The long pine table
Written for readers who have finished Book 1.
The long pine table runs down the centre of the col-house kitchen, and it is Marga's — the table she set for Toll the night he climbed the col with nothing left, and fed him at without asking a single question. Older than the keeper and sound as the day it was made, marked by decades of use and the better for it, it is where the house does its work: the bread, the soup, the maps, the talk. If the kettle is the heart of the house, the table is its long memory.
