Demesne

She slept on the barge, anchored securely out in the middle of the river. With all the supplies removed, there was plenty of room for her to stretch out. She had her rain coat to lie down on, her old pillow, her blanket, and her hat to put over her head so bugs wouldn't lay eggs in her ears, not that there were any bugs in the demesne yet. As sleeping arrangements go, it wasn't bad. When they had been originally travelling, she usually slept under a water wagon in case it rained, but that changed after she became the group's only Whisperer and was able to lay claim to whatshername's tent.

She wondered what had happened to that tent. Ah, well…

Lori thought it would be like sleeping on a ship, but it was actually more stable than that. It moved when she shifted, true, but as long as she kept to the relative center of the barge it wasn't so bad, and it would quickly right itself when she stopped moving. The rocking motion of the barge going up and down on the water was actually pretty relaxing. It reminded her of her childhood when one of her mothers would sway her to sleep…

This was much better than Grem's situation. He had to sleep with his hands tied behind his back, which were in turn tied to a tree. Rian had used their shovel to dig a hole under the man's sleeping roll so he could lie down while still having his hands behind his back, but Lori had to wonder how her first lord knew to do that. Did he have much experience with having men sleep with their hands tied? She supposed it was the sort of things lords were taught before they decide to run away from home and pretend to not be lords.

With the sounds of not-so-distant bugs, the splashing of the river against the hull, and rocking to lull her, Lori went to sleep.

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She woke up to water dripping on her forehead. Her hand came up blearily, the water that had pooled on the various contours of her face dripping off as she moved, and she looked around in confusion.

Rian's face and one arm peeked out from over the side of the barge, grinning as the arm dripped water from the fingertips onto Lori's face. "Done with your beauty sleep?" he asked. "Because I don't think you want to miss breakfast, and we sort of need to pack."

Lori blinked at him, then abruptly sat up. "How did you…" She paused. Sitting up, she saw she was still in the middle of the river. Rian's naked upper body– the state of nudity of his lower body indeterminate right then– hung from the side of the barge, which was at least thirty or forty paces from shore. She glanced at the water suspiciously. While the water had been clear yesterday, her current angle didn't let her see very deep. "Is the river shallow here or something?"

Rian blinked at her. "I swam," he said as if it was obvious.

Lori gave him a confused look. "What, like a seel?"

"It's not that hard," Rian said. "The human body is basically a bag of dirty water."

The confused look intensified as Lori looked at her arm. Yes, they'd taught her that the body was mostly water in school, but… She felt the waterwisps in her blood and veins and pores and...

She blinked as she suddenly became aware of her body, at all the water and waterwisps in her skin, in her flesh, inside her bones… all just lying there. She felt it in her stomach and her gut and her liver and in her nose and ears and… how had she never connected waterwisps and her bladder? It should have been so obvious! It was as if all her life she'd been staring at the dust moving in the wind and finally focused on the dust inert on the ground.

"Lori? Demesne to Lori, you still with us?" she heard, and suddenly realized Rian was waving his hand in front of her face.

She shook her head rapidly to clear it. "I'm fine," she said, as she finally understood how she channeled from her blood to her fingertips even if they weren't sweaty. They'd never really explained that in school, only that magic worked like that. "That doesn't explain how you can swim."

"Since it's mostly water, the body is naturally buoyant, since most of it is basically neutrally buoyant in the first place," Rian said, looking amused. Lori twitched on the inside. "So after that it's a matter of kicking in the water enough to keep your head above it. Hanging from a boat helps."

She looked at him, then at the water again, but the ripples still prevented her from seeing the bottom. "Rainbows," she declared. "It can't be that easy, or else everybody could do it."

Rian tilted his head. "Lori, can you… not swim?" he said.

"Seels swim. Squids and graspers and dillians swim," Lori said. "People don't swim."

Rian chuckled. Idiot. "Okay, fine, don't believe me. Breakfast is ready though, so you better come ashore, and you should have enough time to get washed up while we pack up the boat. I'll save you some of the coals for your staff."

