"Can I borrow your boat?" Rian asked her that morning as they waited for Riz and Umu to come with breakfast.

"My boat?" Lori frowned as she finished setting up the sunk board and moving it towards Mikon so the weaver could make the first move. Ah, winning was fun.

"Yes, your boat."

"Do you mean Lori's Boat?" Lori made her move as Mikon finished with hers. The weaver was trying all sorts of opening gambits other than the most optimal one, simply because she wasn't winning. She still wasn't winning, but now she seemed to actively be trying all possible combinations of not winning.

"Yes, that's what I said."

Lori gave her lord a flat, unamused look as she finished dropping the stones in her hand into the bowls and ended her turn. Rian, for his part, just wore a bright, cheerful smile. "Why?"

"I had an idea about how to get upriver to that thing we talked about checking on," he said. "I'm going to need your boat to start with."

The look became more unamused. "You're going to try and talk me into putting air jets on it, aren't you." It wasn't a question.

Rian made a show of crying with happiness, pretending to wipe away a tear from his eye. "Why do you still need me? You can tell what people are thinking just fine, my position is superfluous. Also, yes."

Lori rolled her eyes. "Not people. Just you."

"I don't count as people?"

"You're a lord," Lori pointed out.

"Fair enough, I suppose. Though in my defense, it's just a job for me. It's not like it's everything I am and for some reason I've wrapped my entire identity around it to an unhealthy degree."

She rolled her eyes again at that, then frowned. "Where is my—I mean, Lori's Boat?"

"You'd know better than I would, if you've been keeping the water jet running, but presumably still in the docks, buried under all the snow," Rian said. "That is, if it wasn't blown somewhere else by the storm. Ugh, I hope it didn't slide into the river and float downstream, otherwise we'd never get it back. But presuming it's still there, it should still be fine. The snow's likely not melting, and the carpenters have already checked it over recently, so the wood's been treated with what oil we have."

Ah. Right. Lori concentrated, sorting through the bindings in her demesne. Yes, there was one that way… yes, it was the water jet… "It's still at the docks."

Rian brightened. "If you lend me the air jet and open a hole in the ice tunnel, I should be able to dig it out."

"Very probably," Lori nodded dryly. "What do you need it for? Besides the silly idea of putting air jets on it."

"Why is it a silly idea? Riz has been telling me about how they use sleds up north in the winter to get around, since it's more efficient that trying to walk or anything with wheels. Your boat's underside is just the right shape to be used as a big sled, once we take off the stabilizer fins. There's enough area to distribute its weight pretty evenly on snow so it won't sink much and with the right runners should go pretty straight. As long as we don't pile on too much weight, it should be able to skim over snow without much friction, and a sufficiently strong air jet can give it enough thrust to take advantage of that lack of friction."

Lori stared at him. "What's a sled?"

Rian stared right back as Riz and Mikon arrived with breakfast, putting the bowls of soup and cups of water down on the table. Lori took one. "You… don't know what a sled is?"

Obviously, or else she wouldn't ask. "Obviously, or else I wouldn't ask," she said, dipping a spoon into the soup to stir it a little before proceeding to eat.

"Huh. Well, if you don't know, you don't know." Rian shrugged and took the last bowl of soup as Riz sat down next to Mikon. "A sled is a kind of board that children sit on to slide down snowy slopes."

"It sounds very dangerous. I treasure my ignorance."

"The adult version is a practical vehicle for getting people or cargo around in the snow."

"… By distributing weight over a large area and using the relatively low friction of snow to make something that's easy to propel, if I recall your exposition correctly."

"Yes, exactly!"

"Presumably to reach the edge of the demesne to investigate that matter I spoke to you about."

Rian just nodded. He dipped his spoon into his bowl and blew on it before putting it into his mouth.

"Would not the trees get in the way? As I understand it, there are a lot of trees between here and the edge of the demesne."

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"Not on top of the river," Rian declared, with the air of one making a dramatic reveal.

"Ah. That makes sense." Yes, the river was currently frozen and under a layer of snow, wasn't it? It would make for flat, even ground with no obstructions. And if the ice should happen to break beneath him, so what? It was a boat. "And propelling it with the air jet?"

"It would probably take more force than the air jets you let us use to clear snow, but in principle it's not that different from the water jet, right? And the ice would have a lot less friction and resistance to push against than water."

"It's also supposed to have a metal bottom, Rian," Riz said. "To get it at its most slippery, it needs to melt the snow a little so it's wet under the sled. It's not necessary, but it helps."

"I don't think we'll be able to put one of those, Riz."

"And if I refuse to humor this silly idea?"

"Well, we should probably still bring your boat in from under the snow, and then I'm going to find a way to tie a pair of planks on my feet, tie a shovel to my back, and start walking up the river to check it out. It's only a little walk, what's the harm?"

