Demesne

As Lori needed to wait for Taeclas to finish fusing the bone panels to her jig—the woman claimed to be slow, but she did good work and the bone panel and wood she'd already fused together had been solid—she decided she might as well be productive and caught two more seels. According to Rian, that would just barely fill their cold rooms, but they would be sending some to River's Fork for their own supplies. The air soon filled with the smell of seel blood and intestines as the sun continued to creep down to the horizon. Fortunately, once everything was cleaned and she'd formed a binding to blow away the rankness, the smells were soon replaced by smoke, roasting meat, cooking mushrooms, sizzling tubers, bread slowly cooking in various ways—

Lori straightened suddenly as a realization came to her.

Rian had arranged for this to be a holiday!

"We're not having a holiday," Rian said confidently.

"How is this not a holiday?" Lori demanded, gesturing at all the cookfires all around where meat was being cooked as the sun continued to set. While the sky was still bright, the sun was hidden behind the trees now. There was roasting meat, meat frying in its own lard—which was lard not being used for soap—meat being grilled on pans… "This is how we eat on a holiday!"

"Because we haven't broken out the honey and sweets for the children," Rian said. "It can't be a holiday without that. We're just eating in a different way. A change of pace."

"You told me that's what a holiday was!"

"You can have a change of pace without it being a holiday," Rian said. "You've been working on developing a lightning binding for the past three days, which is a definite change from what you usually do. Was that a holiday?"

"Of course not. I was working!"

"And so was everyone else today," Rian said. "Having dinner like this doesn't make it a holiday. Now, if we kept it up until tomorrow and didn't work, that would be a holiday."

"No," she said flatly.

He shrugged. "Well, I tried. Can we still have one after the next harvest, though?"

"I never said you could."

"But how else are we supposed to celebrate having enough food for the winter? Come on, it's traditional!"

"How is it supposed to be traditional?"

"We did it last year. That makes it traditional. Besides, when else are we going to have honey bread? Because we're really getting full of honey since we don't need to use it as an antiseptic anymore." He smiled brightly. "Should I tell them to start making honey bread?"

"No honey bread," Lori snapped, trying to ignore the way her mouth suddenly felt very lacking in both honey and bread.

Rian sighed. "Well, that's a shame. Still, we're going to need to have a holiday sometime soon, if only to celebrate having new settlers arrive."

She stared at him like his head had become a beast's tail sticking straight up from his neck. "Why," she enunciated slowly, "would I possibly want to do that?"

"To keep them from being unsatisfied with living in River's Fork and deciding they'd be happier in a demesne they established and control themselves?" Rian said. "I mean, unless you actually do want one of them to set up their own demesne somewhere nearby, we need to make the non-wizard settlers content to live in your demesne, and having a holiday to greet them will go a long way to predisposing them to like the place despite all the work they'll still have to do to be at home. That will make them inclined to try to make a home there. Once we've gotten them to do that, they won't want to leave, because they know that if they set up a new demesne, they'll have to build houses all over again, and they probably don't want to do that twice in the same year. It's the sunk cost fallacy working in our favor."

"That's… not exactly how the sunk-cost fallacy works."

"Eh, close enough. Will that be all, your Bindership? I need to make sure people set aside that fatty cut you like for you."

"As long as it is clear that I am not authorizing a holiday," she said sternly.

Rian nodded. "As you say, your Bindership. By the way, have you finally reached a conclusion as to whether any of the new settlers can live here instead of River's Fork? You never got back to me about that."

"I have been busy," she said, even as she winced internally at the reminder.

Fortunately, Rian didn't press. "All right. Well, we can talk about it over dinner. Although would it be safe to assume none of the wizards are allowed to apply?"

"No wizards!" she said immediately.

He nodded. "What about Kutago's application?"

That made her frown. "What?"

"Our papermaker. Kutago approached me and asked if she and her brother—our other Deadspeaker, just to be clear—could live here," he said. "Given that the settlers have plenty of Deadspeakers, she's wondering if the two of them can move once the settlement is finalized. Personally, I think it's a good idea. Tae will be glad for the help and one more Deadspeaker in River's Fork won't matter at that point, so might as well bring him here so he can work on the dungeon farm over the winter. Besides, you trust Lidzuga."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

She stared at him. "How did you come to that nonsensical solution?"

"You don't feel the need to make him leave the dome whenever you go to River's Fork," Rian said, "and you haven't given any special orders to keep him far, far away from you either. That's either trust or you've forgotten that you're afraid he'll try to kill you, which is basically trust through apathy."

Lori's eyes went wide at the realization.

"If you don't want him here I'm sure that Kutago will be fine moving here by herself, but he is the one more experienced at carpentry, and we have the better-equipped carpentry workshop here," Rian said with a shrug. "It seems a waste of his skills to have him on plant duty. I mean, he doesn't really have a problem with it, but you'd have gotten your jig back by now if we'd had Lidz to do it." He frowned, tilting his head. "How does that work, anyway?"

