The miserable spinster? Oho, you mean Fallow? Nah, nah, you watch your tongue. Fallow is no spinster – and don’t let her catch your clucking behind her back about her temper, neither. She doesn’t take kindly to fools with heads full of manure. Watch your step, lest she has you strung up like old Jack, fit to scare the crows and not much else.

Aye, sad tale though it is, she was married once when she was a lass, long before any of us were born. The Old Father told me all about it, after a skinful of whisky to loosen his tongue, like. It were during the Century Wars, back when farmers were too important to send to fight, and they needed the food more than able bodies. Of course, that didn’t last. Before long they started calling up just about everyone, and lo, Fallow’s husband went off to war for King and country. Imagine, leaving a warm bed and loving wife for the cold embrace of dirt and war, eh? Wound up dead inside a fortnight, the poor bastard.

Left Fallow all alone with a farm to run. Call her what you will, but if I know one thing, it’s that she’s not workshy. Ran the damn thing herself, and ran it well, husband or no husband. Thirty bloody years she ran that farm, come hell or high water. Bandits, wolves, disease, drought? You name it, she spat in its eye. But a certain mindset settles in, when you’re left for that long on your own. Teaches you to be ruthless - sentimentality is how you end up penniless and cold. Every day is a new fight, and sometimes winning means knowing when to give up on that animal you’re trying to save, and killing it to salvage what you can. She’s forgotten heartbreak long since.

No one can say why she’s left her farm after all those years. Hired some local lads to run it for her, promising that if they stole so much as a single lamb, she’d hunt them down and use their guts to spread on her soil. Bodies make good fertiliser, she told me, with a cold look in her eye that made me shudder. That’s just Fallow though. She’ll fight like hell by your side, but the second you go down, you’re nothing to her. Just…useless. And there ain’t no room on a farm for useless things.

Can’t say we’re friends, but I’m fair glad she’s here. Useful woman to have around when the knives come out. And now we’re champions, there’s a whole lot of knives.

- Grange, Farmer’s Guild Team Captain