"Rian, you hate the cold. You're weak to the cold. Your nose starts dripping and threatening to drown you if so much as a chill breeze blows in your face." She'd had him see their doctors and medics about it, but they all said he wasn't really sick, just dripping disgustingly.

"It's fine. My nose only drips one side at a time, so I can still breathe at half capacity."

And he was probably completely serious about that.

Lori sighed, and turned towards Riz, sitting on the other side of Mikon. "Go with him when he investigates and keep him alive."

The woman nodded. "Of course, Great Binder."

Rian grinned. "Does that mean you're lending it to me?"

"Why? You can walk perfectly well."

"Ah… well, there's another reason why I've been thinking of how we might be able to quickly traverse the snow," Rian said.

Of course there was. "Of course there is," Lori said blandly.

"You see, the first births are likely to happen in a two months at the most. If we want to give them the best chance of both the mother and the child surviving, I think it would be best to find a way to restore contact with River's Fork and beg Shana to come here so she can heal either if there are any complications. Doing the experimentation this early gives us more time to find a reliable method, and the sooner we make contact with them, the more time we have to negotiate a deal they'll accept."

…

Lori gave her lord a look pronouncing exactly how much she disliked this idea. "Is this really necessary?"

"Your Bindership, 'mother died in childbirth' comes up a lot in novels and plays for a reason."

…

Lori sighed. "Fine, fine. Get it out of the snow and see what state it's in first."

"Wait, you're already agreeing? I usually have to do a lot more convincing."

"You can still walk. I'm sure Binder Shanalorre could be comfortably conveyed on your back."

"Thank you for your benevolence and generosity, your Bindership!"

––––––––––––––––––

It was a relatively simple matter to dig out to the docks with two air jets and several people with shovels. It helped Lori had already made a tunnel to the water hub shed, which was next to the docks. She just had to open a hole in the wall of the ice tunnel and, admittedly, put down some lightwisps for them to follow so they wouldn't get lost.

She could have just made a tunnel, but she needed to imbue the bindings she'd be using to expand the demesne later. Besides, it was best to give people something to do. Lori had seen a few pacing restlessly, unable to settle down, so best to give them something physical to let them spend their imbuement on before they did something idiotic.

Once dug out of the snow, Lori's Boat was taken to the second level and raised up on wooden stands to be examined by the carpenters and other woodworkers, just in case there was any damage. Thankfully, being buried in snow for two week hadn't seemed to cause it any more harm. The fittings that had been added to it—the outriggers, the water jet, the stabilizer fins—were removed carefully, and the places they had been mounted on were checked for weakness or damage.

Then Rian had gleefully declared they should 'test it to see how it handled the snow'.

Lori had then been treated to the sight of grown men pushing Lori's Boat around in the snow, trying to get it moving as fast as they could, before trying to jump aboard to ride it for however far it managed to travel on the force that had been imparted on it. The grown men acting like children had then been joined by actual children, who then rode on Lori's Boat while the adults pushed them around. At that point, she had retreated to her room so she wouldn't actually have to see if they somehow broke the boat, and spent the rest of her afternoon expanding her demesne like a responsible person.

"Well, your boat is already a wonderful sled," Rian reported at dinner. "Now we just need a way to get it moving." He gave Lori a hopeful look.

"So you didn't break it from jumping on it?"

"No, we didn't break it. It's pretty durable Deadspoken wood. Some of us have bruises on our shins, though I don't expect you have any sympathy for us."

"It was your own silly idea," Lori nodded. She waved a hand. "Very well, I'll see about putting together a larger air jet to propel it for you."

Well, she supposed she wasn't too annoyed at Rian for thinking of more work for her to do. With the desiccator for the latrine waste running, other people taking care of supplying water to the reservoir with snow, and the snow limiting what work could be done, Lori had most of her day free, and even she was starting to get bored at efficiently expanding her demesne, playing board games at meals and reading her almanac. Being aggravated at Rian for thinking up some foolish project was a nice change of pace.

Obviously, the larger air jet to propel the boat-turned-sled would need a way of stopping, else it would be… well, a very inconvenient conveyance. However, unlike the smaller air jets, a vehicle-mounted air jet would be relatively stationary, so the air could be pointed in a particular direction and she wouldn't have to worry about it moving to point somewhere else. Obviously, it would need some kind of mechanical element, just like the water jet, but it would have to be fairly simple so it could be built with what they had.

To that end, she went down to the second level and examined the boat again, taking measurements to refresh her knowledge of its dimensions. Then she went back to her room and sketched out some ideas on a stone tablet. The air jet would need a large volume of air being thrust at great intensity to propel the sled. Enough to counter the weight of the materials and… say, three, no, four passengers as minimum. That would be… what, four hundred sengrains of weight? Well, she could calibrate the thrust later. What she needed was something to anchor the air wisps providing the thrust to, which would in turn need to be physically connected to the sled…

Ugh, why did she let her lord keep talking her into going along with his silly ideas?