"What were you expecting, exactly?" Rian asked, looking amused.

Lori wasn't sure, but she had imagined that there would be things she would covet. At least, she had thought so… "All right, go down the list for me, what do we have?" Lori said.

Rian's smile became genuine for a moment, though no less amused. "All right. Well, over here we have some medicines. Some bottles of antiseptic in case of major injury again, refined osiel extract and osiel nuts to plant and grow more, baler roots, a few dried quefo roots as well as a little sapling we can start growing to eventually make our own… we have these winter tubers, which will still grow in the cold, and our farmers tell me they know how to keep it from dying out. We have these little saplings we can grow for spices. This is green nigrum, these little stalks here are from a vauang bulb that started sprouting on the way back so we put them in these pots to grow, and these are blue sharrods. This little jar here is some vinegar that actually has some vinegar paste in it, so as soon as we have fruits again we might be able to use that to start making more, and we can also use that for antiseptic. It'll be excruciating, but it'll work if we really need it. We also have these grains here. We've got valri, glits and I was lucky enough to get some of this mais… it's not a lot, but if we plant it over the winter in the Dungeon, we should have enough to plant with in summer. At worst, we just plant it next year and eat it the year after."

The words were definitely food words, even if Lori barely recognized some of them. Her mothers had done the cooking at home, and if they couldn't be home for one reason or another she bought something to eat. "Why is so much of it food?" she said.

"Because we don't want to starve?" Rian said, as if that was supposed to be obvious. "We also brought back the seeds from some fruits we ate while we were there, and hopefully we'll be able to grow those, we need them if we don't want to come down with scurvy, and we'll need it for the vinegar. Don't get me wrong, I think mushroom stock is delicious, but a little variety would be nice."

Lori couldn't argue with that.

"Anyway, we've also got pirri nuts that we can try to—"

"All right, you can skip any plants, food plants and medicines," Lori interrupted. "For now, no duties on them. What else? "

Rian looked aside and gave a signal, and Riz and Umu started moving the plants and various wooden things—they looked like wood, so she called them wood—to another part of the area marked off by benches. "All right then. So these jars are for the carpenters. It's wood glue, resin, and tressflower oil. Until we start producing enough bugwax and figure out which trees to tap for what—your almanac should contain that information, your Bindership—we needed to buy all that."

"Why the tressflower oil? I thought that was for cooking?"

"Not this kind. This is for treating wood against damage like decay and rot, better than just scorching it like they've been doing so far. We also have a few tressflower seeds, but I'm not sure if it germinated properly…" Rian sighed. "They might not even be viable, I got them from a bag of cooking ingredients. Anyway, this jar contains flux for the blacksmiths—"

"What's flux?" It sounded vaguely familiar, but not something she'd actually handled or dealt with...

"As I understand it, it's something they use to get the metal malleable at a lower temperature. It's probably for the anatass dragon scale, I hear anatass needs absurd amounts of heat to be worked."

Lori waved dismissively. "A waste of money. If they need heat, I can bind it for them."

"They probably didn't want to waste your time, your Bindership, and it probably has other uses for them so it's most likely still useful. I think they use it for welding metal together too? We have these wire brushes, which were cheaper to buy there, and we also bought these mesh screens, since it was a pretty good deal and you can always find a use for mesh. Uh, no need to charge duties on that, it's meant for general demesne use. Hopefully by the time they wear out the smiths will be able to make more."

Lori looked at the coppery screens made of thin wires stretch taught on a wooden frame. "I can't imagine what we'd use it for," she said.

"Well, off the top of my head," Rian said, "papermaking."

She blinked and stared at him.

"What? How did you think they made paper? Magic?"

"How do you know how paper is made?" she shot back.

"I used to be neighbors with a papermaker," Rian said with a shrug. "We talked, and I visited the workshop where he worked. I've seen it done. Can't do it myself, but I understand what's involved. It can also be used for sifting flour so there aren't little rocks and husks in it or something."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

That… was a point, she supposed. "That's a point, I suppose," she said. "What else?"

"Well, those big jars are the salt we collected." Rian said. "On the way back, we spent a day filling all the water jars with salt since we knew we'd last getting home and just filled some of the used food jars with water. We can get more easily, we just need more containers… and that filter I mentioned, in case there's something floating in the water." He paused. "Also, we might have to process this salt again before we cook with it, something green's mixed in with the salt. I think that was something in the water, some kind of plant or something. You know how seawater can look green."

