Demesne

As it turned out, Lori hadn't been napping.

It had been so much worse!

When the door into the dragon shelter opened, we were met by Riz and her friends—all militiawomen—who had accompanied Lori to River's Fork. Lori had never commented on the fact that it was mostly women protecting her, although there was a very real possibility that she had literally never noticed or understood the significance. Sometimes I wondered what she'd make of all these decisions that other people made for her. It probably fell into the category of things she didn't care about, but she'd probably prefer to know there was a decision that she didn't care about before it had been made.

Should I tell her? Probably.

…

Oh, well.

"Hello, everyone," I greeted. "Your relief is here. Any problems?"

"The Great Binder stopped bathing a week ago," Riz said.

That was immediately alarming. Lori wasn't obsessed with cleanliness, but it was clearly near and dear in her affections, right up there with naming things after herself in the possessive form. For as long as I'd known her, she'd always bathed daily, even if it was just a wash with water. Not bathing was literally unheard of for her. The closest had been when she'd been unconscious for an extended period of time when she'd injured herself trying to ride a rock and gotten infected.

"Everyone inside," I said, gesturing for everyone to get inside. "Let Yllian know they can get started emptying the latrines and getting more water for everyone so people can stay here while we make sure the dome is clear. Go with them in case there are abominations or beasts that Shana…lorre missed. Lidz, go and check on everyone, in case anyone's sick and Shanalorre didn't notice." I turned back to Riz, leading her to one of the smaller alcoves next to the mine door to give everyone room to go in and out of the mine. "Besides not bathing, what has she been eating? Is she feverish?"

"She eats if I keep reminding her," Riz said with a sigh, leaning against the stone wall and closing her eyes. She looked… well, she looked like she needed sleep and rest and to be away from Lori. "At least she goes to the latrines by herself, but I need to remind her to come out, and I don't think she's been sleeping well."

Oh no. "Has she been carrying the almanac everywhere?" I asked.

Riz's eyes fluttered open, and she gave me a confused look. "Almanac…? No, I don't think she's been reading anything. She's been writing a lot, though. Ink all over her fingers and her trousers."

…

Ah. This was going to require very careful handling…

––––––––––––––––––

The door leading into Lori's alcove wasn't locked. There wasn't any stone jutting up from the floor to keep it shut, and the latch hadn't even been thrown. It was like Lori had just walked straight back into the alcove after she'd lowered the stone wall in front of the dragon shelter's doors.

Actually, I didn't even know if she'd even stepped out at all. She could have done it from the alcove for all I knew. Either way, the lack of effort to try and secure the door was another worrying symptom. Lori was terribly paranoid—terrible as in 'not good at it'—but she always remembered to take her basic security measures, such as locking her door to prevent people from getting at her. Her door was always locked.

And she always took a bath every day.

Raising a hand, I knocked loudly on the door. "Your Bindership!" I called out. "We're here to take you home! Are you packed?"

I waited, but there was no answer.

I knocked again. "Your Bindership, I think someone pissed in the water reservoir! There's yellow bubbles in it! And there's something floating in it too!"

I waited again. If she didn't respond to this—

"What?-!"

A sigh of relief escaped me, even though the words weren't as violently outraged as they should have been. It was more like a 'what was that, I didn't hear you properly?' 'what?-!' rather than an indignant 'those fools finally did what I had always feared they would do!' 'what?-!'

"I said I think someone pissed in the water reservoir!" I called through the door, aware that Riz and those close enough to hear were staring at me.

The growl that came through the door sounded… well, very human, but clearly a lot of effort, frustration, and rage was going into it to make it sound as beast-like as possible. The growling broke down into mutters of colorful language, as well as some insults that sounded distinctly of Taniar Demesne-origin, such as 'asking for idea loans without sense collateral', 'suffering from sense inflation', and 'overdrawn from their sanity account'.

The mutters were broken up by more annoyed growls, but those seemed directed at something else. There was a cry of frustration. There was the sound of bare feet stomping on stone, which Lori was probably going to regret in a little bit. I waited some more, even as I knew I'd probably just made a terrible mistake. Lori as she normally was would probably understand. She'd be very annoyed at me, and I might be looking at some shin kicks in my future, but she'd have understood.

After all, a Dungeon Binder had responsibilities.

I wasn't sure this non-bathing Lori who didn't remember to lock her door would agree.

Some more time passed as frantic movement and more grumbling came through the door, which sounded like Lori was cleaning up her alcove. It was clear she had made some kind of mess in there, and just as clear that she hadn't realized she'd been so messy. That was good, it meant that her desire to be organized and neat was making itself known. There was a loud sound as Lori latched the door, and another sound of frustration as she realized she'd just latched the door instead of unlatching it. There was another sound as she finally unlatched the door with far too much force, and pulled the door open.

I blinked at the very bright light that shone in my eyes, instinctively shutting my eyes and raising a hand to shade them… and then the smell hit me. It smelled… well, it smelled like someone hadn't taken a bath in over a week and a half had been staying in an enclosed room, in which they had been sweating. It was thick and acidic, and I felt like my eyes should be watering. I heard Riz step back as the smell reached her, though thankfully she didn't do anything as overdramatic as gag or exclaim.

