The stalk was gone by the time they got down to the second level, leaving Riz holding a handful of grains that were put in her belt pouch as she grabbed four bundles and moved them to the empty space between the ceiling's support pillars Lori had indicated. To one side, the weavers sat, spinning ropeweed fibers into thread at a leisurely, almost lazy pace, something to do as they played board games, gossiped, or just sat back with half-lidded eyes. The carpenters were similarly relaxed, and looked to be simply checking over their tools, oiling and occasionally taking a file to sharpen something, or possibly to remove a burr or some other damage. One seemed to be whittling game pieces out of off-cuts of wood. The waterwheel was still, simply rocking slightly as the water was pulled up by bindings of waterwisps only to fall back into the lower basin through the overflow.

People naturally glanced up as they saw her and Riz, especially since the latter was moving around bundles of stalks as Lori paced back and forth, glaring at the bundles intently as she tried to figure out the best way to approach the problem. She needed to dry the hulls and the point where the vigas were connected to the stalk. Direct manipulation of the waterwisps had already been shown to not be viable, so she'd need something else.

Direct heat? No, no, that wouldn't work, increasing the temperature from the inside would likely just cook the grains, even if she didn't make it hot enough to steam off the water. Indirect heat then? The standard procedure was to let it dry in the sun. However, unless she increased the temperature, that was unlikely to cause the stalks to dry faster, and after a point, that would lead to the same problem as direct heat, which was the grains would cook…

"Uh, Great Binder? What now?" Riz asked.

"Quiet, I'm thinking," Lori said, distractedly, continuing to pace.

Where was she? So, direct heat and indirect heat alone was both not enough and too much… and they weren't the point anyway. The point was getting the stalks to dry without damaging the grain. But how was she supposed to get water out of something if she couldn't resort to binding the waterwisps or heat it up significantly?

…

Oh!

She turned and headed for the third level. Her temporary assistant hurriedly followed after her, falling into step next to her. Lori glanced towards the woman. "Erzebed, go upstairs and bring back a bucket of water and wait for me by the bundles. Don't let them get wet."

"Yes, Great Binder!" Riz said, promptly turning to obey the order.

Lori quickly excavated some stone from the walls since her stone pile had been depleted by her recent building, then brought it back up to the second level. Her bucket of water was waiting for her.

"Good," Lori said absently. She pointed to one side. "Sit there until I need you."

Water. She was trying to get water out of the stalks, and water had its own idiosyncrasies. Taking some of her excavated stone, Lori formed a box. It was a crude box, since she was more concerned with it being air- and watertight, but that was all she needed. With the box finished, Lori used her connection to her demesne's core and bound all the waterwisps in the air inside the box. It wasn't something she'd have been able to do before, when she'd just been a Whisperer. If she'd tried to bind waterwisps in the air, she'd have needed a specially prepared binding with water, since trying to claim waterwisps by waving her hands in the air would have only bound the waterwisps if they actually made contact with her. With her connection to the core, however, she was able to treat every wisp in the demesne as if it were part of her body, allowing her to claim wisps a Whisperer would normally not be able to.

Lori claimed those wisps and formed them into a binding. She claimed airwisps, and with the waterwisps—and in this state, the water in the air could also be claimed by airwisps—bound together a barrier over the opening of the box, trapping and keeping other waterwisps in the air from entering the box, keeping the air inside the box arid. Nodding to herself, Lori took one of the stalks and put it inside the box, pushing it through the immaterial binding.

The stalk and grains hanging from it didn't immediately explode from the moisture in it being turned to vapor, which was a good sign. It lay inside the box as Lori concentrated on her awareness. The binding was doing as it was supposed to, keeping all waterwisps and humidity out of the box. Then she waited.

The stalk just sat there, and if Lori hadn't had her awareness, she'd have thought absolutely nothing was happening. But through her connection to the demesne's core and the awareness of all the wisps within the demesne that came with it, Lori knew that… mostly nothing was happening.

