"You… want me to be your lord?" Rian asked.

"Yes, that's what I just said."

"Uh… why me? I mean, there are other people…"

"I need a leader. Someone people listen to and can convince them to work."

"Again, there are other people," Rian argued. He seemed well aware that many of those people were likely listening in as they spoke. "There's Mary Sue over there—"

"It's Marissa!"

Rian ignored the interruption, though it made Lori twitch. "—Seraphine and her friends, Katherine over there is clearly the leader of her group, Mara is clearly respected… even Hatarine would be a good choice."

"Eh? Did someone say my name?"

"Go back to eating, Hatarine," Rian called out.

"Okay!"

"While that may be true," Lori said, "they are all clearly leaders of their particular group. That will skew their priorities." While she knew nepotism and factionalism were inevitable in any hierarchy, since there was a way to avoid such problems at the outset of her demesne, she'd intended to take it. "While I know nepotism and factionalism are inevitable in any hierarchy, since I have a way to avoid such problems at the outset of my demesne, I intend to take it."

"And that way is…?"

"Having you as my lord," Lori said. "You are clearly unaffiliated with the multiple groups that make up the settlement party, but have good relations with them… even that group who all speak that strange regional dialect that seems to have no relation at all to proper speech." She heard some isolated areas were like that, where the residents' colloquial idiosyncrasies had gone uncorrected for so long that what they spoke was nigh-unintelligible. Fortunately, education was wiping out such deviations, though clearly these edge-dwellers hadn't had that benefit.

"I'm sure they're all perfectly eloquent in their own dialect," Rian said. "But if you needed someone like that, why not ask Lee Fei?"

"Besides the fact she's clearly a Mentalist pretending not to be, and doing very badly at it?"

"Yes, besides that."

"She's a Mentalist," Lori said. "I can't trust her to not kill me and take my core to make this her own demesne."

"Why?"

Lori stared at him. "Why what?"

"Why can't you trust her to not kill you?" Rian said. "I mean, she hasn't struck me as particularly violent, hateful, or envious, so why would you think she'd want to kill you just to take this demesne away from you? I mean," he waved in his arm out in an arc, as if trying to gesture at the world, "it's not that far of a walk to find unclaimed land. If she wanted to, all she'd need to do is walk for maybe half a day and she could have her own demesne. And if she really wanted to take this place from you, it would be smarter of her to do that first, so she could at least match you at an almost equal level. The fact she hasn't and has mostly been helping out dig pits for latrines and helped with excavating the dungeon should be a good indicator she's not out to murder you."

Those… were all very fair and reasonable arguments, and Lori didn't care. This was her life. "No. Be that as it may, I would feel safer if she wasn't constantly close to me."

"You realize she's sitting right there," Rian said, pointing diagonally over his left shoulder and towards where a young woman whose short hair straddled the line between light brown and pale red sat. "And can probably hear you."

Lori stared at him. "So?"

He stared back at her, then eventually sighed for some reason. "All right… say I agree to be your lord… what will the position entail?"

"You're capable and can get people to work. People listen to you. Your job will be to keep all of us from dying because we're out of food or out of wood or someone's son has slept with someone's daughter because there's nothing else to do around here and people are taking wood axes to heads."

"…yes, that last is looking disturbingly likely," he said, glancing towards the table where many of the black-haired young men who all spoke the same unintelligible dialect all sat, making faces at the food as they ate. One of them saw him and shouted something in a tone that was probably supposed to be dramatic, pointing at him with a frown.

"You are also not affiliated with any of the established groups, but seem to get along with them, and you were the one who organized excavating the cave for the Dungeon."

"Well, it needed to be done," he said. "The sooner we had a Dungeon protecting us, the safer everyone would have been. And if we helped, you'd be able to keep us safe with the water break while we worked."

"And the patrols keeping watch for wild beasts?"

"That's just common sense. There are dangerous beasts out there and we didn't have a Dungeon to protect us yet. Besides, it gave some of the hotheads something to focus on and kept us in meat."

"And the woodcutting parties?"

"Well, we needed wood, didn't we? Someone had to do it, and those guys weren't doing anything and didn't mind being asked."

"Well, Rian, I need more of that," Lori said. "I need to get people to work while I keep everyone safe. Everyone keeps looking at me like I'm going to set them on fire."

"Well, you do glare at people a lot," he said. "Especially when you're muttering about drowning people or setting them on fire."

Oh dear. Had she said those things out loud?

"Don't worry, I told them you were just cranky because you had wet socks," Rian said. "You're always cranky when your socks get wet."

The words were pulled out of her with rusty hooks. "Thank you," she managed to push out.

"You're welcome," he said cheerfully. "We're all in this together, after all."

"Which simply proves my point about why I chose you to be my lord," Lori said.

