The next day after breakfast, Lori watched as people began laying out the bundles of stalks under the sun. There was probably a farming technical name for them, but she didn't care. The bundles were laid out on the fields they'd been harvested from, stacked together in long rows out in the sun. People formed a long line, passing the bundles from person to person, which Lori had to admit was very efficient. No getting bottle-necked by the door to the storage shed, no having to walk back and forth while carrying a heavy thing…

Lori mildly increased her assessment of the intelligence of her people.

While a line of efficient people did that, forming a line to get the bundles onto the field, another line laid out the bundles so that no bundles were casting any shadows on the one's beside them, ensuring efficient drying in the sunlight. The children were out in force with sticks and clubs and little slings of the sort her mothers never let her have when she was younger because they said it wasn't a toy, it was dangerous, and that if she wanted to have one she'd have to play with it outside the apartment…

She finally saw what they meant when she saw one boy use the sling to scare a choker away from the bundles being lined up. The stone flew in a curving arc, but it struck the choker in the back of the neck, and while in novels such a strike would have killed the little beast instantly, the ruff of feathers around its neck seemed to cushion the impact. Still, it did cause it to divert away from the stacks of grains and towards the irrigation cistern, where more children ambushed it with sticks and the sort of enthusiastic violence only a child could muster.

Other people were taking planks from their stockpile and trying to fashion some sort of temporary barricade with stones and the outdoor tables and benches they currently had, perhaps in the hope that it would be too tall for the chokers to jump over. Or at least, too tall for them to jump over before someone managed to scare them off. It wasn't the near-manic, purposeful work of the harvest, but rather a more subdued atmosphere. Moving the bundles was repetitive, thoughtless work, and people didn't seem to have settled on an idea for how to keep the chokers away yet. Lori saw a few of the people talking point towards her, sitting next to the third bathhouse, but someone shook their head at the idea, pointing not at her but the ground. Oh good, someone who knew how earthwisp manipulation was bad for healthy soil.

Riz was down there, just another blob of dark pink hair. While Lori was familiar enough with her temporary assistant's face to be able to identify her, she was far enough that Riz was indistinguishable from every other dark pink-haired head on the field.

Eventually, it seemed to be decided that they'd just set up the benches and tables on the side of the field that faced the woods, where the chokers were most likely to come from, and just loiter there to discourage the things from going at the bundles. That didn't seem sustainable for the whole week needed to dry all the bundles. Perhaps they were only planning to set a precedent to scare the little beasts off? That seemed unlikely to work. Despite how many the children had already killed, there always seemed to be more of them, if the one hanging at her door was anything to go by.

Before this harvest, Lori hadn't thought beasts would bother with eating vigas. In her head, her image of the smaller beasts had them eating bugs, small slugs, larvae, and other smaller beasts like foot-sized scavengers. But no, it turned out that beasts also ate seeds and grains, and their harvest would be a tempting target while it dried. It was vulnerable to bugs as well, which was why some people walked around the bundles with brooms, the wide heads ideal for swatting.

Lori watched all this as she sat there, body relaxed as she worked on forming some bindings. It took most of the morning to finish getting the bundles out of the storage shed. When the storage shed had been emptied, all the bundles out in the field in the sun, people had headed over to her Dungeon to get the rest of the bundles stored in the second level's alcoves.

In the corners of the field, people were preparing small bonfires. Were they planning to have another roast? No, the fires were too small for that. Besides, with her awareness, she could feel the concentrations of firewisps in the kitchens, which meant that stew was being made. Perhaps those were for a night watch, to scare off the beasts at night? They'd done something similar when traveling, but those had involved bigger fires, with much bigger beasts.

Lori had hated the night watch, and the other Whisperer who had been with the group had as well. They'd needed to provide the heat and light for those times they hadn't been able to scavenge enough firewood, or it had been too grassy to risk a fire, which meant they'd been up half the night just trying to imbue the binding enough to make it last the other half of the night, and they would still need to wake up early to purify the water they needed for washing off the iridescence, drinking and cooking, and there'd been more than one night attack…

Really, just thinking of those nights made Lori want to go back to her room, curl up in bed and go to sleep.

Lori was staring at the bundles in the field when Riz came up to her. "Great Binder," the woman said in a tone of voice Lori had never heard her use before. Well, didn't remember her using before. Really, she had better things to do than try to remember every tone of voice the woman had ever used. Even if she could use Mentalism to remember it, she wouldn't.

"Erzebed," Lori said, not turning to look at her.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"All the sheaves of vigas in the Dungeon are dry, your Great Binder," Riz said.

"Yes, they are." Lori wished she had some water. Despite the day not being very hot, she was still sweating a little, and could use a drink. "Dry enough to thresh, I believe."

"…yes, Great Binder."

