"And the demesne is now officially five taums in diameter," Rian announced at breakfast the next morning.

Lori nodded, a bland look on her face. "Wonderful. And how much more surface area does that add?"

Rian paused, then sighed. "Wait a moment, I need to write this down," he said, grabbing his bone tablet and burnt stick. "Let's see, three and a bit…"

Lori waited patiently as Rian hunched over his tablet, muttering to himself.

"All right!" he declared. "We started with roughly twelve and a half square taums of surface area. With the demesne's growth, we now have an additional seven square taums of surface area. Well, roughly that much. That's not counting hills and things, so most likely less."

"I'm surprised you didn't have the answer ready to hand, " Lori commented as she ate breakfast. "Isn't this a number going up? You're fond of keeping track of those, are you not?"

"Normally, yes," Rian admitted. "But I hate having to calculate circles. Please never make me do spheres. My brain will melt and leak out of my ears."

"Noted."

"I mean it. If you ever ask me to calculate anything beyond a sphere's diameter, you will get absolutely nothing. I'm warning you now so you're not surprised if it happens." Her lord paused. "If we ever need anything like that, we can probably bother Lidzuga. He's an alknowlege boy, he probably knows the formulas for it."

"And if he doesn't?"

"Then if the calculations are urgent enough, we either send the Coldhold to Covehold Demesne to hire a computer, or try to reconstruct the principles of spherical geometry from first principles."

"I know a computer," Taeclas—it said so on her head cloth— volunteered. "I could give you directions to where to find him! Tirdon's very good with numbers, he does all sorts of sums."

Rian held out a hand as if physically presenting the Deadspeaker's idea. "There we go."

"Also noted."

"Good morning, you—"

"No, no, I don't think that counts as her talking to you," Rian hastily interjected.

"It doesn't?" When Rian shook his head, Taeclas let out a sad sigh.

The woman was very strange. But then, the sort of insanity that resulted in someone naming plants likely resulted in more than one cognitive aberration.

And speaking of which…

"Taeclas—"

"Good morning, your Bindership!"

"Yes, yes, good morning to you too," Lori sighed, waving her hand dismissively.

"Wait, how come she gets a good morning and I don't?"

She stared at Rian and the indignant expression on his face. "Are you serious?"

"No, I'm Rian. And I've been your lord for a year, I've greeted you good morning plenty of times, and you've never greeted me 'good morning'! And I was fine with it, you were like that with everyone, but now Tae merits a 'good morning'? Why don't I get one?"

Lori didn't know if she wanted to sigh or roll her eyes. Unfortunately, it didn't seem like she could do both.

…

But she tried anyway, sighing as she rolled her eyes.

…

No, no, that felt wrong somehow, she shouldn't do that again. It wasn't nearly as cathartic or feel as emphatic as either one individually.

So she just sighed again. Ah, much better. She could feel her weariness and exasperation passing through the breath she let go. "Good morning, Rian," she said flatly. "Now be quiet." She turned back toward Taeclas. "How is the sweetgrass progressing? How long before it can be harvested?"

"Honey is doing great, your Bindership!" Taeclass declared cheerfully. "She's rooted properly and growing again now. I've already taken some cuttings, and Sweety, Sugar, Treacle, Syrup, Candy, Tasty, Pastry, Dessert, Meli, and Vov are growing nicely!"

…

Oh, glittering rainbows, the woman had named more of them!

On the other side of Umu from Taeclas, Rian had a hand over his mouth with his head turned away slightly, while on the woman's own wife had an exasperated but affectionate expression on her face again. Lori shook her head, deciding to ignore it and press on with her inquiry.

…

She really should just press on— "Why Vov?" she asked, even as she scolded herself for asking.

"I ran out of names, so Vov it was."

"H-how about 'Cake'?" Rian suggested through his hand.

"Cakes aren't very sweet, though? They're like dried bricks with bits of fruit in them?"

"Then I have nothing. The only other sweet thing I can think of is lead, and you shouldn't eat lead."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"No eating lead," Lori declared. Then she shook her head. No. not more losing her flow of thought. "How long before the sweetgrass is read to harvest?"

"Oh, it won't be ready for a while your Bindership, even with Deadspeaking," Taeclas declared cheerfully. "You can't just grow sweetgrass and then harvest like grains, it needs to mature and gather sugar inside it. Even with meanings to accelerate the processes, you still need time or else the poor dears will start hurting themselves. Though I think that with some balancing the meaning we're using on the fruit trees right now will work for them. Sweetgrass is meant to be grown warm, so they should be more tolerant of heat than the fruit trees."

It would take that long? "It would take that long?"

"Oh, yes," Taeclas continued cheerfully. "And we wouldn't get much per stalk of sweetgrass. Maybe only fifty grains worth of sugar and meli per pressed stalk." She titled her head. "Though that might be enough to make meli bread on holidays? But even when we have the sweetgrass to harvest, I don't think we have the means of actually refining it into sugar and meli? We don't have any sort of press to squeeze out the sweetgrass juice or boiling vats to reduce that juice."

Lori stared at her. Then she slowly turned that flat gaze towards Rian.

"What are you looking me like that for? I didn't know we needed all that either," he said.

She continued staring at him for a moment, then turned back to Taeclas. "So, we will not be able to harvest sugar from the sweetgrass for another year?" she said.

