Demesne

"You can start moving grain into the new storage room," Lori told Rian at dinner, which was admittedly later than usual. As with the previous harvest, people had worked for as long as there was sun in the sky to work by.

"Just me? Did I do something to annoy you to have to do all that heavy lifting by myself? More so than usual, I mean?" Rian said.

Lori rolled her eyes. "If you don't think you can do it all by yourself, you can ask people for help. I'm sure Umu would be more than willing to volunteer."

"Don't pressure Umu to carry heavy things," Rian said as Umu looked up in panic. "If you're finished, I suppose we can get to work on harvesting the crops in the dungeon farm."

"Don't fill up the area between the entrance to the new storage room and the little alcove opposite the entrance. I need a path free to continue excavating the storage room if it needs to be expanded further or if I need more raw material."

"You're planning to expand it further?" Rian said, surprised.

"Of course. Once we organize the crops to be easier for Shanalorre and—" Lori turned to glance at the forehead of whatshername, but there was no helpful headcloth there. Sighing, she reached into her pouch and felt around to check the rocks there. "—Taeclas to Deadspeak and accelerate the growth of, we will require far more space to fit all the crops at the same time. Hopefully we will be able to manage more harvests before summer is over."

"Um…" Taeclas said, looking between Rian and Lori.

"What is it, Tae?" Rian asked.

"Um, I think I've thought of a way that we could harvest faster," Taeclas said, and Lori immediately focused on her.

"How?" Lori asked.

"Good morning, your Bindership!"

"…" Lori '…'-ed. "It's evening."

"Ah, sorry, force of habit. Good evening, your Bindership!"

Lori reminded herself the woman was slightly insane and named plants as if they were children. "The harvest?"

"Ah, right. So, I've been studying our crops and experimenting on a few stalks that I've been growing separately, trying to figure out a way to integrate the meaning we're using on the fruit trees onto the crops. Some parts don't really work, and a few things I had to simplify, but I think I've finally managed to adapt the meaning! Given how old the crops are now, I think if I tame the new meaning onto the crops, it will only take them three days to mature enough to be harvested."

Lori blinked. "Three days?" she demanded, and realized she'd said that at the same time as Rian.

Taeclas nodded excitedly. "Yes, but that's only because the crops are already very matured, and it's not accounting for the time it will take me and Shana…lorre to tame, imbue and activate everything. And if we're growing fresh crops, like the ones we're growing in the dungeon farm, I'll be able to remove a few days off the growing time. However, it will take assistance from her Bindership."

"How so?" Rian asked.

"Well, it's a meaning derived from studying the trees in River's Fork and those notes, so they'll cause the plants to run a little hot."

Ah. "Ah. And they'll need to be cooled down, I suppose."

Taeclas nodded. "Probably not the ones in the dungeon farm, but any crops in the fields outside will need the additional cooling."

Lori nodded slowly. "When can you begin implementing these meanings?"

At this, Taeclas looked thoughtful. "Um, it might be a while. I want Lidz to peer-review it in case there's anything I missed before I put it into place on something other than the test stalks I've been keeping."

Lori nodded. "That's probably wise. Rian can give you some paper to put the notes down and perhaps the tentative flow diagram as well so you can relay the information more concisely."

"Uh, out of curiosity, how does this new meaning compare to the meaning you've been using on the crops before?" Rian asked.

Taeclas opened her mouth, then paused, looking thoughtful. Her wife reached over and pushed her jaw closed, her teeth clicking as they came together. "Ah. Thank you, moonlight. Well, the meanings I've been using so far are the basic meanings I was taught in school, the one everyone uses in city farms. I've been using it because it's the simplest and quickest to apply, but with this new meaning…"

"Ah." Rian nodded. "Not that I'm doubting the effectiveness of your meaning once you've had Lidz review it, but perhaps you need to practice applying—"

"Taming," Lori corrected.

Rian stopped speaking, turning to stare at her for some reason as Taeclas started giggling. Lori met his gaze impassively.

"Perhaps you need to practice taming," he eventually said, "your new meaning onto the crops first. While I don't doubt the meaning itself will make the crops grow faster, you might also lose that time actually applying the meaning."

"That's… uh, probably a good idea," Taeclas admitted, stifling her laughter. "You're right, getting used to taming with the new meaning is probably going to slow things down until I'm more experienced with it."

Rian nodded. "I'll ask Clowee to take you to River's Fork on one of the boats tomorrow so you can exchange notes with Lidz. Will you need to stay overnight?"

"No!" Taeclas exclaimed, then looked embarrassed. "Ah, sorry. No, I won't need to stay. It shouldn't take long for me to show him the meaning and exchange notes, although he might need to sleep on it. So… tomorrow and the day after?"

Rian nodded solemnly. "All right, that makes sense."

"When the dungeon farm has been harvested, set aside one plot for crops that you're testing your new meaning on," Lori said. "Rian, give Taeclas more paper. She'll probably want to keep notes about the growth rates and other details."

"Oh, yes! I should probably do that…" Taeclas said thoughtfully.

Lori twitched.

