"Lori, lunch time."

Lori blinked, looking up from the ice she had been working on. She immediately became aware of an ache in her neck, and winced, slipping her hand beneath her collar to rub at her nape. Ugh, she hadn't realized she'd been bent over that long… ack, and there was her back. Straightening, Lori put one hand on the small of her back and bent backwards, wincing more as she did so.

"Do you want some ice for that?" Rian said with a grin.

Lori flicked her other hand, and the butt of her staff slapped solidly against the side of his leg. Between his winter robe and the fur wrappings around his boots, most of the impact was blunted, but Rian still made a blatantly theatrical show of wincing and briefly hopping on one foot as if the strike had pained him.

"No ice, noted," he said, before looking down at what Lori had been working on, then around at all the others like it.

It was a tube of ice, a bit wider at the base than at the peak, meant for stability and to reduce the possibility of it falling over. No one wanted a container meant for molten metal to tip over and spill, after all. A half a pace high, the hollow inside was just big enough to fit someone's head, its thick sides irregular in a way that annoyed her greatly but which she couldn't afford to correct without wasting time, the whole thing made of bound ice that had been solidified. A small drop of her blood could barely be discerned somewhere on the glass-like, perfectly transparent cone.

The tube was one of a handful she'd managed to make that morning, barely uniform in height and base width, each one bearing a shameful lack of symmetry save for the dimensions of the hollow within the tube. That she had made by using a form made from a piece of wood with a handle she'd had her carpenters make—well, she'd told Rian to tell the carpenters, who'd probably passed the order down to Riz—on their lathe. It hadn't been the only tool she'd had made in preparation for this smelting work. Some of the rest were still on the boat, not currently needed. The smith had bought his own tools as well, and would probably be doing most of the work when it came time, but she wanted to be ready.

Each tube was imbued, the solidified water maintaining their shape without exchanging heat with their surroundings. As she had every time she'd finished working on a tube, Lori checked their levels of imbuement through the drops of her blood she'd mixed into the ice. Each was reduced from the last time she'd checked, of course, and she sighed, switching to imbuing them again. She breathed in out of habit, and for the now relatively miniscule magic she drew in from the air, even as the magic contained in her core filled her through her connection to her demesne. She pushed this magic to the waterwisps contained in her blood through her affinity, reinforcing that affinity even as imbued the bindings—

"Lori? Lori?"

Lori just managed to stop herself from halting the imbuement as her lord drew her attention. "What?" she snapped irritably, trying to pay attention to him and what she was doing at the same time.

"Lunch, remember?" he said. "The bread is here, and the salted meat stew is done."

Oh. Food. Right, right… Lori tried to decide if she could walk while imbuing or whether she should stop until she reached the food, then continue to imbue as she ate. Rainbows, both sounded like bad ideas for different reasons.

She compromised by imbuing only one of the least-imbued of the tubes as she followed Rian towards where they were eating, and nearly lost that bit of her concentration as she saw what was there. Her workers sitting around the binding of heat and darkness was completely expected as Rian led her towards a small wooden stool—he must have gotten it from Riz—sitting on the far side of the binding from most of the men. The crowd of children at their edges throwing balls of snow into the binding and laughing when water came out the other side were not. Nor were the adults with the buckets and shovels.

As she watched, two people carrying a pole from which a large wooden bucket filled with snow hung between them walked towards her binding, walking on either side of it as the bucket between them passed through the darkwisps. When they walked out the other side, the bucket was filled with water, which was hurriedly carried over to a barrel and poured in as people put in more snow after it to melt.

Lori sighed. Why was the world filled with idiots?

"Rian, please tell our people to keep those idiots away from our heat source," Lori said irritably. "The imbuement I filled it with was supposed to last all day, but if these fools have been using it to melt water and warm their buckets—"

Even as she spoke, the darkness suddenly disappeared, leaving a pair who had just been about to pass their bucket through where the binding had been to pause, standing awkwardly.

"—then," she continued, suddenly feeling very tired, "the imbuement will have been expended far more rapidly due to the difference in the amount of energy it takes to imbue air with heat as opposed to the amount of energy it takes to imbue frozen water, wooden buckets, rope and poles with heat!" By the end of the sentence, she was just short of screaming, and the children had vacated the area, apparently knowing better than to be in her presence.

"Oh…" Rian said, voice small. "That… uh… makes sense. You should have told me that."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"I would have thought it wouldn't be needed, given how I specifically warned you of the hazards of this particular binding," Lori said through grinding teeth. "What, after telling everyone how dangerous it was to stick any part of their body into it, everyone decided it was safe to stick literally anything else in?"

"Um… pretty much?" Rian said.

Lori took a deep breath… then sighed. She closed her eyes, and used her fingers to massage her forehead, squeezing from her temples inward. She bent down and picked up the stool. "I," she told Rian, "am going back to my crucibles lest some colorwit decide they would be a good place to piss in, or some children think it would be fun to carry them somewhere, or just fill them with snow. Bring me food."

"Probably a very good idea, your Bindership," Rian said tiredly. "People aren't really used to you here. And the people who do know you will probably not be very respectful. They left, after all."

Lori nodded and irritably began to walk back towards her furnaces.