"At the soonest," the Deadspeaker confirmed. "Though it will probably be longer than that. Even when the dears I'm raising now are fully grown, that's still not going to be a lot of sweetgrass juice. To be able to provide enough sweetgrass juice so that everyone here—and in River's Fork, I suppose—can have a bun of meli brown bread for every holiday and holinight of the year, I'm going to need to grow much more sweetgrass. And to do that, I need to raise more cuttings and have more space to grow them."

Lori considered. "Then we will set aside the topic for now and revisit it at a later date. Preferably after we have reconfigured the arrangement of our crops for optimum efficient application of Deadspeaking."

"We should probably rotate them too," Rian said. "The soil is still pretty fresh, but best to start getting into the habit now."

Lori blinked, turning towards him. "What?"

"Rotating our crops," he said. "In fact, we should probably clear a bit more land so that we enough field space for three or even four crops to rotate."

No, the response still made no sense to Lori. "Rian, what does it matter which direction the crops are facing on the fields?"

Rian stared at her. "I thought you used to work in city farms?"

"Yes? What does that have to do with anything?"

There was silence for a moment. "All right, I'm going to try to explain this as simply as I can," Rian said. "You know that we have to fertilize soil, right?"

"Of course I do."

"Right. Well, while dried waste helps, it doesn't replenish everything that crops draw from the soil…"

––––––––––––––––––

By the end of breakfast, Lori knew a bit more about farming because of Rian and Taeclas' explanations—which were surprisingly easy to understand—and finally understood why the crops on city farms regularly changed places. It unfortunately meant she foresaw vegetables in her future, which… wasn't appetizing to think about. Maybe she could order the ones cooking to slice them up very small and put them to the side where they were easily avoided, or maybe not put them in at all…

The farmers and Rian—and now Taeclas, she supposed—had obvious been preparing for this for some time, though. There were crops in her dungeon farm that were being grown so that when harvested they'd have enough seeds to sow them outside in their fields. She'd seen them when she'd been down at the third level, but while many had seemed familiar to her, she hadn't thought to consider what they were for and had simply assumed they were meant to become food at some point.

Which, to be fair, was accurate. All those crops were technically edible, it was just that it was unlikely they would be eating them, at least directly. Two of their crops, nonconseeds and tressflowers, were being grown so they could press it into oil for soap, lubricant for tools and machinery. So, no eating.

It was an informative discussion she was sure to remember in future—much more memorable than boring, unimportant things like names and faces—as she headed up to her room to collect her bead-making equipment. Her leather sacks for holding beads, the new funnel to make pouring them into the sack easier that had used to be a bucket made of bone before she had repurposed it, her bead-making table, her table's trestles—no wait, she didn't need to bring those, or her stool either—and her copper tweezers. She was also bringing a bone tablet, as she needed a place to anchor bindings before she amalgamated them into beads.

The load was one she was used to carrying down from her room, and no one barred her way as she headed towards the docks to lay everything down on the boat she would be using. Even with the modifications, there was plenty of room still for all the equipment, and they hadn't even needed to disassemble the strange three-plank chair.

"Ah, there you are, your Bindership," Rian said cheerfully. "I wasn't able to ask you to do this last night, since this was still being finished. Could you cover this in rock?" From the curves of the hook-like arrangement of wood, she was reasonably certain that the implement had been Deadspoken rather than shaped with manual woodworking.

Lori wanted to sigh and complain that this was something that Rian should have informed her of yesterday… but she'd been tired from expanding the demesne yesterday, and would likely have put off the need to do say anyway. "You should have informed me about this yesterday," she complained as she accepted the wooden anchor.

"You were tired from expanding the demesne yesterday," Rian said. "I didn't want to bother you then."

"So you're bothering me now?"

"Yup!" was the cheerful reply.

All right, she'd give him that.

"Don't we already have an anchor for the boat? I distinctly remember making one for each of the boats we have."

"Yes, but given you'd want this boat relatively stationary, I thought two anchors would be better. You wouldn't want to accidentally drift into the demesne and have all the Iridescence you've gathered disappear, do you?"

She supposed that was a valid concern when it came to working on a moving platform. "Fine," she said. "Come with me, I'm not carrying it back by myself."

Rian followed her, carrying the wooden anchor, to the stone stockpile, which was still huge now. If she hollowed it out, she'd have a decent-sized house, and still have enough stone to do it two or three times more. Well, the last house would need to be built manually on her part, but still. Softening some stone from the pile, Lori covered the curving arms and the main shaft of the anchor in stone to protect it from the water, and added a large mass of stone to where the two lengths of wood met so that part of the anchor would sink first as well as insuring that the anchor would sink.

The resulting weight was heavy enough that Lori took hold of one of the anchor's curving arms and helped Rian carry the anchor back to the boat. The stone dug into her hand, but between the two of them it was easier to haul about. Once they returned, Rian set about securing a rope to the anchor, while Lori began claiming and binding the darkwisps beneath her clothes. Drawing them out as she imbued them, she anchored the stream of opaque blackness to the pieces of bone on top of the poles on the corners and sides of the boat.

As she anchored the binding of darkwisps, the blackness spread between the poles, until there was a black ceiling above her. It had no sheen, reflecting nothing, a pure blackness of the sort only to be found in a completely sealed room. The binding was completely immaterial, and didn't stir as Lori passed her hand through it, although the binding moved as the posts it was anchored to swayed with the movement of the boat. The air passed through it easily, and water would as well, she knew. It completely blocked out light, however, which would greatly cut down the heat coming from the sun…

…when it was higher up.

…

She might have to adjust the binding when she got to her location.