Demesne 159 - Report On A Journey To Covehold (Patreon)

"All right," Lori said in Rian's house after breakfast. She sat on the little wooden stool, her new almanac on her lap. "You've had time. Report."

"Are you sure you don't want us to do this somewhere else?" Rian said. "The benches alcoves in the second level would be a lot more comfortable. Sitting on that stool is probably going to hurt after a while." He was seated on his bed, his bedroll folded under him as a cushion.

She rolled her eyes. "They're still threshing there. It's loud." It really was. The sound of the wooden threshing tools striking the stalks and the stone floor beneath was surprisingly resonant. Rian's house was much quieter, and thankfully didn't have the smell that sometimes wafted out of her mothers' room after a night when she struggled to go to sleep before the imbuement on the binding blocking off her hearing ran out. She supposed the flirting hadn't gone that far yet. "Now, report."

Rian shrugged, but made himself more comfortable on his bedroll cushion. "All right. Before I start, what do you want me to skip? I doubt the details of what we had for dinner and the hunting situation is anything you carry about…"

"It isn't," Lori confirmed.

"Day to day morale?"

"I don't care."

"Problems with the prisoners?"

"Unless you tell me you had to kill them before reaching Covehold—"

"—you don't care. Okay… potential resources and ways to make money we identified on the way?"

"Of course. Get started."

He rolled his eyes for some reason. "Right… all right… well, first I'm here to report that Grem, Naineb, and Rann were all successfully exiled to Covehold. We also didn't lose any buckets along the way, and the letter to the Golden Sweetwood Company was sent and we didn't have to pay for it. No one was hurt, no one was robbed, we were able to sell all the cargo we brought for that purpose, and all in all, I'd call the trip a success."

Lori frowned. "Who?"

"The people we exiled for attacking you," Rian said.

"Oh. Next time, don't bother with the names, you know I don't care."

"Noted. All right, removing the bits that happened during the trip, it takes about two, three days to reach the ocean at the Coldhold's maximum speed with the amount of people and cargo we had at the time, though it takes longer to get back since we're fighting against the current. So regularly sending people to get salt for the demesne is easily viable. Most of the land on either side of the river below River's Fork is hills and rocks, which explains why they settled where they did, but I think it's worth it to cut and bring back the ropeweed growing on the banks if we can be sure there aren't any beasts around."

Lori nodded. "I'll leave that to you. Continue."

Rian nodded. "The river opens out to a protected bay, it's actually a pretty good location. A lot of seels and fursh in the water, as well as lots of different sea weed, which might be good for something. Maybe there's something in your almanac, but they're a potential resource. The bay though…" Rian shook his head. "I'm kind of surprised the Golden Sweetwood people didn't settle there instead. It's a good location, and it would let them control the mouth of the river. The next batch of them might set up a demesne there next year."

"Rian, no one would want to build a demesne next to the ocean," Lori said dismissively. "You only get half the surface land area when the demesne expands. Covehold is necessary, but now that it's there, no one needs to do the same thing again."

Rian stared at her. "Lori… all the goods from the old world, all the beads, all the peoplepass through Covehold, and they charge customs duties, taxes and fees for everything. That alone makes them richer than any five demesnes on this continent, but they're the main supplier of salt on the continent because they're on the ocean. Salt can used to preserve meat without any additional magic, meaning that EVERYONE who can't access the ocean to make their own salt, or use Whispering to preserve their food with cold like we have, will need to buy from them to preserve their food long-term. That alone gives them a hold over every other demesne around them, even without everything else they control. Maybe what you said is true in the old continent, but this is the new continent. The next person who decides to set up a demesne on the shore is going to become as powerful as Covehold."

Lori stared at him.

"Maybe that kind of logic about demesne placement worked in the old world, where everyone was moving outward to the sea," Rian continued, "but here, everyone is moving from the sea inwards. And as long as advanced, processed goods need to come from the old continent, and as long as Covehold is the only demesne next to the sea, they have an economic advantage. The only reason that not one has set up another spot is because most of the coastline near Covehold is rocky cliff that isn't immediately accessible from ocean or land. The bay at the mouth of the river is different, and the person who sets up a demesne there can directly compete with Covehold. At the very least, they'll restrict our access to the sea, even if it's just a fee to pass through."

Lori kept staring at him. Eventually, she took a deep breath. "A matter for later," she eventually said. "Continue your report."

Rian frowned at her, but nodded. "From the bay, once we got out to the ocean, it took us most of a week to get from there to Covehold, though we were slowed down from not knowing exactly how far the demesne was and how we needed to be careful to keep the Coldhold from capsizing from the waves. The outriggers were a good design idea, but we need a deeper keel and more weight on the keel. Though maybe that was just because it's close to winter, maybe the water will be milder when it's warm. "

"So, we'll need to redesign the boat again." Lori managed not to groan. She thought they were done altering that boat!

Rian sighed. "Yeah… but if it's just from here to the ocean for salt, what we have now is fine. Though we might need to think about where we put the Coldhold when a dragon comes. We can't just leave it out, and it's been a significant enough investment of time and work that we need to protect it. "

"I'll work on it tomorrow," Lori said. "Even if I feel a dragon coming right now, we have time."

Rian nodded. "Good, that's good… all right, so in addition to being able to travel to Covehold safer, a move seaworthy ship will also let us take advantage of our access to the ocean beyond salt. While there's a lot of potential food in the bay, there's a lot more outside. Bigger fursh, small dillians, sea bugs, larger graspers and squid… it's food everywhere, and what we don't eat, we can sell to Covehold or just trade to River's Fork. But food really sells in Covehold and, a lot of it gets resold to the other demesne around it."