"Um… about the heat…"

"As you all let it run out of imbuement early, I'm sure you can find your own solution, as you all clearly know better."

"Punishment, got it. All right boys, lunch is interrupted! Go find some wood so we can start a fire!"

Lori did, in fact, have to keep children away from her furnaces, as well as have to deal with a furnace that had somehow been half-filled with snow in the time she'd been gone. At least it hadn't been piss.

She was muttering about all the things she wanted to do to those children's parents for failing utterly in teaching them proper behavior as she finally finished turning the last of the snow into steam when Rian finally came with a platter of bread and two bowls of stew. The bowls were only half filled, and most of it was a watery soup that still wafted up heat in her face as she took one of the bowls.

"It's a dipping soup. You're supposed to put the bread into it and let it soak a little for warmth and flavor," Rian said.

"Obviously," Lori said, who had suspected as much. She sat down on her stool, grabbing one of the flat disks of bread from the platter. Rian stood to one side, holding his own bowl and taking from the platter as well. "If you're going to stand, do it over there so you can block the wind."

"Yes, your Bindership," Rian said with a small sigh as he moved to the indicated spot. "Do you want a report or can I eat first?"

"Eat," Lori ground out. "I don't think I can bear to hear anything more right now. Stupid, idiotic, rainbow-brained…" she bit savagely into the bread chewing. The outside had already cooled a little, but the insides were still pleasantly warm, and Lori let out a sigh as she ate. The bread was thick and heavy, but it was bread and tasted so good!

Lori sat in silence, dipping bread into the stew, biting, chewing, using folded bread edges to scoop up bits of meat and popping both bread and meat into her mouth. Her simmering annoyance slowly abated as she ate, so that when she finished all that was left was a vindictive irritation that had already been sated by her previous declaration. When she finished, she took a deep breath, adding the meager magic that filled her lungs to the binding around her hands and face, then let it out, nodding to herself. She held out her bowl to Rian.

"You want me to see if there's any more bread?" Rian asked.

Loi blinked, then looked towards the empty plate. For a moment, she glanced towards her furnaces.

"I'll get them and come back, and you can listen to my report while you're eating," Rian suggested.

"Do it," Lori said.

The bread he bought back wasn't very warm anymore, but that was fine. She altered the binding around her head to warm the bread slightly as it passed through on the way into her mouth, so it wasn't cold when she chewed. Unlike with the heat source earlier, she could adjust for the additional imbuement this consumed, so she didn't suddenly have a cold face.

"All right," Rian said, glancing towards her workers, who were now crowded around a fire. The people with the buckets and shovels were gone, off to take advantage of their stolen heat no doubt. "We've got three piles of exactly twenty five carts of ore and are halfway through a fourth, so you and Lanwei can probably get started on smelting. We'll start the afternoon's work once Shana's aunt comes back to keep track. We should hopefully have eight, maybe even nine before we have to stop for tonight, and I'm going to have to find someone willing to keep watch so we can all say no one tampered with the piles while we slept. I don't think anyone is going to, but we need to do it anyway, unfortunately."

Lori nodded. "Then we will begin smelting. Hopefully after three or four tests I can learn enough that tomorrow I can start mass production, perhaps even start using bigger furnaces."

Rian glanced at furnaces she had made, then up towards the dome. "Should we have a roof put up or something?" he said. "Just to maybe avoid potential steam explosions if snow should drop down into the things when they're full of molten metal?"

Lori blinked, then looked upwards herself, towards the dark, snow-covered dome above. Had this been some sort of play or novel, that would have been the moment some snow dislodged and dropped down onto her face. No such thing happened, but Lori could well imagine the possibility.

"I will find some stone to make a roof," Lori said, then took another bite of her bread and swallowed. "But later."

Rian nodded, taking some more bread for himself as well. "We're going to be here a while," Rian said, his tone more casual. "How do you feel?"

She frowned at him. "Cold. Sore. In need of a taller chair." This stool was definitely not comfortable for eating on. Her knees were too curled up, and the legs rocked a little on the uneven ground.

"Oh? No urges to declare you're never leaving your demesne again?"

"I always never want to leave my demesne again. However, I have obligations and agreements to fulfill."

"You don't have to start smelting today, you know?" Rian said quietly. "Why don't you take the Coldhold back home, sleep on your own bed, and come back in two days? We should have most of the ore audited then. You don't have to sleep here."

Lori snorted, waving her hand dismissively. "I would still need to be here. I've never smelted ore before, and I need the experience so I can understand the process and begin to make more appropriate bindings for it."

Rian tilted his head, then shrugged. "Fair enough, I suppose."

They finished the bread, and Lori stood up. "Watch over the furnaces," she said, hefting her staff. The wire that ran up its length was cold in her grip, the binding of firewisps around her hands not heating it. "Make sure the children don't come back to play with it. I'm going to go find some stone."

"Try near the mine," Rian suggested, pointing to one side of the location in question. "A lot of what gets excavated is just rock without any ore we can use. They dump that over there."

Lori nodded in acknowledgement, heading in the direction he was pointing to get some stone so she could keep snow and water off her furnaces. Lunch was over, and there was more work to do.