"Are you sure about this? I mean, for all you know, I might go mad with power and start declaring that all the women belong to me or something."

"Then I'm sure there's no shortage of people who would be willing to correct you by beating you soundly."

––––––––––––––––––

Lori had felt so optimistic when she'd first made her core. In hindsight, she might have to admit the heady sensation of power had gone to her head. And she was willing to admit to herself—the only person such an admission mattered—that she might have assumed too much of the other settlers she'd joined with. She had thought that there would be some people who would know how to farm.

"Would you repeat that?" Lori said, trying to deny the evidence of her senses. Her ears, in particular.

"The number of people in the demesne who know how to farm are precisely two," Rian said. If he was troubled by the words coming out of his mouth, it wasn't obvious. "One if you discount purely theoretical knowledge."

Lori nodded. Yes, that was what she'd thought he'd said. A pity she'd been correct. "And these people are…?"

"The person with only theoretical knowledge is Lee Fei."

Of course the Mentalist would know. And depending on where she had learned, it might actually be purely theoretical. "And the other one, who I gather must have practical knowledge as well?"

"Hatarine Weise."

Lori twitched. "The one who introduces herself 'hello, I'm Hatarine. I'm a perfectly ordinary girl and definitely not some kind of lady. That would be wrong. And very silly'? The addled idiot who's clearly some kind of lady in disguise, has a woman who is clearly some sort of servant with her, and accompanied by a whole group of clearly infatuated idiots who are also clearly lords and ladies of some sort, and are only slightly more successful at pretending?"

"Yup, that's the one," Rian said brightly. "I took the liberty of asking her to organize our farming, because she's literally the most qualified. She actually had farm tools with her. Well, she had a watering can and a hoe, but that's literally all the farm tools in this entire demesne."

Lori groaned. "We're going to starve to death."

"Not at the rate everyone's bringing in meat, no. If Hatarine proves to be even partly capable, then we'll hopefully have something to show for it later in the year, when we're all sick and tired of meat. Although some people are already sick and tired of meat already. They've started experimenting with some of the local plants, trying to find something that can be used as a spice of flavoring." He sighed. "I'm afraid they also managed to get their hands on many of the eggs beasts that had been found in the territory of the demesne."

Lori grimaced. "Is that why I've been seeing so much yolkoil?"

"They call it mayonnaise."

"It's yolkoil, whatever it's called in that dialect of theirs."

"You don't like it?"

"It's a disgusting substance that shouldn't exist."

"What did she say?-!" someone at another table exclaimed.

"Go back to eating, Arashi! Not everyone likes mayo, don't antagonize her Bindership by insisting she like it!" Rian called out. He turned back to her. "Anyway, I've told them that if they find anything usable, they need to preserve it first so we can grow more."

"So they're probably going to strip every plant of it they find in the demesne bare and kill them."

"Most likely," Rian nodded.

––––––––––––––––––

Despite everything, the farming was actually going well.

"Heave-ho! Heigh-ho! Heave-ho! Heigh-ho!"

Though she seemed to have the mind of someone half her age, Hatarine—her name was burned into Lori's mind, both because of her atrocious introduction and horror she had felt at learning the woman was their only farmer—actually seemed to be a capable farmer. And despite clearly being a bunch of lords—or at least their children—her entourage were actually a respectable labor force under her direction.

"Heave-ho! Heigh-ho! Heave-ho! Heigh-ho!"

Even now, they were laboring in the newly cleared ground that Hatarine had been working on. Said work had apparently included sowing the waste from the latrines onto the soil to fertilize it—Lori had assisted in that, desiccating the waste by removing all the waterwisps—after the area had been cleared of trees.

"Heave-ho! Heigh-ho! Heave-ho! Heigh-ho!"

Lori was still wondering how it had been cleared. She'd been in her dungeon when it had happened, excavating stone for building material and to expand the dungeon into a proper shelter in the event of a dragon, so she hadn't actually seen it, but the trunks had clearly been cut by a water cutter, or perhaps a Mentalist's thought force had been used as a cutting edge. The trees—and their stumps—had also been stacked haphazardly next to the hill her core was in—right over the corpses she had on ice for when she had Deadspeaking, as it happened— without even being stripped of branches and leaves. The rocks and other obstructions that had littered the ground had been put in a much smaller pile, a convenient building material for Lori or anyone else. People had already started using it to make firepits for semi-permanent bonfires.

"Heave-ho! Heigh-ho! Heave-ho! Heigh-ho!"

Getting the tree trunks from the pile, stripping them of branches and leaves, and then cutting them into logs had become the punishment duty for those who had kept bothering her about insisting on the features they wanted on the houses she'd been building. Everyone was getting a single large room with a stone floor and sun-facing doors and windows and liking it! She wasn't going to hear about packed dirt floors in front of the door or raised wooden floors, and if they wanted sliding paper doors, then they could figure out how to make paper themselves! Perhaps all the work they'll be doing with the branches, leaves and trunks will inspire them. Not everyone doing it was on punishment duty, of course, but it was conveniently endless, needful work that would keep such bugs occupied.

