The fallow is not empty. That is the first lesson, and it arrives through your shoes.

Sheep scatter. A ewe baas in a tone that means you are not a shepherd. Meg’s father is over the baulk so fast his hat stays behind. Rights of common are not a poem. Fallow feed belongs to beasts who are writing next year’s bread with their mouths and their manure. You trampled a sentence in that book.

There is no keep drama for you today. No solar, no barge-heroics, no clerk saying your name like a bell. There is Meg of the Green saying, “I told you,” without joy, and a day of making it right: moving the flock back, re-stacking a hurdle you knocked, walking the long way with a basket of weeds that should have stayed as fodder.

You eat pottage at their fire. Onion, grain, a little cheese. No potatoes. You listen, properly this time, while Meg names the strips until the words live in your bones: winter, spring, fallow. Rest is work the dirt does. Shortcuts through sheep are how you meet hallmoot as the problem, not the witness.

Hew will hear you were late. The letter will wait. You will not forget the rough field again.

THE END

What you learned: three-field rotation is winter grain, spring grain, and fallow. Fallow is not wasted land—sheep eat, manure feeds next year’s bread, and trampling common fodder is a real offense.