The motte is a hill with a job. On top, Greyfen Keep shows its teeth: gatehouse, stone that used to be a wooden palisade, a roof the color of a wet mouse. It is not waiting for a dragon. It is waiting for accounts.

The road runs beside three long strips.

The first is plowed in ridges, dark and tidy, waiting for winter wheat.

The second is still green with the last of the spring crop.

The third looks almost wasted—weeds, sheep, rough as a dog’s back. A girl your age is counting sheep with her chin, which is to say she knows them so well she doesn’t need fingers. You know her from the Green: Meg, a tenant’s daughter, who treats a field like a tool and a greeting like a spare nail.

“Fallow,” Meg says, before hello. “This year this strip rests. Sheep eat. Sheep leave presents. Next year that dirt is bread. If you walk the sheep-bit like a fool shortcut, my da will have you at hallmoot for trampling fodder.”

She says hallmoot the way you say millstone: ordinary, and capable of ruining a week.

The keep-road goes on, pale with chalk. Hew’s letter is warm from your fist. The wrong note of the mill still sits in your ear.

Meg squints at your sack. “Kitchen’s the side hatch, if you go in. Steward’s the solar. Don’t call it a throne room. Aldith hates that. Long way stays on the baulk. Shortcut goes through the sheep and then through my da.”