If the smell was bad, Lori herself looked worse. The fingertips of her right hand were dark with ink—a part of me winced thinking of how much ink that could be—and the front of her trousers were stained with more. There were more stains on the hem on her shirt, as if she'd been wiping the tip of her pen on it, and the lower two button were undone. The armpits of the shirt had very pronounced sweat stains, and there were oil stains on the sleeves, probably from where she had been wiping her face. Lori's hair was matted with more oil and so thick it looked like the whole mass had fused together into a helmet. Her eyes were half-lidded and visibly drooping from tiredness, and seemed to be staying open from raw willpower and also rage from the thought that someone had finally defiled the water supply.

It would be funny if this wasn't a woman who could sink me into the ground and had already shown a marked preference for painfully mutilating kicks to the side of the knee. Getting your knees kicked in the wrong way was agonizing.

"Who did it?" Lori hissed though gritted teeth.

"No one, I just needed you to get up and open the door so we can talk," I said. "The dragon's gone now, so there's work to be done."

Lori stared at me for a moment, visibly working to comprehend what I'd just said, and I took a moment to look over her shoulder and into the alcove. While the smell was… intense, it seemed to be primarily emanating from Lori rather than coming from the room itself, which was… well, not as neat as her own room back in Lorian, but in reasonable shape given the sounds I'd heard before the door opened. Her bedroll and pillow had been pushed to one end of the sleeping niche, and the parts I could see didn't seem to have ink stains. In contrast, the flattened-looking pile of straw spread out across the rest of the niche had plenty of dark spots, but they seemed to be concentrated on the point furthest from the sleeping paraphernalia. There was also a dark splotch where it looked like Lori had spilled ink, but it looked smaller than it should have been, and seemed looked old and dry. Perhaps she'd spilled ink and used Whispering to gather it back together into the bottle?

There was a frustrated, if inarticulate, sound from Lori as she understood she'd been tricked. However, instead of glaring angrily at me, using Whispering on my person and the environment around me, or just kicking me, she just made a growling sound before turning away and picking up an untidy sheaf of papers and a bone tablet that had been put on top of the wooden container enclosing the wispbeads powering the ventilation and other defensive measures. "I was in the middle of something important! I need to get all this noted down before—rainbows! I've lost track of where it went!" That finally got her to look at me, glaring angrily, even as one hand started feeling around for something next to her, patting at the straw.

She'd just left the door open and walked away. Carefully, I stepped into the room and made a show of closing the door and latching it. "The dragon's gone, and two demesnes need their Dungeon Binder back. While I'm sure whatever you're doing must be pretty interesting, it's time to get to work, your Bindership."

For a moment, Lori stared at me. With her oily face, tired eyes, unkempt hair, sweat-stained clothes and random ink stains, she didn't look like the reliable, ever-present wizard she usually did. Her face wasn't set in a small frown as she thought of how to solve whatever problem, real or imagined, she'd taken offense at for being present in her demesne. She just looked… she looked like she was tired, needed sleep, and wanted to punch me in the face for pulling her away from whatever had been happily distracting her for days and out into cruel reality.

Her fingers were still holding the papers in her hand gently, though how much of that was tiredness, I didn't know. Lori looked down at the sheaf, her eyelids drooping, and with the exaggeratedly careful movements of someone really, really tired because they've been awake for possibly more than twenty hours, she aligned the edges, making the papers into a neat stack. Once that was done, she deliberately laid it down on the straw as far away from her as her arms could manage before looking around her. "Where's the pen?" she asked, her voice confused.

I silently pointed at the pen—just lying on its side, not even capped to keep out dust and protect the nib—next to where she'd picked up the papers.

"Where?" she demanded.

Silently, I stopped pointing and just picked up the pen, wiggling it at her.

"Oh, right, that's where I put it," she said before letting out a yawn and rubbing at her eyes. Finally, she said, "So no one's actually pissed in the water?"

Closing my own eyes, I let out a long, relieved breath. "Not that I know of. You'd know better than me, since you've probably had to refill it everyday. I went straight to you since Riz told me you've been acting weird. Have you really not had a bath yet?"

She looked away, her expression a mix of childishly sulky and guilty. "I was busy."

I nodded. "We're ready to take you back home," I said. "Do you want to go, or will we be staying a bit?"

Lori blinked at me. "Home… right, the dragon's… I can go back home…" She looked vaguely at nothing for a few moments, then abruptly nodded. "Home. Let's go. I'll just… pack."

Her pack was lying with the top open, and the clothes inside still looked neatly folded. Had she really not changed her clothes at all? "Why don't you let me take care of it?" I said. "Riz can lead you to the boat and get you settled in so you can nap on the way home."

Lori swayed for a moment. "All right… yes, you do that…"

I looked over my shoulder, where Riz was looking very concerned. "Riz, could you take her Bindership to one of the boats? You and your squad go with her and have Clowee bring you back." I paused.

"Understood," she said, looking relieved. "What about you?"

"I'll stay and talk to Yllian about what Lori hasn't been dealing with," I said. "Any suggestions?"

"She hasn't really just been staying in her room," Riz said softly. "The Great Binder just… hasn't been taking care of herself. When she wakes up, she goes around, does things, then goes back to her room and…" She nodded at the sheets of paper. "She made sure there was water in the reservoir."

I sighed in relief. Well, at least she hadn't gone completely irresponsible. Just mostly. And she'd been neglecting herself in favor of her Dungeon Binder things?

That… actually, that was very Lori-like.

Shana must never know. This would just encourage her to take even less care of herself!