Demesne

All right, Lori was willing to admit that the strange three-plank chair was actually fairly comfortable.

Sitting on the chair, she was able to lean back comfortably, and the texturing on the seat meant that she didn't slip off. The breeze from the boat moving so fast blew on her more consistently from her higher vantage, although that meant she had to remove her hat lest it blow off, but that was fine.

Yes, it was nice to not have to sit in water any time someone used a ladle to splash water on themselves. And she wouldn't have a mildly sore posterior from just sitting on the floor of the boat. The darkwisp binding above her serving as a roof—a sunshade?—was effective enough, although Lori spent the trip upriver adding firewisps to it to delete heat—the less heat she had to deal with, the better—as well as imbuing the binding so that she wouldn't have to worry about it as she worked.

The modifications to the seating also had an effect on the seating arrangements. The plank and beams that had been placed to act as supports for the trestles were high enough to be usable as low benches, and Riz's friends were using it as such. While the planks were low, forcing knees up at stomach level, the former militiawomen seemed to find the seating reasonably comfortable.

Riz herself operated the steam jet driver, which had been replaced by the driver from Lori's Boat Two, with its integrated reverse setting. It was the sort of driver the woman was more familiar with oeprating, and given that they would need to go ashore to retrieve the jar full of iridescence that she and Rian had left beyond the demesne's boundary yesterday, the reverse setting was necessary to help them maneuver away from shore more effectively.

Lori's eyes were drawn to the familiar tree next to where she'd set up her ice shed back in the spring, and a part of her was expecting them to slow down to land next to it as they had done before. However, what had become a familiar, Iridescence-covered landscape was gone, and there were only the browns and greens and silver whites of exposed vegetation, rocks and ground. The shed itself was long gone, no doubt melting back into water and rejoining the river after she'd stopped imbuing its binding to maintain it.

They traveled a bit farther after that. The added stretch of river allowed Lori to appreciate how much more her demesne had grown over the summer. While she'd gone to River's Fork Demesne and back since she'd started expanding, she wasn't really familiar with the landmarks denoting the edge of the demesne in that direction. Yes, she had a general familiarity with the twists and turns of the river along the route that allowed her to judge how much further it was to the… to her other demesne, but she'd be hard-pressed to remember specific landmarks at the boundary, usually because she was too busy suddenly suffering from the sudden heat. She knew that tree very well, however, and seeing how much more clear land beyond it they had to pass by helped put all of Rian's numbers into context for her.

Eventually, they reached the new edge of her demesne, a sharp line marking the border of what she ruled and the wild lands full of beasts covered in deadly colors. In fact, there were some of said wild beasts at the river at the moment. Lori watched them warily. Shaped like fat teardrops with stubby-looking tails, they rose up more than twice her height. Their long necks supported a round head with a wide, triangular mouth, and unlike most beasts, they stood as if upright, their hind legs straight and long beneath them. Their bodies glittered with Iridescence of course, obscuring what their natural colors were.

The beasts were drinking, some bending down to lap at the water while others stood straight, head as high as they would go, keeping watch for predators. They had noticed the boat and a few of the beasts blinked at them curiously, their eyes intent on the strangers. Lori wondered if that was simply natural instinct to keep watch on moving objects, or whether they'd learned to be wary of the boat.

Behind her, she heard Riz grunt. "Glittering waddlers."

"Is there a problem, Erzebed?" Lori said.

"The waddlers are close to where we buried the jar, Great Binder. I don't think it's safe to try and get it right now."

Ah. "How long does it usually take for these things to move on?"

"They won't move until all of the beasts in the flock have had a chance to drink, and we don't know how long that will be. Could be a few moments, could be half an hour from now."

"Could we make them leave?" Lori asked.

Riz hesitated. "You'll have to be the one to try, Great Binder. It would be too dangerous for us to try to force them off. You're never supposed to go up against a beast the same size as you alone. The bigger it is, the more people you need to deal with it safely." The not-an-officer gestured. "We'd also need the right equipment, like beast spears and shields, not these little stickers." Lori assumed that meant the bundle of spears with their steel points elevated above what little water was sloshing around the bottom of the boat. "I wouldn't want to deal with their claws without something to but in front of me."

Lori blinked, taking a second look at the waddlers. "I don't see any claws."

"No, you don't. They're a nasty surprise hiding under the feathers, which are actually very thick."

She stared at the beasts. "They must be cooking under those colors," she said. Then she blinked, and turned to give Riz a pointed look. "You've been carrying those same spears when you accompanied me to the edge of the demesne before…" Lori said, giving her a pointed look.

"Because if a big beast showed up that could be dangerous to you the idea was to buy time while you ran into the demesne, not try and make the beast go anywhere," Riz said. "Trying to get those waddlers to move means holding our ground, which we can't really do with these things."

Well, Lori supposed that made sense. She looked towards the so-called waddlers. While they didn't look dangerous—honestly, they looked like large eggs standing upright—they were still dangerous bigger than she was, and if Riz said it had claws, then it had claws. The fact she couldn't see the claws meant no one would be able to adequately react to them. Actually, since they were hidden, one couldn't even be able to say what was a safe distance.

