Demesne

With the probationaries telling them that there was, in fact, no rapids between her demesne and their previous, now unclaimed one, as well as the assertion there were wounded left behind, Lori was… all right, still worried this was a trap. But the possibility of an unclaimed demesne was worth the risk… but someone would know that, that's why they thought it was a trap, and the supposedly unclaimed demesne was the bait… but if it wasn't a trap…

For the first time in her life, Lori was starting to understand why even a reasonably intelligent person might fall for a scam.

But the story of how there was (supposedly) wounded left behind had spread, and while Lori was, of course, completely immune to social pressure, Rian had no such resistance.

"We're going to have to go after them today," he said over breakfast. "I know it's not ideal but if there really are injured and we're just being paranoid–"

"Ugh, fine," Lori said, feeling very put upon. "If you want to rescue these supposedly injured people, then you can. But I'm going with you. If there is an unclaimed demesne, I'm taking it."

"Wouldn't it be safer for you to stay here and wait for me to come back with confirmation?" Rian said.

"I'm sure I can handle anything they throw at me," Lori said.

"Even another wizard? Or another Binder?"

"I'm a Whisperer," Lori repeated haughtily. "I can handle anything they throw at me."

"You haven't been outside the demesne since you set it up," Rian pointed out. "Can you even adjust to not having whatever boost it's giving you?"

All right, Lori was getting tired of this discussion. "We're going, that's final."

Rian rolled his eyes, then chuckled. "I should have realized."

"Realized what?"

"That you were recklessly ambitious too," he said, an outrageously baseless accusation, "Or else why would you come to this continent instead of staying back home taking advantage of the opportunities available only to an educated wizard?"

"You sound like my parents," Lori said, rolling her eyes. "Besides, you're here too."

"Yes, but I had absolutely no prospects or any marketable skills," Rian said. "What's your excuse?"

"I wanted a demesne," Lori said simply.

"You could have set up next to Covehold," Rian pointed out.

Lori snorted. "Oh, please. Those colorbrained idiots are too close. They'll be killing each other to claim each other's demesnes within a year."

"As opposed to you, who waited for someone to die of natural causes."

"Exactly," Lori nodded. "Why fight when you can scavenge?"

"How does that fit into 'handle anything they throw at you'?" Rian said.

"Finish eating, we need to get started this morning," Lori said. "Have you picked out who'd be coming with us?"

"Three of the boys will be coming along," Rian said.

"Any particular reason for choosing them?" Lori asked, uncertain if he meant actual boys or just other males close to his age.

"They were chosen on the strength of their demesne apparently having encouraged quarterstaff fighting as a pastime for bored young people," Rian said. "Or perhaps better to say an inability to discourage it." He paused. "And it's just occurred to me that you don't actually have a law against people hurting each other, only killing each other."

"I believe everyone should have the right to punch idiots in the face for being idiots," Lori said.

"And the reason you're not worried this means people willing to punch you in the face…?"

"I'm not an idiot. But they are for trying to punch me. So they get to be punched in the face."

"Ah. Sounds about right."

"We will be using the barge, once I make some modifications."

Rian raised a single eyebrow, which made Lori blink in surprise. "What sort of modifications?"

"We want to be fast, don't we?" Lori said.

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The small barge the probationaries had brought with them to carry supplies and luggage had obviously been made by a Deadspeaker. It was all one piece, with no seams or joins, and was clearly made from three different types of wood.

Lori really wanted to be able to do that. It would be SO convenient! She'd finally have furniture not made from rock!

It was, however, still a barge. Wide, flat-bottomed, and more built for space than speed. It handled like a log, and while it definitely displaced enough water that someone standing at one of its corners wouldn't cause it to capsize, it was still a barge.

She could work with that.

Only Deadspeakers could work with wood, whether living or dead. Living, to accelerate and control growth, induce flowering and fruiting, or reshape and alter even the bloodtraits– not that trees had blood, but they apparently had bloodtraits. Dead, to be reshaped and molded as she would stone or ice.

