I felt better once we went back to Master Yhosed's workshop and collected our three walking sticks. There was just something about having a sturdy stick in hand that was reassuring. Very good for poking, swinging, hooking legs and arms… leaning on when my feet started aching…

…

Why do my feet ache so much? I'm still young and healthy, especially now since Shana's healed me once or twice and probably fixed things I didn't know needed fixing! I'm only twenty-two years old! I mean, I don't join the logging teams every day, but I don't hold them back when I join them, and I do a lot of walking all the time! Why do my feet ache so much!-?

…

Well, my feet aside, I had to get back to work.

Trying to find other Deadspeakers to recruit was hot work. After all, I couldn't just walk into any place with a Deadspeaker's sign and ask them to move to our demesne. Unless I had the luck to find someone sufficiently dissatisfied with their life, or the person in question was having a very terrible week, we weren't going to get any recruits that way.

Over the next three days, I asked around some of the carpentry workshops in the area, especially the ones to whom I'd sold beads to, inquiring about the local Deadspeakers while I still had some goodwill. While there were no doubt Deadspeakers who were gainfully employed in one way or another, there were probably still those with the terrible luck of being unemployed because the workshops couldn't take on any more people as regular employees. Granted, these people might also be unemployable for one reason or another, but not all of them would be.

Between all this walking and the information I was able to learn about talking to people at the Shady Stand, we were able to meet and try to recruit over twenty people over that time. The key word, unfortunately, was 'try'.

Some of the Deadspeakers were far too young, still in their mid-teens and either apprenticed to older Deadspeakers for training, or attending one of the local schools that had managed to establish themselves. I wasn't sure as to the exact particulars of the latter arrangement, but casual inquiry gave me the impression that the schools subsisted on a combination of civic responsibility on the parts of the wizards teaching, tuition fees, support from the demesne, and local good will.

While the young Deadspeakers had been spoken well of by the carpenters I'd talked to, I'd thought that their references to 'young' someone was simply in comparison to them, which had been the case a few times. One carpenter had referred to a Deadspeaker as 'young', and it turned out the wizard in question actually just looked younger than them. No, it turned out some of the woodworkers had been literal. A few looked young enough to for me to think of them as children, and Lori probably would have as well.

There were older ones in their late-teens, those nearing the end of their apprenticeship or schooling, but many of them were shackled by debts they'd undertaken to pay for their education. The young Deadspeakers also probably needed seasoning in the application of their skills and abilities, which was probably safer for them to have in the controlled conditions of whatever workplace they'd eventually go to.

I could still have recruited some of the older ones, the ones who were recommended as really good or talented… but unfortunately, there was always a final factor that made me remove them from conservation: the size of their families. More often than not, the very talented, driven ones that I might be inclined to recruit had large families to support… which probably explained why they were so driven and worked so hard. If we'd be recruiting them, it was obvious we'd need to bring their family as well, which… well, often had far too many people for us to safely transport on the Coldhold. Not unless we didn't take on any cargo, and even then, it would far too overcrowded for safety.

Recruiting only the older of the young Deadspeakers was an option… but there were still their debts to consider. If we recruited only them, they'd at the very least want to be able to send beads back to their families to pay for their debts. Besides the fact we couldn't really pay them the way our demesnes were, Lori would be very annoyed at her having to restructure the current economy of her demesnes just to pay one person, and we would have restructure, because as easygoing as everyone has become with Lori's rule, no one is going to be happy that only a one person in the entire demesne is getting paid.

Then there were people with difficult attitudes. Fortunately, there weren't many of them and none of them were belligerent, but I doubted Lori would appreciate a Deadspeaker who took the opportunity to slack off every chance they got. It would also be terrible for general morale. The same for the one who was far too flirtatious. In their defense, from what I heard they did very good carpentry work, but… well, at the very least, I put them at the very bottom of the list of maybes.

There were those who just refused our offer, though they did so quite politely, even if I did make sure to mention the free baths. That admittedly made some people very thoughtful, but in the end they still refused, and I didn't press. However, some of them were kind enough to recommend other Deadspeakers who they thought might be more amenable.

Despite all that, we had some promising candidates.

Taeclas was a pleasant young woman who'd been recommended by two nearby carpentry workshops and three of the Deadspeakers we'd met with earlier. While a skilled Deadspeaker, she was currently not regularly employed by any workshop because she was considered a bit slow when implementing meanings as well as not very well-verse in manual carpentry, so she was less desirable to employ compared to many of her peers who could work faster and assist in the more manual aspects of the craft beyond carrying wood around.

While that wasn't the best when it came to any worker, it also wasn't the worst, and beyond the speed in which she worked, those who mentioned her said her work was exceptional. It was simply that in the workshops, fast and good was more desirable than not-as-fast and exceptional. It sounded like something that would sort itself out with enough experience and learning manual carpentry, and given the sorts of projects we were likely to ask her to do in Lorian and River's Fork such thoroughness probably wasn't a bad thing. She was also very skilled in meanings meant for farming, something we found out when we learned she and her wife were growing pots of vegetables in their house, which supplemented their diet as well as their income.

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As a recruit she was almost perfect, but Taeclas was a bit reluctant to uproot herself and her wife to move to another demesne now that they'd established themselves in Covehold. They promised to discuss it and I told them I would return in a few days to hear their decision, as well as help them with packing if they decided favorably.

Sharrod—yes, he had apparently been named after the bulb vegetable—was another candidate, an even-tempered and supposedly industrious young man who wasn't regularly employed because in addition to being the bead-winner of his family, he was also the oldest and had to take care of his three younger cousins. It was a recent change, as his aunt and uncle had died over the winter. I hadn't gotten any specific details as to how and hadn't pressed, but given he was a Deadspeaker, it probably wasn't from disease. Hopefully.