Lori felt her covetousness fading with every word, replaced by impatience and a slight amount of self-recrimination. Really, she should have expected this. Who would waste their beads buying absurd luxuries? It definitely made more sense that people had been doing as she had been, and buying resources they needed for what they were doing. She listened much more perfunctorily as Rian read out what else they had bought. There wasn't all that much. After all, not many people had any beads left. There was thick leather, made of sheets of leather Deadspoken together, that Rian said was meant to make soles for new boots for the men and women who regularly went out to hunt for beasts who might need better footwear than just a thin sheet of leather over some stuffing. They had pooled their beads together in anticipation for the future need. More glues, this time for the leather. More tressflower oil, of a different composition than the one for the carpenters, meant for waterproofing what fabric they had for rain cloaks when the rains came again so people could continue working…

Eventually, they got to the end of the list, and nothing jumped out at Lori as being worth havi—er, taking customs duties on.

"All right," she said, absolutely bored and just wanting to get back to reading the book she had in her hands. "You may distribute that to… whoever. Tomorrow I expect a report on Covehold. Riz, finish your report to Rian this afternoon so you can finally go back to being a glitter crawler like you want."

"Yes, Great Binder!" Riz said, actually sounding happy at the prospect.

Rian picked up a pair of packages and held it out to Lori. "The other things you asked for, your Bindership," he said. "I'll carry the glass and the box to the treasure room once you get it open, shall I?"

Lori grimaced at one more thing keeping her from just reading her day away, but accepted the paper-wrapped packages that she realized hadn't been laid out on the ground with the others. One of the packages was bigger than she expected. How many socks and underwear had Rian purchased? She had made it clear he was to use the majority of the beads she had given him for glass. "Make sure to include the glass shards and the wire," Lori reminded him. She could use that wire.

Rian lifted the glass block himself, following her as she went ahead to open up the treasure room. The block and box were placed in a discreet little corner away from the piles of metal before she closed it off again, then parted ways with Rian so she could continue reading. The packages she took upstairs, and she carefully put her new book on her table. Then she opened the first, more obvious of her packages. Inside was a new pair of boots. The leather was fresh and clean and did not smell of piss, the soles thick and made of Deadspeaking-layered leathers that seemed very tough. She'd bought her old boots in Taniar and it had an inner layer of cushioning that her new boots didn't seem to, but it would be a simple matter to take them out of her old boots and into her new ones when she started using them…

Her old boots were probably still good for a few more months, but the soles were getting worn and there were clearly cracks growing where the leather folded and wrinkled with her stride. When she'd noticed she'd tried to walk while keeping her toes straight, but she very quickly reverted back to her normal walk.

She took the boots and hollowed out a small alcove in the wall, storing the boots there and drawing out as much air and all the moisture that she could before sealing it. Hopefully the partial vacuum would keep the new boots from getting damaged while she wore out her old ones.

The other package held, as she had hoped, new socks and underwear. The larger size of the package was soon explained by how thick they were. She pulled at the socks gently, testing the elasticity of the knitting, and found herself comparing them to the rather thin strands of the socks she was currently wearing and had folded in her clothes alcove. The chest wraps were equally thick and looked rather warm, as did the loin cloths. The cloths ties were actually very thick, almost like belts.

Lori began folding up the new clothes, reflecting on the irony that she had bought socks and underwear with the last of her money. She had always been annoyed when her mother had given her those for her birthday, and now here she was, buying them for herself. Or at least sent someone to buy them for her.

Once they were folded up, she debated just curling up on her bed and reading her new almanac to find ideas for more new bindings to make, but she knew it was close to midday. She reluctantly admitted that she might miss lunch if she did that. So Lori picked up her new book and headed downstairs, sitting down at her usual table to read.

Lori was tempted to just go from flow diagram to flow diagram, but she restrained herself. Instead, she went back to the beginning of the Whispering flow diagrams and began systematically reading them. It began with what it claimed were efficient ways to gather water out of the air, and she was slightly annoyed to find some of them actually were more efficient than the method she had used. She had made a large cloud of airwisps and waterwisps that funneled water vapor in the air down into the containers they had stored their water, staying up so that she could imbue the binding enough to last for the whole night.

She took comfort in knowing that her method had still been more efficient that how whatever-her-name-had-been-who-was-dead-now had been doing it. Lori had always made more water than the other Whisperer.

Lori lost herself to reading for what was left of the morning as she devoured through the flow diagrams, tracing the notations with her fingers as she read and resisting the urge to form the bindings then and there. The dining hall wasn't the place to start experimenting on bindings! She needed to do it outside or at the third level…

But after she finished reading!