Loman looked around the Hanrahan great hall and fought back the urge to berate the assembled guests as if he were still a priest, speaking from the pulpit.
Everywhere he looked, he saw fresh, full faces that lacked any traces of the lean, harsh lifestyle he'd seen in the sunken cheeks and bony figures of the townsfolk he'd met in the poorest, outer areas of the town.
Here on the edge of civilization, as close to the frontier and the border with the demons who infested Airgead Mountain as a person could build a sizeable town, it was expected that conditions could be harsh. Raids in the fall and winter claimed the lives and livestock of many farmers every year, even if they weren't on the scale of what had recently befallen the barony.
