And were some of those out of Change-Circles? After listening to the story of the aftermath of the Mage-Wars, it seemed likely! Surely he would have been drawn to Change-Circles, and to investigate them. And I have never heard of a fungus like the one we use to make barge hulls anywhere else.

Well, since the first Duke’s discovery, the Duchy had been making and selling the hulls at such an entirely reasonable price that there were only two other workshops in other parts of the Empire that even bothered with doing the same. Wooden barges were almost unheard of except as luxury items, but these were cheap to produce, requiring a bare minimum of magic.

First, a mold, or bladder, made of inflated rawhide, oiled and carefully prepared, was covered in a layer of cured long-fibered vegetation. This was the only finicky part of the process: layering the vegetation for maximum strength. Here in Valdemar, they used a kind of hemp—the stems, and only the stems—the kind that was generally made into ropes. The stuff would grow anywhere, with wild enthusiasm, and quickly choke out any other crops. They got several cuttings out of every field every growing season. There was a workshop on the eastern coast in Lyranhold that used an equally fibrous seaweed. The third workshop, near the Capital, used a similar weedy relative of flax.

The vegetation was laid on with a simple water-soluble glue, easy and cheap to make. It was allowed to dry, then a thick paste made of water, wheat chaff, sawdust, and any other kind of plant material that could be reduced to a state like coarse-ground wheat was coated on just before the spores of an extremely odd fungus got laid on with a trowel. That was kept damp and allowed to grow until the mold was about a thumb-breadth thick, which took about three days. The workers wore glass-faced hoods, aprons, and gloves, which were thoroughly bleached every day. The fungus spread fast enough that one could watch it grow into intertwining layers, pulling itself tight into a weave that was ultimately fine enough to shine like satin.