Lori sighed and reminded herself to be patient.

Eventually, moisture began to seep out of the stalk. The amounts were miniscule and completely undetectable to even a Whisperer, but there was a change. Lori nodded in satisfaction, then added a binding to the air inside the box, a simple arrangement of airwisps to circulate the air.

She waited again.

In her eyes, more nothing seemed to happen.

Lori sat on the rest of the stone she'd excavated and watched the stalk intently.

After what seemed like forever, in which she'd taken a short nap sitting on a bench in one of the alcoves because why not, everything was imbued anyway, Lori checked the state of the inside of the box. More moisture had seeped out of the stalk, and since the air was circulating and moving the moisture around, the water hadn't settled on the outside of the stalk. Carefully, Lori reached into the box and carefully felt the surface of one of the stem's leaves. It was noticeably stiffer and dryer now…

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Erzebed," she called out, pulling the stalk out of the box. The barrier keeping out humidity didn't affect it coming out the other way, for which she was glad. It shouldn't have, since the binding had no directionality built in, but in those cases there was always a chance a directionality would naturally emerge in an untested binding. Not that this binding was completely untested, it was a modification of the binding she'd used to collect water from the air when they had been traveling…

Lori waited, then frowned as her temporary assistant failed to appear. She looked up irritably.

Riz was sitting on a bench in one of the alcoves, her arms crossed and head back against the stone, eyes closed. Her mouth was slightly open as she slept, practically inviting a bug to crawl in. Being afraid that a bug would crawl into your head while you were asleep was a completely legitimate fear!

Sighing, Lori wound airwisps into a long tube from her mouth to the sleeping woman's ear. "Erzebed," she repeated, and the woman jerked upright as the sound was conveyed as if Lori was right next to her. "Come here."

"Y-yes, Great Binder!" Riz said as Lori let the binding collapse, her temporary assistant hurrying towards the Dungeon Binder.

Lori held up the stalk. "Is this dry enough to thresh now?"

Riz blinked at her, but took the stalk in her hands. She felt at the grains, rolling them around in her fingers until they popped. "It's… still a little tough, Great Binder, but… I suppose, if we had to?" The look she gave Lori was clearly one of someone who didn't want to. Even Lori could tell that, she'd used to make that face a lot.

Lori grunted, dissatisfied. "Go find out if it's lunch yet then come back here," she said, taking the stalk and setting it aside as a result sample. She realized she should have used a water clock to time how long it had been drying for, but… "Wait. Get me a water clock from the Um, and then come back. And have another bucket to go with it."

"Yes, Great Binder!"

Riz hurried to do just that, seemingly not bothered at having her sleep interrupted as Lori took another of the stalks and, after binding the contents of the box again to draw out the humidity leaked from the previous stalk, put it in the stone box. This time, in addition to having the air be arid and circulating gently, she rubbed her hands together until they grew warm, then carefully bound the firewisps on the surface of her skin as she stuck her hand into the box. Delicately, she separated the firewisps she'd generated from friction from her skin and into the space inside the box, imbuing them to slowly radiate warmth and using the airwisps to spread that warmth around evenly as Riz returned with one of the water clock and another bucket.

Once the air around the stalk was warm and seemed to be maintaining the temperature, Lori placed the water clock over the bucket and filled it with water up to the line that measured about an hour's time. "So, is it lunch yet?"

"We're not having stew for lunch, Great Binder," Riz said. "Some people went out to hunt beasts, so we're having roast."

"Roast… but it's just a rest day, not a holiday."

"Yes, so the kitchen staff are resting," Riz said. Lori couldn't fault that reasoning. "Besides, who doesn't like a good roast? Don't worry, I told them that some of the meat needs to make it into the storage room."

