Meg will not be hurried. She plants her feet on the baulk—the narrow unplowed strip that divides one family’s work from another—and uses it like a ruler.

She taps the dark ridges with her toe. “Winter wheat goes in now, before frost gets ideas.” The green strip: “Oats and barley after winter lets go.” The rough one: she points at a ewe mid-gift. “Fallow. Not laziness. Sheep eat weeds. Sheep leave manure. Manure is next year’s bread wearing a disguise. Plant every strip every year and the dirt gets tired and the loaves get sad.”

You walk the long way, letter warm, sack bumping your hip. The keep looks less like a fang and more like a lid on rooms: gatehouse, hall, a hungry kitchen. Meg nods at it. “Well in there never gets to be dry. Kitchen never clocks off. That’s what the strips are for.”

Her voice drops. She shows you glitter where glitter should not be: water pooled in the winter ridges. “Our ditch is sulking. Snag of willow. Da says hallmoot. Water does not care who is right if the wheat drowns.”

The gatehouse waits. So does a puddle with a grudge. The letter is not getting lighter.