During lunch, Lori had to all but sit down on her new almanac to keep from reading it while she ate so she didn't accidentally drip any of her food on it. Despite her excitement and enjoyment, she had glanced at the page listings, affirming for herself what other information was in it besides flow diagrams. The almanac contained illustrations of plants and labeled whether it was edible or whether it had any use as a resource, or if it caused itching on contact and many other things.

She had a feeling she might need to—ugh—share this almanac, with Rian if no one else. The illustrations were so good she actually recognized some of the plants as those that they'd been cutting down and clearing to make space in the demesne, and some of them had actually had edible parts, like the roots, or leaves that could be used to spice their meals. Personally she thought the stews tasted well enough, but if they had more food, different kinds of food…

Well, they might need spices and flavors then.

"So, you're not playing sunk anymore?" Rian was saying to Mikon as Lori ate a bit faster than she normally would have, eager to get back to the almanac.

"Oh, we are," the weaver said. "I'm getting better at it. The games are very close now!"

"She still hasn't won," Riz, sitting between the two of them, said.

"I will! Eventually! It's just that her Bindership is really good!"

"You're still playing that?" Rian said incredulously.

Both Lori and Mikon frowned at him. "Why wouldn't we be?" Mikon said.

"You… don't find it boring?"

Lori and Mikon looked at each other, as if trying to confirm they'd heard the same thing. "Why would we be bored?" Lori said.

"It's fun," Mikon… probably agreed. What was fun about constantly losing? Did she just enjoy being crushed and shown her inadequacy? Her mothers had warned her about women like that…

"If you like it, you like it," Rian said hastily. "I don't, but that's just me."

"It's not just you," Riz said in a low voice.

Mikon reached around Riz and patted Rian on the shoulder. "Don't worry, I still like you anyway," she said cheerfully.

Rian's lips pressed together and his face didn't redden, but he was clearly embarrassed as he avoided anyone's gaze and focused on his food. On Rian's other side, Umu leaned back and gave the other weaver an annoyed look as Riz sat there looking awkwardly indecisive.

Lori shook her head and ignored this silliness as she continued eating her own lunch.

When she finished, she picked up her book and headed back to her room. She'd have the whole afternoon to read, and she was going to use it!

––––––––––––––––––

"Rian," she said as she started setting up the chatrang board. She'd come down to find a lot of benches gone from the dining hall again, and so had deduced everyone was eating roast outside. The board was being set up on a block of stone she'd pulled from the stockpile for this purpose, in front of the bench that she had claimed against the stone wall flanking the Dungeon's new entryway. Her stone plate lay next to her on the bench, waiting to be filled with food as dinner was prepared, the air once more filling with the smell of woodsmoke and roasting beast. She hadn't tired of the taste of it yet, and from the looks of things neither had everyone else. "I need you to find someone who can draw."

For some reason, Rian smirked. "Let me guess. To copy parts of the almanac? The illustrations, perhaps?"

"Yes," Lori said, frowning slightly at the tone. What was there to be smug and triumphant about?

"Well, I don't think we'll need it," Rian said confidently. "Have you looked at all the magic parts in the book yet? All the ones about Whispering, at least?"

"I've glanced through them, and I've been reading the ones I thought immediately relevant to our situation," Lori said. It was immediately obvious that some of the flow diagrams had two versions for their bindings: a small, relatively simple one that needed only a small amount of imbuement, and one that worked better when scaled up for economy and efficiency and incidentally required great amounts of imbuement that would either need to come from beads, several people working in shifts… or a Dungeon Binder's raw power.

"Ah, that explains it. So, you haven't been reading the section that talks about unusual but useful applications of basic bindings?"

Lori frowned as she continued putting the pieces on the board. "I saw it but haven't perused it yet." She remembered that section, and honestly, it had seemed interesting, but the flow diagrams of things she didn't already know how to make had seemed more immediately important. Tomorrow she intended to use the binding it depicted in one diagram to more efficiently make solidified air for their cold rooms, though she'd have to modify the rooms with better ventilation so that no one asphyxiated to death. The suggestion given in the almanac to line the room with metal to draw out the heat and keep the solidified air in another location also had some merit, and they certainly had a lot of dragon scales that weren't doing anything except perhaps rusting… "Tell me what about it you mean without being dramatic."

Rian sighed. "Sure, ruin one of the few things I can do for fun, why don't you… Fine. Do you know how to lock lightwisps to create a still image?"

"Of course," Lori said. It was one of the more delicate bindings of lightwisps, binding the lightwisps in the air such that they captured an image, though it wasn't as simple as that. In essence, the binding locked the lightwisps in the claim to continue emanating the light passing through it at the moment the binding was made. It saw more use in theater and novels, usually used by 'cunning' characters to trick people into thinking someone was still asleep in a room or making them think an open door was still closed, never mind it wouldn't work like that because it was just a flat image hanging in the air. "And no, that binding doesn't work that way. I can't just bind lightwisps to make a copy of the page because the binding would also lock the light coming in all other directions, so the only way to read the page would be from almost exactly where my eyes were when I made the binding."

Rian nodded. "Exactly," he said. "At least, that's what the almanac said. But! Someone worked out a way to copy an image by making the copy radiate its own light so that it can been visible from any angle it can be viewed from. "

"Yes, you paint the air with lightwisps," Lori said dryly. "I don't have that kind of skill, Rian."