"Heave-ho! Heigh-ho! Heave-ho! Heigh-ho!"

As Lori watched Hatarine leading her besotted idiots and a few volunteers in turning over the earth, she finally realized what had been disturbing her about the scene she was watching.

"Rian," she called out, and he looked up from where was speaking with one of the demesne's few medics. "I need to talk to you."

He sighed, then turned back to the medic. "We'll talk later, all right Anna? Keep up the good work though. Hopefully we can keep people from getting sick."

The woman nodded cheerfully. "Sure, Rian! Later!" She walked away, a literal bounce in her step as Rian turned towards Lori.

"Yes?" he asked, and Lori twitched a little at the patient look on his face.

She let some of her irritation enter her voice as she pointed out at the scene sight before her. "Rian, where did all those farm tools come from?" Now that she was looking, in addition to the hoe Hatarina had, there were also several shovels, some people at the edges of the fields were using picks to soften the soil in preparation for further expansion, and there appeared to be several metal buckets being used to carry desiccated waste. "You said Hatarine had literally all the farm tools in the demesne on her, and they amount to a hoe and a watering can!"

"Oh, those tools!" Rian said brightly. "Some people made them."

"With what?"

He blinked. "Uh, pardon?"

"Some people made them, you said. Made them with what? The sound of metalworking is quite distinctive and carries, and I heard none of it. There was no smoke to signify attempts at forging using all this wet green wood, and I don't remember assisting in any forging by creating firewisps of sufficient heat to make iron workable. I saw no one with proper forging tools, and I definitely saw no anvils among the carts on the way here. And judging from what I can see of the tools even from this distance, they appear to be made of steel, which requires even higher temperatures to achieve. Untarnishing steel, at that, which requires not just iron and coal, but croco as well."

Rian was silent for a moment.

She rounded on him angrily. "Where did it come from, Rian?"

"I told you, it was made in the demesne," he said, then sighed. "The maker just… didn't want you to know they were making it in case you might be inclined to over-react. It was their condition for making the tools in the first place."

Lori's hands shook, and she clutched at her staff tightly. "Rian," she said, and she didn't know if she was angry or afraid, "is there another Whisperer in the demesne, hiding in all those groups?"

"No… I can definitely say that there isn't another Whisperer in the demesne," Rian said. "I should probably just show you. Just… please be reasonable? They don't want to hurt anyone, they just want to be left alone. You of all people can appreciate that, right?"

"Rian, explain this to me properly. Now!"

"A bunch of people have set up a little facility on the edge of the demesne," Rian said quickly. "It's where beasts and such get taken to be butchered now before they're carted here for you to put on ice. That's where some people have set up… shall we say premises… to do some things where they're less likely to be bothered. And not by you. You're not the one they're trying to keep things secret from, though they did it anyway because it was convenient."

"And who, exactly, are these people trying to hide from?" she asked, her voice filled with vitriol.

"The Japanese."

Lori stared at him. "Who?"

"Ah, right. The ones with the unintelligible dialect who keep making yolkoil and—"

"Oh. Them," Lori said flatly. A bit of the tension inside her eased. "Well, I can almost understand that." Their obsession with yolkoil was enough for her to not want to be near many of them. "But what does this have to do with farm tools?"

"The person who made the tools are afraid that if it gets out who's making them, that they'll start pestering her to make them swords and armor and crossbows and a table with a brazier on the underside…"

The tension lessened even more. Yes, that certainly sounded like some of them. Not all, probably, but as Lori couldn't tell them apart because they all looked alike from having the same hair color…

"Anyway, they don't go out there, since they don't participate in hunting anymore and most are a bit squeamish at the butchering part. Once the other groups figured that out, some of them started setting up there so they wouldn't be bothered while they worked."

"Which includes this smith."

Rian nodded.

Lori nodded. That all sounded… almost reasonable. However, her gaze was still piercing as she glared at Rian. "Why didn't you tell me we actually had a smith in the demesne?"

"You hadn't asked, and weren't working on anything that might need one."

"And the fact they have the resources to make untarnishing steel?"

"Uh… that's something I think you need to discuss with them, since I don't know the specifics myself."

"Take me to them, then," Lori said. "I want to meet this smith."

Rian might have hoped she hadn't noticed it, but he had made no mention of what the person in question was using for heat in their smithing. Even if she was inclined to believe Rian—which she wasn't at the moment—about there not being another Whisperer in the demesne, there was clearly some sort of resource being hidden from her. One that could provide enough heat to work steel.

She was not going to let something like that be hidden from her!