Since then, he'd had to go from being a regular worker to a part time or temporary one, or at least that was what we'd been told. When we met, I got the impression that some of his irregular hours was also because he became anxious when away from his cousins for too long, a fact that he admitted to with some embarrassment. Ah. Employers didn't like it when you started acting unreliable, after all. They'd no doubt be more than happy hire him again as a regular when he was more reliable again, but… well, that seemed to be unlikely to happen soon. Still, he was able to subsist on small jobs from the workshops for now, but that was probably not sustainable in the long run.

The Deadspeaker had listened quite politely when we had met in their home, his cousins sitting with us, and had asked me several questions about how safe our demesne was. He seemed interested to hear if there was any violent altercations, and I answered honestly that while there was roughhousing, it was generally usually resolved in a friendly manner. I also confirmed that there were no gangs in our demesne, which was probably a sign of what happened to his aunt and uncle.

By the end of our discussion, he seemed very interested in accepting, and said he would take some time to think about it.

There had also been Master Yhosed's recommendation, Lidzuga, who seemed about my age or at most a year or so older. He was skilled in Deadspeaking, friendly, hardworking, and seemed to be making a decent living, so I was a bit confused as to why he was being recommended, since it seemed very unlikely he would want to accept.

The answer to that turned out to be very simple: he'd come to the new continent searching for adventure, and now after working to rebuild his savings, he wanted to move out to one of the outer demesnes—as the least-developed demesnes furthest from Covehold were called, which… well, we qualified, so fair enough—to have that adventure. Thankfully, as a devout follower of the Mysteries of Alknowledge, his idea of adventure was being among the first to document the native plants, beasts, bugs and fursh, which was admittedly hard to do around Covehold because the march of progress had driven them out, killed them, eaten them, used them as building material, or some combination thereof. If he wanted to record anything new, a demesne far from Covehold was the best option.

On the one hand, he seemed a wonderful candidate for his skills, and as a follower of the Mysteries, he probably knew useful things beyond Deadspeaking. On the other hand… I felt very reluctant to recruit a Deadspeaker who wanted to go and be adventurous in his spare time. Especially one that wanted to observe, document and sketch the local beast population, study their habits, sketch them… I mean, I suppose that the hunters could accompany him, but Lori would probably be very annoyed about having a Deadspeaker who'd take long breaks from working to conduct such studies. Still, of the candidates so far, he was the most enthusiastic of about the idea of leaving Covehold and heading out to a distant demesne he'd never heard of once I told him we were from really far away.

It was vaguely concerning, actually. No wonder Master Yhosed had recommended him to me. I probably looked halfway trustworthy, so I was unlikely—well, far less likely—to rob Lidzuga and just leave him for dead somewhere.

Correction, Lidzuga and his sister. Because I learned at the end of our discussion that he also had a sister, but he was sure he could convince her moving was a good idea…

Uh… not my problem. Though I got the feeling the sister was probably the one who was going to decide whether they'd be coming with us or not.

Crucially, when asked, all of them denied any desire to found their own demesnes. Lidzuga said he had no need for it since he'd be living in a demense anyway, and actually ruling a demesne would be a distraction. Taeclas also said it seemed like hard work, and not something she'd be good at, and Sharrod said it was a position that would take up far too much of his time.

That was good enough for me. Hopefully Lori would accept it. Well, we'd already be there when she found out, so she really wouldn't have any choice…

After three days, we had to stop the search. Enough of the goods we had ordered from Emborin and Sons had been assembled that Ravia said they were ready to start delivering them to the Coldhold. That meant that the boat couldn't set out and gather salt that day, and I needed to be there to supervise and direct the others as they arranged the cargo amid the space available.

After we sold the salt we'd gathered to Ravia again—we only had one barrel, since the priority was filling our water barrels again—it was time to move all the cargo into the ship. It took most of that day, since we had to balance and secure everything so that the Coldhold wouldn't tilt too far to one side or the other. The bound tools and some of the things that didn't need to be washed—like metal ingots and bar stocks, coils and coils of wire as well as the containers of ink—were stored in the front room, while the bundles of paper, bolts of cloth, books and anything else were put in the cargo boxes, sealing the lids shut so that no one could accidentally reach inside. We'd probably have to tell whoever we recruit not to touch them, but the darkness-shrouded appearance of the containers would likely make people careful around them.

By the time we finished loading the ship with most of the things we'd bought, it was mid-afternoon. To thank Ravia and the workers who'd pushed the carts with all the goods for waiting while we got the ship sorted out, I treated them to lunch when we'd stopped to eat in the middle of the day, which was gladly accepted.

"It was an education for myself as well," Ravia said as we ate. "I had not realized the importance of properly distributing weight aboard a boat. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but…" He shook his head.

"Thinking of commissioning your own boat so you can sell to the demesnes upriver more easily?" I asked.

"It's an idea that's been bandied about," he admitted, "but it was decided that we should wait until there are more experienced sailors to advise us."

"Given how your rivals likely have more beads to draw on, you'd likely be outbid. You'd probably do better to get the experience yourself by funding your own boat and crew," I said. I waved my hand at the men. "None of us had any sailoring experience before we built the Coldhold. We learned as we went."

"That has also been suggested, but the investment…"

I shrugged. "Why don't you fund a saltboat or two and work your way up from there? As an investment, it's not bad. Helps you cut out the middle man, so it might even pay for itself by the time you think you have enough experience to move on to larger ships?"

Ravia blinked, then tilted his head. "A sound proposal… I'll pass it on to my father."

"Glad to help," I said. "And since we're good friends, I won't charge you a consultation fee."

Ravia laughed. "That is greatly appreciated."