Given she had to make some modifications to the barge to make it more suitable for her use, this was a problem. But only a minor one.

The modifications were minor and intended to make it easier to make the thing move straight. Barges were usually towed or pushed, usually by another boat or from land by people with ropes. While they could be self-propelled, this one wasn't. It had been pulled from the shore and maneuvered with poles.

Lori didn't want to do the same.

She had to be quick, since they had to leave by lunch at the latest.

Most of the beast skulls had been turned into shovels. Some of the bones had been cracked for marrow and broth. Others had been made into tools like knives, needles for sewing the seel skins, hooks, all sorts of needful things that they didn't have metal for or didn't want to use metal for. But beasts had a lot of bones, and so did the seels, and so had that large undead islandshell, once it had FINALLY stopped moving and she'd desiccated the fleshy parts before they could rot. And bones had earthwisps.

She made her way around the cliff, in the direction away from the river, towards where they stored bones. It was mostly a recess in the ground next to the stone face not deep enough to be called a pit, where bones were left to dry. People were mostly free to take what they needed, though Lori had prior claim on all beast teeth and claws.

Absently pulling some of the rocks from the cliff face to make a work surface for her to lay things on, Lori quickly got as many big bones as she could. She swiftly identified which side had bones that were dry and not disgusting, going for the ones broken open for marrow. These she methodically piled on her stone surface.

She had a nice pile by the time Rian found her.

"As you keep telling me, you don't know how to Deadspeak, so this big pile of dead things is mildly worrying," Rian said. "Not as much as your corpse cache, but getting there. I thought we were leaving?"

"Not without propulsion," she said as she stepped back from the pile and grimaced at her hands. She condensed water out of the air to give them a quick wash. "I'm not rowing." She claimed the earthwisps in the bone and began to reshape.

"Wait, are you… magicing bone? That's… new? I thought Whispering couldn't manipulate bodies, living or dead."

"Whispering can't manipulate living body functions and structures," Lori said. "Otherwise you would have things like taking the lightningwisps from someone's brain and killing them. This, however, is dead bone. Bone is used to align with earthwisps when Whispering."

"So… it counts as a kind of rock?" Rian said. "Oh, right, you were able to reshape teeth, weren't you? And teeth are like bone… But why bone?"

"It's lighter than stone and can be as strong as metal," Lori said.

Rian tilted his head. "Are those… panels?"

There were four, thick as a finger, wide as her forearm and twice her arm's length, meant to be attached to the sides of the barge to stabilize it and keep it going straight. "Yes. Take those to the barge, and be careful with them. Don't drop them," she warned.

"Yes, Great Binder!" Rian said in an overblown attempt at the probationaries accents, but did as he was told, taking the panels one at a time as Lori continued working on the last piece.

It was long and vaguely shaped like a vase, a much larger version of something she'd once made to demonstrate principles of propulsion. It was uneven, since she didn't have any tools but her hand to shape it, but it didn't have to be perfectly shaped. Holes in the front to draw in water, lengths of fused bone to mount it to the barge, enough thickness to make it less likely to break…

She carried it back herself, not trusting Rian to hold it right.

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"Is that some kind of… egg?" Rian said, staring at the object Lori was carrying. With him were Grem and three of the young men, looking in their late teens, maybe twenty at best, all carrying beast-tooth spears. Rian and Grem were wearing swords in addition to spears, the latter wearing it much more comfortably that the former.

"It's a means of propulsion so we don't have to row or be pulled along," Lori said, walking up to where the barge had been beached. It had been emptied of contents and looked much bigger out of the water, coming up to Lori's waist. In addition to small packs of personal supplies like blankets and maybe a change of clothes, there were jars filled with stewed meat submerged in broth to serve as rations, boxes of dried meat, dried firewood, rope (from among the probationaries' supplies), long poles for pushing the barge along, oars for when it was too deep to do that, skins of water, a couple of sealed sacks, and folding buckets made from seel skin and wooden ladles for washing away Iridescence. Her staff was already there where she'd left it, and she put her hat in as well. "With luck, we'll be able to get up to enough speed that we'll arrive where the wounded are and claim the demesne by nightfall."

