"D'you have bandages anywhere?"

"Nnno."

"Right, probably wouldn't have been a priority. D'you have something to boil water in?"

"That I do have!"

"Great. We can find some cloth and boil it and bandage Proust's finger, I don't want it getting infected."

"Good idea."

He detours briefly from his shard-collecting rounds to find a cooking pot and a big pile of very fine white cloth left over from recipe testing.

"Excellent." She starts boiling cloth.

And Tiro goes back to collecting shards. He also digs up the collector plants with their cup-shaped leaves full of shining blue liquid, and moves them a ways downslope until they aren't anywhere near the edible stuff.

Yttren starts poking at the food-bearing plants to see if he can do anything for them.

The food-bearing plants are all very happy and healthy. Could use watering, though. It doesn't rain here.

Ah, but could they be obscenely healthy?

It is technically possible for them to get healthier than they currently are.

Tiro goes down to the smallish crater by the lakeshore and piles up all his collected shards and consults a recipe book and paints the recipe for a pile of wood and then the recipe to set the pile of wood on fire.

Yttren putters around contentedly, improving the plants.

"Is there anything I can do to help?" Leuska asks. "I don't really know--what's helpful, here, it's nothing like the palace or like being on the run, I don't really know what's useful. Everything obvious someone else is doing."

"Sorry, I'm a little at loose ends myself," says Tiro. "Um, I was planning on hauling the broken furniture out of the downstairs rooms at some point, if you wanted to help with that."

"I can do that!" she says brightly, and goes to find Delsmiar to help her do that because hauling furniture is a two-person job.

Hooray!

Tiro settles down at the table in the upstairs room with his recipe books and starts trying to figure out construction.

"Ooh, what's that?"

"This is me trying to learn how to build a house!"

"I assume you'll be substantially slowed down by trying to explain any of it to me."

"I can try anyway. I don't need a house urgently in the next three hours."

"Awesome."

"So where did we leave off, before?"

"You explained how the colors combine to form the other colors?"

"Right," he says. "I have guesses about what the most common four are. Fire I think I mentioned, and then there's water, earth, and air. I'm kind of confused about what the five basic colours could be, but I think this one's light?"