Lori nodded. "I'll be right there," she said.

"Do you want me to pull you ashore?" Rian said, grinning. "So you don't have to mess around with the oars?"

Lori shook her head. "If you're here, it's obviously shallow enough to use the pole," she said.

"Yeah… good luck with that," Rian said, chuckling. Lori watched in horror as he let go of the boat, not even keeping a hand on it as his entire body slipped under water.

"Rian!" she cried, diving for the side, her knees extremely annoyed with her as she bumped into the wood hard and she almost toppled over herself as she peered through the water, hoping he was still near enough to reach, taking in deep breaths as she channeled through the waterwisps in her blood–

Something broke through the surface three paces away, flinging up a spray of water as it began moving towards shore. It slammed back into the water, only for something else to rise up and spray water everywhere, the water behind it starting to churn

Lori stared at the churning water as it moved steadily for the shore, before Rian suddenly rose out of the river, completely naked and dripping and moving towards a cloth weighed down on a rock…

"Colors of death," she muttered, actually impressed despite herself. "He actually swam." Not like a seel or an island shell, but it was definitely self-propulsion through the water without sinking. She hadn't known that was physically possible.

Shaking her head in honest wonder at learning something new, Lori pulled up the anchor, then unhooked the pole secured to one side of the barge, holding it securely as she tried to reach bottom so she could push herself along.

After a while of flailing at the water and not feeling ground, Lori pulled up the pole and stuck in her staff, breathing in a circular, rhythmic way to build up magic as she bound the waterwisps to push her boat towards shore…

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After generously not punching the smirk off Rian's face, and accepting the bowl of stew, Lori quickly ate. Inured to gender-segregated public nudity or not, it was too bright out in the day, not to mention the lack of privacy-screening cover, for her to be comfortable bathing in public, no matter how briefly. She'd settled for taking off her shirt and her chest wrapping and splashing water on her face, torso and hands and calling it a wash. Hopefully she'd have time to do the rest later.

By the time she'd gotten dried and dressed, the barge was ready to be pushed off again. Grem's hands had been untied, but his sword hadn't been returned to him.

"You shouldn't need it after all," Rian said with bright cheer that managed to be almost sincere even though everyone except possibly Landoor– and yes, Lori wasn't getting that idiot's name out of her head– knew it wasn't, and as the spears he and everyone else were carrying called out the lie with brilliant pillars of light. "After all, you'll be among friends, right?"

"You are a hard man, Lord Rian," Grem said, though he seemed to find the situation amusing in a dark and morbid way.

"Just Rian, Grem. We're both lords, after all. Onward, to adventure or whatever!" he declared as he took his place at the rudder and dramatically pointed forward while Lori reactivated the water jet. The imbuement had lessened during the night, consumed to keep the wisps bound, but it was a minute loss all things considered. She'd have to spend some time imbuing it again before they went back home, but she would have needed to do that anyway.

She paused as she realized what she'd just thought.

Home.

Lori's Demesne was home now, wasn't it?

Her heart felt strangely light as the water jet rose to life once more, and Lori's Boat began to move forward once more, slowly accelerating over the water as the river moved between two rising hills.

They found the settlement of River's Fork demesne soon after. It was sort of obvious.

Rian threw the anchor over the side to at least slow them down as Lori shut down the water jet, starring at the tangle of trees that was apparently River's Fork Demesne. It stood on the base of a thickly wooded hill, at the triangle of land between the aforementioned fork, the confluence where the river they were on and another river met, forming an even wider river that cut through rocky hills. The settlement looked like someone had taken a dozens of different trees, planted them in a wide circle large enough to cover the area between Lori's Demesne's dining hall and the Dungeon's entrance, and started growing and pruning and melding their branches together to create a large, dome-like canopy, all centered around a lone, massive tree that towered high above all those around it.