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The next day, Lori had to go out and work. As much as she wanted to go back to her room and return to expanding her demesne, the harvest was an opportunity. A new wood curing and storage shed for the products of the sawmill had been part of the things she'd needed to build, and now was the best time to do it. She had plenty of stone from the recent excavation, and with nearly everyone working on the harvest—a few were still working in the fields, but most were inside the dungeon, working on harvesting the dungeon farm—there were no idiots around to put themselves in danger when she moved stone from her stockpile to the sawmill.

True, she had yet to have any accidents, but that was because she was careful!

As she was working outside, Lori put on her hat and rain coat. While she didn't have to worry about feeling too hot, her skin starting to peel from the exposure to the sunlight was another a matter, and that same sunlight shining on her eyes made it hard to see sometimes. Hence the coat and hat, a necessity for her when she was working outside. They were torturously uncomfortable to wear outside of her demesne, but without them it would be much worse.

With her stone-shaping tool in hand—Taeclas had been able to fuse the wood together, and Rian had pulled the cord that had been keeping the stave and plank together taut—a cord with a knot at every pace in her pocket, and a large mass of stone she had to carefully roll towards the sawmill, Lori began building the two sheds.

Most of the sawmill had been covered, with the thinly-cut planks covering two-thirds of the building's sloping roof. There was a small pile of sawdust just inside the sawmill's walls—well, the frames of the walls, which was mostly there to hold the roof up at the moment—waiting to be added to the latrines to blot and soak up anything that needed soaking, a byproduct of all the sawing being done for the roof.

The location of the new shed had been planned beforehand, and was on the downriver side of the sawmill-in-progress, further from the river so that it wasn't at risk of eventually having the ground under it eroded, and at a slight angle to the sawmill door that faced in that direction. The intention was that the shed would be positioned such that it was easy to carry wood to it from the sawmill, as well as carry wood out.

The site itself was marked with lines of stones and stray branches on the ground, with relatively straight branches thrust into the soil to mark the corners. The marks were fresh, put in place that morning by… actually, Lori had no idea who Rian had told to do this. For all she knew, he might have done it himself. She really wouldn't have been surprised if that was the case. Still, the lines were straight and the angles right, and that was all she needed. The dimensions were bigger than the sheds near the sawpits at four paces wide and eight deep.

Lori carefully claimed and compacted the dirt within the boundaries of the lines—and only that—to a depth of one pace, and watched as the ground sank slightly as a result, the little voids caused by the dirt being separate particles instead of one contiguous substance filling in as she fused the dirt to the bedrock below. She then traced the remaining outline with a binding of earthwisps, deactivating the binding since she didn't really need it to do anything but be a marker as she rolled the softened stone into the depression and poured in the foundation. The stone fused to the packed dirt, anchoring it to the bedrock by proxy. It wasn't perfect—she'd have preferred the soil be dug up so that it could be used in the dungeon farm—but it was a solid enough foundation.

That done, she began to raise the wall of the shed, moving the softened stone along one of the long sides of the foundation. Fusing the stone and foundation together, she began shaping a pace-high wall atop one of the long sides of the rectangle, making it ten yustri thick.

She was not calling it one stri. No one except Rian used stri to measure anything, but fortunately she'd managed to correct him in time before it became a habit.

Lori managed to repress her natural inclination to make the wall as plumb as possible. It was an external load-bearing wall, she didn't need the wall to be properly vertical. Lori kept telling herself that, and while she never started believing it, the reminders were enough to keep her from pausing in her work to try and plumb the wall when she noticed it was wider at the bottom than at the top. As long as the top was one st—ten yustri thick, it was fine. It didn't bother her, it didn't grate at her soul—

…

At great personal expense and agony, Lori finished the low walls of the shed by late morning, though she'd had to get two more batches of stone from the stockpile. Both were relatively straight and a pace high, just about level with her waist. With those in place, she could start building the ceiling.

She claimed and bound the earthwisps of the foundation and the walls she had made, forming them into a binding that reinforced the stone in case she needed it, then deactivated the binding. It allowed her to distinguish between the stone she was using as building material and the stone she shouldn't alter.

Lori then took the stone she had left from the third batch and piled it up at the far end of the shed-to-be, away from the sawmill. It wasn't enough for what she was planning to do, so she went back to the stockpile—now only slightly smaller from all the stone she'd being using—and got another batch of stone, glancing towards the fields as she did so. The work there seemed done, and there seemed to be few people there, probably to keep chokers and other small beasts away from the crops that had been harvested and set to finish drying under the sun. The binding she'd placed to keep out bugs didn't work on beasts.

Rolling the large mass across the ground and back to the new shed in progress, Lori added the stone to the pile already there, making a stone mass that extended from wall to wall and rose up more than three paces and was far thicker.

Nodding to herself, Lori carefully softened the stone and started excavating it like she was digging through the stone of her dungeon, pulling out stone and leaving behind a high, arching ceiling. The stone that she removed, she drew out to extend the shape of the pseudo-tunnel that was forming the roof of the shed.

Slowly, the shed progressed—

"Lori, lunch time!"

—would progress after lunch.