The following morning, after a breakfast of stew that tasted very salty, with the tubers being hard and almost underdone—eh, she had eaten worse—Lori met with Shanalorre, in her office once more. Unlike yesterday, when they had both had militia with them, this morning it was just them and their lords. Shana's lord, whatever his name was, looked stern and impassive next to the smaller Dungeon Binder as he watched Rian and Lori, while Rian stood at her side, leaning against the wall to keep her and the door in his view.

"I am willing to consider the addendum," Shanalorre said, "But I must request a reduction in numbers. If it is merely an accounting of the ore, then it isn't necessary to retain all of the miners. Half of the current number should be sufficient to the task, would it not?"

"While that would normally be the case," Lori said smoothly, "it is winter. Unlike mining, my people will be exposed to the elements. Thus, they will need to work in shifts to prevent sickness and injury from the cold. While half of the number of the miners currently present would be sufficient to the task, under these conditions it would be cruel to expect them to do so outdoors for the whole day. Shifts will be necessary. This will need to be done in a rush as it is, before truly heavy snowfall begins. Only after the accounting can we begin the smelting of the ore into refined metal that we can divide between ourselves."

Shanalorre frowned minutely. "What about the crew aboard the Coldhold? Surely some of them can return to Lorian Demesne, due to their presence being surplus to requirements?"

"Such as myself and my lord?" Lori said. "No, we will be staying to supervise the accounting to be sure it is performed correctly, and in order to prepare for the smelting. The Coldhold needs to stay as well, so that I have a place of rest, and all aboard it are essential to its operation."

The younger Dungeon Binder let out a small sigh. "I see…"

"Pardon me, Great Binder," Rian interrupted, "but are your concerns perhaps logistical? Does your demesne lack the supplies needed to feed a few more mouths for a few days more?"

Shanalorre tilted her head thoughtfully for a moment.

"As a matter of fact," Shanalorre's lord said, "our supplies are—"

"Stop."

The word was a firm, sudden command, and Lori's eyebrow rose as the older man stopped speaking immediately. "Our supplies," Shanalorre said, continuing the statement, "are more than sufficient to the task, as we have grain to spare. Though, in the interest of disclosure, we are running a bit low on salt. I'm afraid that with the coming of winter, most has been used in preserving food for a winter dragon, and the rest is being used for bread."

Lori glanced over her shoulder. "Rian?" she prompted.

"We have some salt on the Coldhold, your Bindership," Rian said with easy cheer. "I'm sure we can part with some for our beleaguered neighbors here."

"Arrange it, then," Lori said. She turned her gaze back to Shanalorre. "I'm sure you can have more salt when we make another journey to the ocean, once this matter has been dealt with and the Coldhold can go about its usual activities."

Shanalorre tilted her head and nodded. "Very well. Then I must ask that this accounting be done in reasonable haste. After all, should the cold grow in intensity, such a thing becomes less vital than being properly home."

"Of course, Binder Shanalorre," Lori said. "When has our work been anything but thorough?"

Another nod. "Then we have reached an accord. Lord Yllian, please pass and confirm the order. Our hardworking guests will be staying a little longer. Lunch will be ready for you and yours, Binder Lolilyuri. Should we both be available, shall we have a meal together?"

Lori tilted her head and nodded. "That would be acceptable, Binder Shanalorre. I shall look forward to it."

"Then our business is concluded. I will not delay you any longer."

Lori nodded again and rose, heading out the door, activating her bindings of firewisps as she did so. Rian followed after her. Bereft of firewisps bindings, he simply wrapped his towel around his face again, and Lori tried not to imagine the parts he had wiped his nose on being the same parts touching his mouth.

Outside, her volunteers—not proper militia, just big, strong men Rian had asked to accompany them—were standing with Shanalorre's two militia, the two groups standing in silence. Rian could probably tell what the mood was but she had no idea. Instead, she just walked past, Rian at her side between her and the militia as their two volunteers fell into step with him.

They'd gone some distance before Rian made a sound, a hum. It was one of those 'pay attention to me without me having to tell you to' sounds, pitched just low enough to sound like thoughtfulness, and Lori had to surpress a shudder as memories of pointed, leading questions from her mothers over dinner came to mind. "What?" she snapped.

"Yllian's not leaving the office yet," Rian said quietly.

"So?"

"Despite Shana giving him an order to pass and confirm that should really have him going somewhere else."

Lori blinked and finally deigned to look back. The two militiamen were standing in front of the repurposed house they had just left, looking straight back at them, but she ignored them. She couldn't see anything through the paper-covered windows, no dramatically cast moving shadows…

"I understand Shana not leaving yet, if she's tidying her desk so nothing gets lost, or putting out the brazier so it doesn't burn the place down," Rian said quietly, "but Yllian should be going to convey her message, right?"

"Perhaps they are discussing us," Lori said dismissively.

Rian kept staring towards the office. "Awfully long discussion when he already has something he's supposed to be doing."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Then what do you think they're doing?"

"Arguing?" Rian suggested. "Maybe? A man that age can't be completely comfortable just taking orders from someone that young, Dungeon Binder or not."

Why not? "Why not?" Lori asked, disbelieving.

"His age making him think he knows better just because he's old?"

Hmm… yes, that would do it.

"Idiot. He should know better than to argue with his Dungeon Binder," Lori said.

"He probably thinks Shana can't really do anything to him," Rian said. "It's like he's forgotten how petty and vicious children can be."

Lori shook her head. "Come. We have things to do. Get the miners organized while I prepare the heat and smelting vessels."