The central tree's trunk seemed ten, maybe twelve paces in diameter, and all around its trunk the living wood had been carved into steps leading to platforms that housed small houses. Other buildings had been raised at ground level. Some were around the bases of the circle of trees, while other had been raised in the shadow of the dome, little mushroom-shaped buildings seemingly shaped whole from a single piece of wood. Others had been hung from the living, wooden dome, like fruits on the branch, some with slender stilts of wood bearing their weight, but many just hanging from the thick, weaving branches. The buildings reminded Lori of their barge. The mushroom-like building extended outward, towards the rising hill behind the dome where they dotted the ground that had been cleared of trees, replaced with unnaturally regular fields of high grass in the making.

"Someone was taking cues from Treeshade Demesne," Lori noted. "A pity about all the dragon damage."

A third of the trees on one side of the living dome had been shattered, trunks in pieces, and only their melding and connections with the trunks around them was keeping them up. One of the shattered trees seemed to have been partially turned to some kind of pale stone, and was so heavy it had pulled itself down so its shattered trunk to rest on its shattered stump, making the whole dome lopsided. The dome had holes torn through it, broken branches exposed like wounds, and several large stones nestled incongruously atop the surprisingly sturdy branches. Other stones lay conspicuously underneath the holes in the dome, and a couple had flattened mushroom houses. The remains of fallen hanging buildings lay scattered about, still being cleared up, and Lori spotted telltale clearings where others had probably fallen but seemed to have been burned in lieu of clearing them. Despite all this, there were people walking between many of the surviving standing structures, while smoke rose from a few of the surviving buildings.

It was all very concerning. There didn't seem to be anything like a proper dungeon or shelter in sight.

"Look, we've got a welcoming committee," Rian said, pointing.

Indeed, they'd been spotted, and people who'd been walking started running. Lori could vaguely hear the distant sounds of people calling to each other, and there was a lot of pointing.

"That's a lot of people walking around," Lori said tranquilly. "Especially since they're supposed to be too wounded to travel."

"Perhaps there have been developments," Grem said, staring straight ahead.

"They seemed friendly," Rian said, still sounding jovial. "I think we'll be fine."

Lori snorted. "Somehow, I don't think they're going to offer to share their lunch with us," she said. "Landoor, give me your spear."

The confused idiot blinked, but obediently did as ordered. Lori reluctantly handed him her staff, which he nearly dropped. "Careful! If that falls into the water, you better jump in after it to get it back to me. You hold that and– no, not like that, you're holding it upside down! The end with the coalcharm is the top! Yes, like that." Lori sighed, already regretting this. "Right. Landoor, from now on, you don't talk. Just keep your mouth shut and stand between Grem and Rian. You got that? Just nod."

Landoor nodded, still looking confused, but at least he was holding her staff the right way around. If he lost any of the accessories…

"Rian, you do the talking," Lori instructed as she took off her hat and her rain coat. Hopefully no one on the shore would remember she'd been wearing them. "If anyone asks, Landoor is our Binder."

Landoor's eyes went wide, and he opened his mouth.

"No talking," she snapped. "You job is to stand and hold the staff and look impressive. Can you do that?"

Landoor nodded. Strangely, he suddenly seemed excited, looking eager and, ugh, fondling her staff, stop doing that, you'll knock the quartz off!

Behind him, the other two exchange looks, then nodded at Lori. She nodded back, not exactly sure what she was nodding about, but apparently they weren't too concerned about Landoor.

"A hard man and a hard woman," Grem said, as if commenting on the weather.

"You swore to be of my demesne now, remember?" Lori said.

"I will not hurt my friends, Great Binder," Grem said. "I want to save them."

"I don't care about your friends enough to bother hurting them if they're not in my way to the core," Lori said. "So make sure they're not."

"Yes, Great Binder," Grem said.

They let the current carry them to the shore, towards the group of people congregating to meet them.

One of them would be the new Dungeon Binder. Now Lori had to figure out who it was.