"We'll stay inside the demesne and wait for a few moments to see if they leave," Lori declared. "I have things I need to prepare anyway. If they're still there by the time I'm done…" Lori shrugged. "I'll move them."

Riz nodded. "Are we staying on the water or landing?"

Lori opened her mouth to order the latter, then paused. "Let's try the two anchors," she said instead. "Best to see if they work as intended, since we have time." If there was one thing she'd learned in her time as a Dungeon Binder, it was that even sound ideas didn't always work right the first time. Adjustment were always needed. "I'll leave you to it."

"Yes, Great Binder," Riz said.

Lori sat back and started preparing the starter binding for the beads she'd be amalgamating as Riz and her friends tried to get the anchors to work, although she did notice that they simply dropped the anchors over the side, requiring Riz stay at the driver controls to keep maneuvering the boat away from the shore. It made the Dungeon Binder sigh, but she simply went back to her preparations.

Airwisps, lightwisps, firewisps, and most importantly darkwisps were gathered around her as she reached out through her connection to her demesne's core, the wisps claimed, bound and added to the mass of wisps anchored to her bone tablet. It was probably excessive, but as this would be the first time she'd be making beads on a boat, there was a possibility of failure and she wanted a surplus of raw materials—as much as wisps could be considered material—to be able to make up for it. Of course, the limiting factor would be crystals of Iridescence…

The bindings needed a certain level of imbuement so that they wouldn't be completely consumed by the Iridescence, and Lori spent a few moments filling the deactivated binding so that it would reach that level. Fortunately at that point Riz and her friends recalled that the two anchors needed to be some distance from each other and were trying to throw them as far as possible in different directions. That allowed them to manage things, and once the anchors were secured, it was all a matter of adjusting the ropes so that the boat was suspended where they wanted to be.

Fortunately, the waddlers had left in the midst of all this, the flock making their way back into the woods. Whether it was because they'd all managed to drink their fill or had been disturbed by the former militiawomen trying to figure out how to deploy the anchors, Lori couldn't say, although she'd have understood if it was the latter. Regardless, that meant it was safe to try and recover the jar of iridescence that Rian had buried yesterday when he'd come out to the edge to measure the demesne's expansion.

That meant finally crossing the border of the demesne and beyond to the outside. This time, Lori actually remembered to brace herself, and indeed there was a sudden increase in the temperature around her, turning from comfortably warm and humid to very uncomfortably hot and humid. Thanks to her sunshade of darkwisps and the firewisps anchored to it, the heat was much less extreme than it usually was when she'd had to leave the confines of her demesne this summer. Yes, it was still hot, but not so much that she wanted to throw herself in the river or immediately regretted convincing herself she had to exit her demesne. This was merely uncomfortably warm.

She didn't have that long to appreciate the effectiveness of her sunshade as the boat approached land that the waddlers had vacated. Lori could still hear them as they… well, waddled… between the trees, calling out to each other loudly, their juveniles in the center of the group's formation. Two of Riz's friends followed the not-an-officer ashore, spears in hand, to keep watch as Riz kicked a spot on the ground as clear of Iridescence as she could before starting to dig with a nearby rock and her bare hands. In a few moments, she had unearthed a sealed jar, which they carefully brought back to the boat. One of the women still aboard took it with some reluctance, but there were no exposed crystals on the outside, only a glittering rainbow hue.

"Don't let that get wet," Lori snapped just as the woman was about to put it down. "If that gets washed, it becomes useless." While Lori had been gathering up the water on the bottom of the boat that had gathered every time someone had splashed themselves with the ladle to cool off, there was still some water there, and it might be enough to adversely affect the iridescence in the jar.

…

The world had become a very strange place ever since she'd become a Dungeon Binder, Lori reflected. Regularly talking to people, deliberately doing unpaid work, and now she didn't want Iridescence to be washed away with water as a sane person should…

…

Probably best not to think about it.

Taking the jar, Lori carefully pulled off the stopper. Inside, she could make out the glittering, crystalline shapes of Iridescence. Rian had apparently not simply buried the jar but had also filled it with Iridescence he'd collected the day before, which had continued to crystallize.

The sight of it still made Lori shudder as she carefully stoppered the jar shut again and resisted the urge to wash her hands, and the jar for good measure. She needed the Iridescence. She needed the Iridescence. She needed the Iridescence…

If she said it enough times, perhaps she'd stop shuddering at the thought.

"All right," she said as Riz climbed back onto the boat, "take us out into the middle of the river and set the anchors. Don't let us drift back into the demesne."

"Yes, Great Binder."

As Riz got returned to the rear of the boat where she could operate the steam jet driver, the other former militiawomen used the butts of their spears to pushed Lori's Boat Three away from the shore. Soon, they were back out further into the water, away from the reach of beasts. This time, there was no problem as the anchors were set apart from each other—they had dropped one anchor and Riz had moved the boat some distance away before the other anchor was dropped as well, which was a much more certain way of doing it than trying to throw the anchors—and the ropes were secured to keep the boat more or less in place, or at least not as at risk of drifting back towards her demesne.

Lori set the trestles onto the places meant for them and laid down her bead-making table. It was time to get to work.