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Apparently all the miners had been provided with heavy work coats and furs to wrap around their legs at some point. She supposed that given the lack of heating in the mine, only ventilation, such clothing had been necessary when it had started getting cold, even before the onset of proper winter. As Rian began to divide the miners into two groups—there were ten in this shift—Lori began to make bindings to warm the air in the work area.

She was annoyed to find herself slightly out of practice when it came to using her staff to form bindings, finding herself trying to default to reaching through her connection with her core to bind the wisps… only to be abruptly reminded this wasn't her demesne, which resulted in an internal screaming fit and reminding herself that she'd used a staff for years and knew how to use one, so USE IT.

Fortunately, it was firewisps she was binding, so she could have magic flow from any warm point of her body to align it to the wisps in question. What snow there was on the ground also worked to her advantage since she could anchor the binding of firewisps to waterwisps instead of earthwisps. That meant the magic could also flow from any point in her skin. Getting some firewisps was as simple as rubbing her hands together to create some through friction, even if she didn't already have some bound around her body to keep her hands, face and feet warm.

By the time Rian had managed to divide the miners into two groups, Lori had managed to get a binding that emanated warm air running. She'd needed to use darkwisps to define the area where the firewisps were instead of lightwisps—dealing with lightwisps was always annoying given how close things had to be to one's eyes—to keep people from simply walking into the invisible binding and harming themselves, but an area of darkness in midair was usually disquieting enough that it probably worked better than lightwisps to discourage people from walking through it. Firewisps were not bonded to a material the way earthwisps, waterwisps and airwisps were, and just because she couldn't actively reach into someone's body to bind and imbue the wisps there did not mean those wisps couldn't be imbued or affected by other wisps. Walking through active and imbued firewisps was dangerous and potentially fatal, especially when it was generating heat well above her core body temperature.

People should probably know this already even if just from stories, but she had told Rian to mention it to people anyway, emphasizing the 'horribly death from your insides catching fire'—though not really, since the heat the firewisps were bound to generate was well below a body's ignition temperature—and to not walk through the hot darkness, or even touch it. She expected someone to at least try to stick their finger in though, and get horrible scalding that would perhaps discourage people from doing it again, but they had snow around them, and they still—admittedly tentatively—still had their agreement with Shanalore to provide healing if someone were so foolish.

Rian directed their miners to perform the rudimentary audit of the ore. The larger of the carts that had been used to transport the ore from the mine to the location they'd been stored was retrieved, and the miners used shovels to pile the cart with ore. Once it was full, as the miners reckoned such things, the cart was pushed a little under the dome to where Lori was and dumped onto the ground, accounted for and ready to be smelted.

Off to the side, a woman she vaguely remembered—some relation of Shanalorre's? The woman made Lori think of bread for some reason—was keeping track of the number of loads on River's Fork's behalf, just as Rian was doing for Lori. If the amount of carts of ore matched the record the demesne had kept, then wonderful! All was as it should be, and the demesne had learned a valuable lesson in properly attributing and measuring things in storage. If it exceeded it… well, then surely the original count was somehow wrong or inaccurate, and everyone had come upon an unexpected scalefall from which they could benefit.

If it was significantly below the amount recorded by the demesne…

Well, then surely they had been a touch overzealous in testing for viability, and the lack would be deducted from their share of the ore. After all, any inconsistency couldn't possibly be anyone's fault but their own. The miners had been busy working, trusting in their hosts to properly account for the ore, and Lori hadn't entered the demesne in months. Any discrepancy would clearly have their hosts at fault, since the accounting was being done with the demesne's own tools.

Rian had said that he believed that no such significant lack would exist, and that any discrepancy could be accounted for by some days having recorded carts as full when they were comparatively less as a convenience, but one aspect of the punitive measure was to make River's Fork worry that the ore would be found lacking. It was a frustrating social interaction that Lori was willing to have her lord handle the minutia of, even as she understood the broad flow diagram of it.

But that was all for later. Now that the heat source had been placed to keep her miners—simply workers now, since they weren't mining anymore— her part was preparing to smelt the ore. Smelting wasn't as simple as providing heat until the metal melted into a liquid. As she had learned from one particularly talkative blacksmith during a job when she had been close to finishing her education, smelting ore sometimes also involved having the substance comprising the ore alchemically reacting with other substances so as to isolate the metal itself. Even though this still required an intensive amount of heat, certain kinds of ores also needed the correct additives for the ore to react properly, or at least efficiently.

It was a bother, since it meant she couldn't simply have an open vessel that they could just keep adding ore to at the top while the refined copper flowed out the bottom. Annoyingly, the almanac had been lacking in any information about smelting when she had looked it up, which made an annoying amount of sense. Most of the information in it either had to do with processing commonly available material resources, or ways to more easily survive while constructing a new settlement. Information about smelting, however, would provide an industrial advantage to everyone who had access to metals, which was NOT a commonly available material resource. The closest thing it had to helpful advice on the matter had been the section on quarrying advising using explosions to break up rock, and that was general advise useable for all rock.

The book was similarly bereft on information about papermaking, glassmaking, dye making, the refinement of vitriolic fluids, and other such subjects. It DID contain a page-long recipe and procedure for making soap, but once Lori had read that, she had to agree that the materials for it were hardly uncommon, and it was probably a survival necessity.

Fortunately, Lori had her experience, and she had a Rian to extract any pertinent information she didn't have from their blacksmiths, who had experience in smelting copper, even if it was more common to use metal stock. With those two, she had devised a method of smelting.

As the workers from her demesne made an accounting of the ore, Lori went down to the river, staff in hand, the case containing her syringe in her pocket.