Lori nodded. "Good." She should bring down her stone plate, then…

––––––––––––––––––

The water clock ran out. Lori, who had simply been sitting there staring at the water clock impatiently, immediately reached into the stone box and drew out the stalk. It was hot, but not enough to make her drop it, even before the firewisps in her fingers cooled the parts her fingertips were on. "Erzebed," she called.

"Um, a moment Great Binder!" Riz called back.

Frowning, Lori looked towards her. Riz was putting down a pitcher and a stack of cups on a bench next to… yes, there was Mikon, sitting with a group of other women, some of whom looked amused as Riz hurried away. Lori rolled her eyes, but she but waited as her temporary assistant hurried towards her. She held out the stalk, and Riz took it, this time not even needing to be prompted as she rolled the vigas around between her fingers. Little pieces of something fluttered down to the floor and Riz was holding some grains in her hands. Riz frowned down at the vigas, then pierced one with her thumbnail, breaking it open. She rubbed the powdery insides between her fingers…

"That… that feels like we can thresh it, Great Binder," Riz said slowly. "And the insides don't feel strange…"

"Go find a farmer and make sure," Lori said. "Bring them here, if you run off with the stalk it might break apart."

"Yes, Great Binder!" Riz said, going off to presumably find a farmer as ordered.

Lori, meanwhile, took several more of the stalks and, after removing the humidity from it again, put the stalks inside the box until it was half full. Very belatedly, she wondered if it might have been easier to make some sort of lid, if only to keep the heat inside. She did just that, taking some stone from the pile, making a knife and using that to slice off a slab of rock from the pile that she formed into a lid. She had to put it on and remove it a few times to make sure it was air tight and not fusing to the stone of the box itself.

With the lid closed, she filled the water clock again, reducing the output of the firewisps so that it wouldn't get so hot since heat was no longer escaping from it. She placed her hand on the lid, concentrating to keep the lid from being cooled so she could judge how hot it was, reducing the output of the firewisps a bit more as Riz came back with the same farmer as before. Riz handed him the stalk, and the farmer felt it himself, rolling the grains between his fingers as well. More flakes of something fluttered down to the floor.

"Well?" Lori said. "Is that dry enough to thresh?"

"It's… close enough, your Bindership," the man said frowning. He continued to feel the stalk.

"So, if all the harvest was that consistency, you could… what was it you said Erzebed?"

"Threshing, Great Binder," Riz supplied.

"Yes, could you start threshing?"

"We… could, your Bindership," the farmer said hesitantly.

Lori nodded. "Excellent. Go back to resting."

The farmer blinked in confusion, glancing towards Riz, who shrugged. "All right… glad I could help, your Bindership…"

Lori was no longer listening, staring at the water clock.

"You can go, Rafel. Sorry for bothering you. Great Binder, it's lunch time," Riz said.

It is? Already?

"It is? Already?" Lori said, instinctively looking up. Of course, since she was in her dungeon, there was only stone above her. She shook her head. "Right, right… I'll get my plate, you know what I like."

"Yes, Great Binder, the soft, fatty bits everyone likes," Riz said. She glanced towards the stalks. "Do you really think we can start threshing tomorrow?"

Lori shook her head. "No. The day after at best, and only if I can successfully scale up the binding to work on a lot of stalks at once, which isn't always as simple as making everything bigger. Still, at the very least we can take a couple of days off the process."

Riz nodded slowly. "But not today or tomorrow? Because I think people need more rest."

"No, not tomorrow," Lori confirmed. "Tomorrow I will be attempting mass drying, so no threshing will need to be done."

Riz sighed in relief.

"You will, of course, be assisting me by carrying all the bundles I need dried."

Riz sighed again. "Can I at least draft other people to help?"

"Of course. You're an officer, not a glitter crawler. Temporarily, at least."

Riz tilted her head thoughtfully. "Huh… Well, put that way…" A small smile grew on Riz's face.

Lori started walking. "Follow me so I can get you my plate."

"Yes, Great Binder!"

She was no Rian… But Lori had to admit, Riz had her own competencies.