Next to him was the plank of wood he wrote notes on. Rian held it out to Lori. "Here's a list of all our expenses, and there's a legend of how much beads were worth. But there was a daily docking fee for Covehold's docks. Just cheap enough to be affordable but expensive enough for you to need a steady income to afford it."

Lori took the plank and blinked. Instead of being written in charcoal, Rian had carvedthe list of expenses into the wood. She supposed he had worried the information might be lost. The handwriting was… well, well, it was terrible, but she supposed he couldn’t safely hold a knife or whatever he'd used to write this the way he would normally hold a writing implement.

She still frowned as she read though the numbers, and winced as she saw how much her boots and glass had cost. The rest of all the other items they'd brought back were also listed—Rian had used a strange shorthand, but she supposed that made sense to reduce how much carving he needed to do to list all this down—as well as how much they'd been able to sell their cargo for.

"You sold salt?" she said. It was on the top of the list of sold things.

Rian shrugged. "It's not like we couldn't just make more on the way back. Though the deep-sea water might be why it came out a little green, the batch we sold didn't look like that. It really helped pay for the berthing fees, and let me buy more of what we needed. With the whole river and ocean for us to get from, with a little work we could start turning a profit next year. "

"So, we'll have people regularly leaving the demesne and spending large amounts of time out in the Iridescence," Lori said.

"They'll pass through River's Fork before they get here, and if we managed to keep a good relationship with Shana—"

"Binder Shanalorre," Lori corrected. Honestly, he was supposed to be the one who remembered names, why did he keep forgetting this one.

"Right, her. If we can maintain a good agreement, she can heal them of any injuries and damage they might accrue out there. We might be able to pay for healing with salt, they'll want it to preserve their meat and for tanning their own skins and furs."

Lori considered it, then sighed. "We already have an agreement she'd heal us in exchange for hiring mine workers."

"True. Maybe we can negotiate an addendum that they'll heal us over the winter in exchange for salt to preserve their food?" Rian suggested. "Winter means people might get sick, and since we don't have much in the way of medicines… well, we know where a Deadspeaker is, we might as well stay on her good side."

Lori frowned, considering that, then reluctantly nodded. "All right, arrange it. I suppose it's a good contingency until I can learn Deadspeaking."

Rian paused. "Yes, exactly," he said. "Anyway, the list also has how much things were selling for when we were there, though I think that might shift depending on the season."

Lori looked at the plank again. "I can barely understand what any of this means."

Rian sighed. "Yeah, I know, I'll write it out properly later. But right now, our best means of income is probably food we catch from the ocean, skins, salt, and ropeweed fabric. With the whole river to get resources from, we can harvest far more ropeweed than we need for ourselves." Another pause. "They also don't call it ropeweed, but I figure you don't care what their term for it when we have our own?"

"You figure correctly," she acknowledged.

"So, if we're going to trade with Covehold for what we can't make for ourselves, we'll need to establish production facilities, storage facilities, processing facilities..." Rian began to list. "Of course, these are secondary to the demesne's needs to survive, but if we plan to have a lot of surplus for something we're going to be making for ourselves anyway…"

"The salt will be simple," Lori said. "We simply need an efficient means of pouring seawater into an evaporator and storing the resulting salt. The fabric though… " Lori shrugged. "I'll leave the details of scaling up production of that to you… after you set up the Dungeon farm."

"Yeah, that's probably a good set of priorities," Rian said. "With how little we actually managed to harvest, any additional food will be important." He sighed. "We might have to find a way to buy grain from River's Fork. They lost some during the dragon that killed their old Binder, but they still have a lot since they originally needed to feed a much larger population. They have surplus and we'll need that surplus."

Lori scowled.

"I can literally feel your dislike of the idea from here," Rian said. "Think about it as practice for trading with Covehold. If we don't have enough surplus to trade for food from River's Fork, then we don’t have enough surplus to trade for resources in Covehold, where the value of our goods will be relatively lower because we won't be the only one providing it."

"I'm familiar with supply and demand," Lori retorted. "I grew up in Taniar. I just don't like it."

"Given that I'll be doing all the talking to other people to set this up and get it going, I'm inclined not to like it either," Rian said dryly. "But if we want to thrive, it's necessary. We're relatively isolated and have room to expand out here, but what about next year? The year after that? When the Golden Sweetwood Company comes, people will know about this place, simply from watching where they're going. I think you'll want to be in a dominant position when that happens and not have to worry about being hemmed in by other demesne. And if we continue with your stance about not recruiting other wizards—"

"No wizards," she snapped.

"—yes, that, well, it means we'll be working with a significant handicap. Even one Deadspeaker would let us increase grain yields and not have to worry about disease and injury."

"Only until I learn how to use Deadspeaking," Lori said.

Rian was silent.

"Is that all?" she said.

Rian sighed. "Well, while I didn't recruit, I kept an ear out for people who were amenable to moving to a different demesne, and it looks like there are a lot. There's also talk about Covehold actively encouraging people to move to other demesnes. So when you do decide to start recruiting, I don't think we'll have trouble finding skilled workers who have their own tools, though if we're doing it on the Coldhold we'll only be able to bring in people in small batches."

Lori nodded. "Noted. What else?"

Rian hesitated, frowning. "I… think that's everything immediate. I mean, you probably don't want to hear about every rumor and thing I heard about while I was there…"

"No, I don't," Lori nodded. "Very well, then that will be all. Inform me immediately about anything that might have slipped your mind."

"Yes, your Bindership…" Rian said. "Ah, have you read the section I told you about yet?"

Lori sighed at his impatience. "Yes, yes, I'll read it now," she said, holding up her almanac to show him.

Really, he could be so impatient sometimes…