"Neither do most Whisperers in Covehold and the demesnes around it," Rian said. "So someone worked out a way to make copies of things by using locked lightwisps of the first type and turning them into lightwisps of the second type bound to things people can carry around. It's all there in the almanac. So if you use it, not only can you make copies of the illustrations in the book, you can actually make the illustration bigger than the original."

Lori gave him a skeptical look. "If you say it will be useful, then I'll investigate it after dinner," she said, finishing putting all the pieces on the board.

"Please. It'll mean you don't have to lend the book to anyone, so no need to worry about people getting their grubby hands on it."

Oh. Well, that certainly increased the priority of her reading the section he meant. "I already said I'll investigate it, didn't I? Worry about your own report. You haven't been procrastinating, have you?"

"Only in the sense I've been doing other work in the meantime. Oh, by the way, Riz finally got me up to date on what happened while I was gone."

"Good. Then inform her that her temporary position is no longer extant and she had been demoted back to a glitter crawler."

"What, you're not even going to tell her yourself?"

"Talking to people is your job, remember?"

"Ah, right, so it was. How foolish of me to think you'd be comfortable talking to the woman after working with her all these weeks." He reached out and moved a black militia.

Lori frowned and put the piece back. "What are you doing?" she said, annoyed.

Rian blinked at her in confusion. "Er, aren't we going to play?"

"Why do you assume that? If you want, I'll be perfectly content to crush you utterly tomorrow, but I already have an opponent for tonight."

If this were a story or a play, that would have been Mikon's cue to appear. As it was, Rian gave her a skeptical look, then shrugged. "So, back to work tomorrow, I suppose?"

"The threshing will continue, and probably finish," Lori nodded. "And then preparations will be made to plant the winter crop."

"Wait, winter crop? We're planting in winter? Isn't it too cold for that?"

"Of course not," Lori said authoritatively. "The crop simply grows slowly under the snow until spring. It makes it less likely the crop will be consumed by beasts, bugs and slugs."

"Huh. You learn something new every day."

She waved a hand dismissively. "Well, you need to know these things when you're a Dungeon Binder, so I learned. That being said, I also need you to begin construction of a Dungeon farm in the third level," Lori informed him. "As we have neither the equipment nor the right technical knowledge to grow crops in trays and fluids, soil will need to be carried in to line the floor to a sufficient depth. I leave the logistics of it to you."

Rian stared at her. "A… farm. A full farm? Not just a few plants we're keeping indoors? Is there even enough space? I haven't really looked down there yet…"

"There will be," Lori said. One way or another, there would be. "Once I learn how to perform Horotracting, having all the space we need in my Dungeon will be trivial. For now, however, we will simply have to take best advantage of the space I have managed to excavate. That means planting what will give us the greatest yield for the least space."

"So, we're having a lot of boxes and racks made, filling them with soil, and planting tubers in them?"

Lori paused. "What?"

"I mean, obviously we'll be planting vigas and other things too, but tubers are very efficient when it comes to space, and you can fertilize them with waste straight from the latrine," Rian said. "Add in all the meat in cold storage and we'd get through the winter pretty well. And we'd get a new crop every six to nine weeks, which is a pretty good rate. If we planted some now, we'd have some ready to harvest by early, mid-early winter. And since it'll be in boxes, every family can have two or three in their house, or outside their house, that they can just bring out to the Dungeon come dragon time." He paused. "The ones near people's houses probably shouldn't be fertilized with fresh latrine stuff."

Lori stared at him a moment. "As I said, I leave the logistics of the matter to you. I will be busy ensuring proper growing temperature, light and maintaining a suitable irrigation reservoir." Maybe she could repurpose their old reservoir for irrigation and simply make a new one for their drinking water? Then she wouldn't have to worry so much of people pissing and dropping shit into the reservoir pit, since it would all be growing towards their crops anyway. Though she'd have to make sure all the pipes that lead from it were properly redirected, especially the ones leading to her bath…

"I don't suppose I can ask you to appoint a new lord or lady?" Rian said. "Or let me get some official assistants I can give some authority too? Because even just organizing the Dungeon farm thing will be a full time job unless I have someone doing it for me, and then who'd deal with all the other things for you? Unless you've become comfortable dealing with people in my absence—"

"I'll consider it," she interrupted him to kill that odious line of thought on the spot. "But I suppose you have a point. Before you left, you were beginning to rely on assistance from Riz, and when she was replacing you, she relied on Mikon. It seems clear to me an official full time assistant will be necessary for you from now on."

The smile on Rian's face looked disturbingly like the one Riz had when Lori had said she only needed to report the demesne's events to Rian before she would be relieved of her position.

She shoved her stone plate at him. "Now, get me dinner."

Rian rolled his eyes, but took the plate. "One dinner, coming up."

When he came back, he wasn't alone, of course. But Lori had been expecting that.

Still, it was an enjoyable dinner as Lori played chatrang with Mikon, the two of them eating as they played while Riz and Umu took turns trying to teach Rian how to dance as people sang and clapped and ate.

It was a perfectly ordinary night, and all was right in her demesne.