"Will it work outside the demesne?" Rian asked, gesturing at what she'd made.

"Are you questioning my capabilities?" Lori glared.

"Yes," Rian said bluntly.

Why did he have to be so annoyingly honest?

"It will work outside the demesne," Lori huffed.

"Well… if you say so…" Rian said. "How does it work?"

Lori gave him a frustrated look, then sighed. "Well, I suppose I'd better test it, just to be sure. Help me get this in the water."

By which she of course meant Rian was to put it in the water. Carefully, he set the long, vase-shaped construct of bone in the water. As he steadied it from behind by holding on to the two long projecting struts of bone, she bound waterwisps at the inlet holes.

Water and vapor erupted from the open end of the construct as the waterwisps bound to the inlets pulled water in. The bone construct leaped forward, pulling a surprised Rian forward to fall face-first into the water as the bone bulb scraped along the muddy ground and seemingly darting up the slope to dry land before it ran out of water to propel it.

Lori hurried forward, checking the bone construct, and sighed in relief as she found it hadn't been damaged, though little clumps of water still clung to the inlet holes, their binding holding them in place and waiting for more water to propel down the tubes. "It's fine," she declared.

Rian was slowly pushing himself out of the water. "Oh good," he said blandly, completely soaked. "I wouldn't want anything to happen to it. You could have warned me, you know."

"You wouldn't have understood," she said.

"It's a water jet. It sucks water in from one end and shoots it out the other, propelling the whole thing forward as long as it's submerged," Rian said, voice still bland. "What's hard to understand about that? It's basically shaking a beer bottle and then knocking off the cork to send it spinning, except it never runs out of beer. Please warn me next time, I might have stood in front of it, and then you'd be down a lord."

Grem looked aghast. "Who does that to beer?"

"People too bored to drink it," Rian said.

Lori sighed and pulled some beast teeth from one of her belt pouches. "Will you stop talking about weird beer games and help me put this thing on?"

"I'm fine, by the way. Completely unhurt, nothing broken, just a little wet."

"How nice. Do you want to go and claim the demesne or do you want to talk about how wet you are?"

Sighing and muttering something about holding out for more rights, Rian got up and helped her install the water jet to the barge using the beast teeth to grip the wood and clamp the jet in place by the bone struts. The panels were similarly installed at the corners with their own teeth-studded bone clamps, to serve as fins to keep the barge going straight. Thankfully whoever had built the barge had included a rudder, if only as an aid to being pushed around by poles or pulled by ropes.

They were about to push the barge into the water when Rian suddenly said, "Wait! Does this boat have a name?"

Lori, Grem, and the three young men, as well as the inevitable onlookers milling about stared at him.

"What?" he said. "Where I come from, it's bad luck to travel on a boat with no name. I'm almost sure that's a thing. We need to give it a name."

Lori stared at him. "Surely you can't be serious?"

"I am serious. And my name is Rian."

One of the young men chuckled, quickly stifled.

Lori rolled her eyes, and turned reluctantly to Grem. "Does it have a name?"

He shrugged. "We just called it the barge."

"Bad luck," Rian repeated. For some reason, people started nodding as if agreeing with him.

"Ugh…" Lori groaned. "Fine! I hereby name this 'Lori's Boat'. Now can we get it into the water now?"

"Are you just going to name everything after yourself?" Rian said. "You're not going to name this 'Lori's River', are you?"

Lori looked thoughtful.

"Push the boat in before she actually does it!" Rian cried, and suddenly people were pushing and Lori had to scramble along so she'd be in position to get herself on Lori's Boat before it got too deep. She was first on board, wincing as she heard her things ground. Eventually though, it was in the water, and the men were scrambling to pull themselves in, with Rian going last as he was completely soaked. He immediately had them grabbing poles to push them deeper as people on shore called and waved.

Lori found a nice place to sit and began imbuing her water jet.