori interrupted.

Rian made a show of visibly thinking this over, then looks over his shoulder at Taeclas. "Are we done?"

The Deadspeaker blinked innocently. "What are we supposed to be doing?"

"We're done, then. On to business. Tae, her Bindership needs you to do some Deadspeaking for her."

"… can we go back to whatever it is we were doing? I think I'd be better at that."

"Come on Tae, you're the only one we can ask to do this," Rian said manipulatively. "No matter how long it takes you, it would still be a lot faster than going down to River's Fork, asking Lidz to do it, and coming back. Besides, it's not like you're on a clock. Take all the time you need to do it right."

On the one hand, Lori could understand the reasoning, as there were few things worse than not being able to do something properly because you were being rushed. On the other hand, she had tests to do, and she wanted to do them soon. "I have tests to do, and I want to do them soon," she said pointedly.

"You don't need the jig for that, though?" Rian said. "Just the binding."

That… was correct, she supposed. Lori grunted. "Fine." She held up the pieces of bone that she'd retrieved from her room. "I need more places to anchor bindings."

"Ah…" Taeclas looked both relieved and disappointed. "Oh, sure, I can do that…"

Lori temporarily moved the bindings anchored to the stock to another bone tablet she had brought with her. While the firewisps and darkwisps on the lightning ball prevented heat and light from escaping, the binding was immaterial, and if the Deadspeaker were to pass her hand or some other part through the lightning ball binding… well, then Taeclas probably die as all that lightning passed through the woman. She was not have that sort of careless industrial accident happen in her demesne! Once the transfer was done, Lori handed the stock to the Deadspeaker.

"All right, let's do this…" Taeclas said with a sigh. "Where did you want me to fuse the bone?"

"Under here, and on both sides," Lori said, indicating the underside of the long part of the stock as well as either side.

Taeclas nodded, taking one of the bone strips Lori had given her and pressing it to the side of the wood. "All right, let's see…um, this is going to be a while…" She began taking deep, measured breaths as she began systematically draw in magic. Her fingers touched both the wooden stock and the bone panel, obviously imbuing both and no doubt claiming the life in them in preparation for whatever meaning she was going to use to adhere them together.

…

Lori turned away, as this would take a long time and she could be doing more productive things than watching someone breathe. As Rian had said, she needed to strike the seel with lightning from a distance to test the effectiveness of her binding, and unless she was willing to struggle to move the seel again that meant moving some distance before trying to use the lightning binding combination on the seel. And while her jig was currently being added to, all she really needed was the binding itself.

She looked around, noting that the only place with a clear line of sight to the seel was along the roadway leading away from the river, the one that lead to what used to be the outdoor dining hall and… actually, did people still eat there? She'd have to ask Rian. Unfortunately, doing the experiment there would be extremely dangerous. You do not do experiments on public roadways. That was simply common sense. There were too many factors to control, and even when you told people to get out of the rainbowed way because you were doing something important and dangerous they wouldn't, even if they could clearly see she was sitting on a box on wheels—

Wait. She was the Dungeon Binder now. She could just order people to get out of her way! Then she could have the carpenters build her a box and put wheels on it…

"Your Bindership?"

Lori blinked, her flow of thought diverted. "What is it Rian?"

"Are you thinking of sending lightning at the seel from the top of the rise?"

"It is the logical place to do so without trying to move the seel," she said.

Rian let out a sigh, looking up at the sky… and blinked. Head still thrown back, he tilted it to the side slightly. "Huh. Actually, I can think of somewhere better. You know, somewhere we don't have to worry about children suddenly moving between you and the seel."

"…" Lori '…'-ed. "And where is that?"

Still looking upwards, he pointed and Lori followed the direction of his finger towards the top of the hill above her Dungeon.

…

Oh. Right. There.

Well, she'd been thinking of seeing what was up there since last year. Now was as good a time as any.

Lori had never been the sort of person who was impressed by 'views'. What was the point of going to a high place and just looking at what could be seen from that vantage point? But no, her mothers had insisted, and while they'd go on and on about how great the view was, she was still trying to catch her breath because reaching a high enough elevation to have a view meant lots and lots of climbing…

Thankfully the slope of the hill over her Dungeon was a reasonable one, although the path switched back and forth several times to accommodate this. Still, branches had been lashed between some of the trees—using rudimentary ropeweed braids rather than real rope, the kind that the children made—to form railings and delineate a path.

"Why is this here?" Lori asked as she and Rian climbed.

"Where do you think I send people to watch approaching dragons so we know how close it's getting?" Rian said. "After all, you weren't here for the last two dragons, so I had to use my own judgment about when to tell people they all had to get inside so we could seal the doors."

Ah. That explained it. "Ah. That explains it," she said, nodding.

By the time they reached the top, Lori was starting to breathe hard, and she had to take a few moments to let her heart calm down. Rian, to her annoyance, seemed far less bothered as he—ugh—turned to enjoy the view. He was even doing the whole 'enjoying the view' pose, with both hands on his hips as he turned his head back and forth, a wide smile on his face. Well, if he was going to stand like that, he might as well make himself useful. "Can you see the seel from there?" Lori said.

She couldn't hear it, but from the way his shoulder moved up and down, she got the distinct impression he sighed. Which was probably deliberate on his part, as sighing did not require that much shoulder movement. "Yes, your Bindership," he said. "It's just in view from here, so you don't have to get too close to the edge. Though as your lord, I will have to insist on you tying a rope around your waist before you try so that if you accidentally slip you don't fall down the cliff and die."

"Your insistence is noted," Lori said. "Give me the rope."

"Not even going to take a moment to appreciate the view?" he said. Still, he removed the coil of rope he'd been carrying diagonally on one shoulder.

"I've never understood the practice," she said, walking carefully to where Rian was, her gaze down so she could watch her footing. Sure enough, Lori was able to see the seel just before she reached him. "As with many things, it is pointless."

"Huh. I would have thought you of all people would like to see exactly how big your demesne was. I certainly appreciate looking at it." Out of the corner of her eyes, Lori saw him wave one arm in a theatrically expansive gesture. "Everywhere the color doesn't touch is where we're safe, and it's all thanks to you. Everything the colors don't touch is yours, completely and absolutely. I'd have thought you of all people would enjoy a visual quantification of your power. All the material resources, all the land, all the demesne you control… not even a little look?"

…

Lori raised her eyes and looked out over her demesne.

From here, it was clear how they had barely made a dent in the extent of the woods on this side of the river. The rest of the trees rose into the sky in dark greens that were turning brown and red depending on the type. They seemed to ripple in waves as the wind gently blew through them. Some trick of the angle and elevation made them seem to go as far as her eyes could see. In the distance, she could see a glittering line that twinkled in many colors even at this distance, marking the Iridescence at the borders of what she had claimed.

Her demesne.

Lorian—

No.

Lori's Demesne. Always Lori's Demesne, to the only person for whom the name mattered.

…

Ugh… she hated it when he was right.

…

Well, that was enough useless sentiment. "Tie the rope," Lori said as she pulled the bone tablet where she had anchored her lighting binding to from her belt. It was deactivated, so there had been no damage to her clothing.

"I'll need you to raise your arms so I can get the rope around you."

Sighing, she raised her arms even as she gathered lightwisps to replicate one of her aiming bindings.