"Rian, if I knew how Deadspeaking worked, I'd be doing it already," she said, slightly annoyed at the reminder of her failure. Despite having become a Dungeon Binder, the other three forms of magic still eluded her.

"I'm just saying, both of them are dead materials. It's not like they can grow and stick together like flesh or the branches of a living tree, so how does it work?"

"Deadspeaking," Lori said flatly.

"That's not actually an answer!"

She rolled her eyes, but before she could properly retort, Lori heard something that made her freeze.

Rian heard it too, though it made him smile. "Oh! Looks like the men have managed to get the band together." His head began to move to the noise as his body began to sway from side to side.

"Why are they playing music?" Lori practically growled.

"Well, you did make it actual law to not play music after sundown," Rian said. "By that token they're allowed to play it while the sun is still up." He tilted his head. "Actually, you never actually said when they could start playing music, so this is your fault."

Her eyes narrowed into a glare. "My fault?" she managed to growl out.

"You did fail to specify when people could start playing music," he pointed out. "Not that I think it's the sort of thing you need to legislate. Actually, it might be better if you didn't. If you specified a time when people could start playing music, you just know someone is going to start playing at exactly that time just to be legalistic and annoying. Imagine having dinner time always being full of music."

Lori shuddered at the horrifying noise that brought to mind.

"How about this?" Rian said. "You've been working on your lightning binding ever since we learned that the settlers arrived. You deserve a rest. Why don't you go up to your room, relax, maybe read the almanac or something? I'll call you down when we start eating or it's time for dinner, whichever comes first."

That did sound tempting, but… "There are other things I could be doing, Rian," she said.

"Up in your room, where the thick walls will keep out the sounds of the music…" Rian continued.

Well, when he put it that way… she supposed she did deserve a break.

Lori was startled from her nap when she heard the knock on the door. Her eyelids felt heavy, as it always did when she had been dozing. Every part of her wanted to lay back down, but she knew better than to let that happen. If she went back to sleep, she'd sleep all night and miss dinner. She was not missing dinner, not when they were having roasted and grilled seel meat. She still had to force herself to sit up and swing her legs over the side of her bed. The pleasantly cool, hard ground pressed against her bare feet as she padded to the door, where someone was still knocking.

"Your Bindership? We're starting to eat, and there's a plate we set aside with some of the cuts you like for you."

Lori opened the door and found Rian on the other side. He'd clearly taken a bath at some point, because his hair no longer looked like it was fused together. "How long have I been up here?"

"Uh… not quite an hour?" he said. "The sun hasn't set yet at least, but everyone's cook fires have gotten to the point where things aren't getting burnt anymore. I thought you'd like it if your food didn't have charcoal on it."

She nodded absently. "I'll be right down," she said, turning towards her bed to slip on her tsinelas rather than her boots.

"I've got your bench ready," Rian said cheerfully. "We can talk then."

Even though it was supposedly not a holiday, Rian had taken the time to prepare things for her as if it was. A bench had been put up against the outside wall of her Dungeon's entryway where anyone sitting on it—namely her—could lean back comfortably against the rock, which Lori was doing. As Lori had been promised, a plate full of meat that was marbled just the way she liked it was ready for her, all either roasted, grilled or fried to perfection. Another plate containing mushrooms, breads cooked in various ways, and lard-fried tubers were on the plate next to her, and there was even a small bowl of the stew that the kitchen had made because it had already been in the process of being cooked. A pink lady and a mican lay next to her on the bench to round out the selection.

Rian had chosen well. There was just enough of everything that Lori felt she wouldn't be inclined to have a second helping when she'd finished eating, but would leave her with some room if she wanted one last taste of something.

Everything was delicious, the meat and breads all pleasantly warm—which probably meant they were all still hot enough to burn the mouth of anyone in the demesne who wasn't her—and she'd even finally indulged in a curiosity and placed one of the particularly wide but thin cuts of meat between two pieces of bread. It was actually a quite efficient way to eat, although Lori felt she preferred flatbread wraps. As long as you ate it from the open end, you didn't need to worry about the meat falling out.

The only thing to mar the occasion was the so-called music, which grated on her ears and was just loud rather than melodic, rhythmic, or any other adjective used to describe actual music. Out in the open air, without the stone walls of a dungeon to make the noise reverberate, it was just barely tolerable, and so she did. It helped the noise seemed to be coming from the old dining hall up the rise and not anywhere nearby.

Many had congregated up there and were dancing together with unfamiliar and almost-familiar steps. Not that Lori knew how to dance. Quite the opposite in fact, as she had staunchly maintained her ignorance so that she would never have a reason to get close to such noise or could ever be forced into participating.

Lori was in the middle of peeling open a mican when Rian carefully sat down at the far end of her bench, letting out a sigh at being able to get off his feet. He had his own plate with him, cuts of meat already between pieces of bread. Her lord didn't say anything, just taking one of his stacks and beginning to eat.

It was only when he'd finished off two—out of five—of the stacks of meat and bread that Rian finally spoke.

"All right," he said, "have you come to some sort of decision about whether you'll let them settle here in addition to River's Fork?"