Lori nodded. "Perhaps you should get started, then?" It had taken all night to get it all dried. She'd needed to seal all the alcoves and remove the moisture from the air to encourage desiccation, and had needed to double check the walls and ceiling for moisture seeping in. The heat had needed to be kept low so that the second level wouldn't turn into an oven, and she'd needed to make a very extensive binding of airwisps so that she could force the dry air through all the stalks, even those up against the wall under other bundles.

Fortunately, she'd had all night, and with only minimal heat and using firewisps to recycle the heat already in the alcoves, the circulating dry air and the bindings to keep the air arid had dried the wood far slower than her experiments, but it had allowed her to be able to affect all the alcoves at once. The few holes she'd made for air to pass through all the alcoves so she could make one large binding instead of several smaller ones for each alcove had been easily fixed.

"Um… we'll need to use the second level, Great Binder," Riz said.

That made Lori blink, and she almost turned to look at Riz before going back to staring at the field. "Why?"

"We need a solid hard surface to put the stalks on so that we can thresh them," Riz said. "And it helps that the second level doesn't have sand. It's even windy, so we might even be able to winnow there."

"Well, make the arrangements with the weavers, ropers and carpenters and clean up after yourselves," Lori said. "Then get back up here. You might need to bring me lunch." Lori frowned and considered that. "You might need to bring lunch for both of us."

"Er, why Great Binder?"

Lori pointed at the field she was looking at. "I still need to dry the rest of that."

Riz blinked and followed her finger out to the field.

"I might need to surround the vigas with ice," Lori said, keeping her eyes on the field and the bindings she was placing. Having her eyes to supplement her awareness helped her get it done faster, even if the wisps were actually invisible from her eyes. Without her connection to her Dungeon's core, she wouldn't have been able to perceive the bindings unless she ran right into them. "It will make the process more efficient. Happily, that also means that the chokers won't be able to get at the grain, which is also useful. Unfortunately, it means no one will be able to approach the grain until I bring down the wall, so we might suffer some loss to bugs."

"You're… going to dry all the vigas," Riz said slowly.

"We are not wasting a week," Lori said. "If people want to keep dealing with beasts for that long, it might as well be large beasts that give more food. This way the harvest gets finished faster, we don't waste firewood—" whatever people were going to use those bonfires in the corners for, it was clearly only because of the bundles of stalks drying in the field, "—and people can do other things."

Riz looked between her, the field and back again. "If you say so, Great Binder."

"I do, in fact, say so," Lori confirmed. "Go, see that people are threshing, and tell them to stay away from the bundles when I bring the water up."

"Yes, Great Binder," Riz said, voice still sounding strange. She looked down at the field one last time before she started walking towards her Dungeon again.

Lori watched Riz go down and talk to the people around the field, occasionally pointing towards her and the Dungeon. They glanced her way, but she ignored them, focusing on the field. Fortunately, the bundles were laid out in a straight line—more or less—so she could be efficient with the airflow, though it looked like she would need to make walls with ice to enclose the bundles as they dried…

Hopefully it would only take a day or two to dry everything…

––––––––––––––––––

In the end, it took three days for the grain in the field to dry with her binding to accelerate the process. While most of that delay was because the moisture from the whole stalk slowed the process down, since she couldn't just dry only the head where the grain vigas was, she had also forgotten that there was moisture in the ground to account for and didn't realize where all the additional moisture in the air that was slowing down the desiccation was coming from. It didn't help that she only remembered to check well into the second day, so the binding was extracting moisture from more than just the stalks for all that time.

Fortunately, no one seemed to have figured it out. They only saw that she was able to cut the time it took to less than half of what it would have normally been, so Lori's dignity remained intact. The farmers who had cracked open some of the vigas to check the state of the grain also said it hadn't been hot enough to kill the seed, which… was something that Lori had definitely remembered could happen, so she had made sure not to heat the grain too much! Yes, that was definitely what had happened…

Over the next week, most of the demesne was involved in processing the stalks to get out all the grain and store them into the jars that had been made for them, which was much more efficient for storage. There was some grumbling at the short, fat stalks the vigas was on. According to Riz, the long, thin stalks that Lori was familiar with were usually used to make brooms, which helped with sweeping up the threshing floor to recover every bit of grain, as well as cleaning after the mess threshing made. Beast-feather brooms were apparently too stiff for the job. The blacksmiths had used their hammers to break the modified stalks into fibers pliant enough for sweeping so they'd gotten some new brooms out of it.

Lori having done her part, stayed out of the way since what was being done was brute force manual labor, which didn't really need her since there were enough bodies to throw at the problem. She went back to her routine of drying wood, excavating the third level for more stone to continue the construction of her Dungeon's entrance, making ice for their arrangement with River's Fork and solidified air for their own cold room, and beating Mikon in sunk and chatrang as she made more pieces to play lima with. By the end of the week, much of the vigas had been stored in jars in the storage shed.

The next day, a week after the threshing began, in the middle of the afternoon, Lori felt bindings enter her demesne.

Bindings she had made.

After several weeks away, the Coldhold had finally returned.