Chapter 18: The Township at Dusk

Niall took the bread.

He looked at it for a long moment.

Then he bit off a corner and chewed, and swallowed it.

I knew it tasted like wet sand to him.

I watched his throat work, and I watched the township watch him.

"Thank you," he said.

"It is very good."

The widow laughed out loud and wiped her eyes.

"It's yesterday's," she said.

"Well, it is the best I have had in some years."

That broke it.

Somebody coughed.

Somebody else whispered, and a man laughed behind his hand, and a child's voice said clearly from the back, "He's got teeth."

"I have," said Niall gravely.

"They are for deer, mostly."

Morag shouldered through the crowd with her wrists wrapped and a ladle in her fist.

"Enough gawping," she said.

"Himself has a table, and that's twenty people on his stair that haven't had their supper."

"Up!"

They ate in the great kitchen.

Morag fed twenty-two on a pot of mutton broth and four loaves, and she scolded every one of them while she ladled.

Niall sat at the head of his own table for the first time since I had known him.

The old miller sat on his right, and the widow's baby sat in her lap on his left.

Nobody seemed troubled that the laird took no plate.

"Is it true you've not died?" the miller asked.

"I have, rather, once."

"And you can't go out of a day?"

"I burn."

"Ach, that's no great hardship," said the miller.

"My wife says the same about me, and I've lived to seventy."

The table roared.

I saw Niall's face as they laughed.

He was staring at the long row of warm, tired, candle-lit faces.

Under the table he found my hand and gripped it hard.

"They sat on my stair," he said very softly, so that only I could hear.

"All afternoon."

"They did."

"I have been the thing in the tower for a hundred years."

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