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She knows it’ll take him, tonight, the fever raging through him blooming into horrid lesions, a death warning writ large across his skin. But she already knows it’ll take her too, can feel the chills creeping through her bones, even against the warmth of the fire.
So she clings to him, clings to the memory of him, laughing, tossing a ripe apple into her hands during the harvest. She thinks of the rough, calloused pads of his fingers tucking her hair gently behind her ear, of stolen kisses in the woods and the lines of his bare back, strong and full of life. The sweat and grime of his skin stains her shift as she holds him close, the sickly warmth emanating from him doing little to combat the cold that stirs inside her, despite the moisture beading on her forearms where they’re bared.
Her mother is gone, taken by it a week hence and her father and sisters fled, out onto the moors where the plague may not find them, but the frosts certainly will.
She wonders if he can still hear her. If he can feel her tears where they fall, hot and saline onto his brow, beading in his eyebrows and lashes like cool, sweet drops of rain. Selfishly, she hopes that he, even in his fevered mutterings and cursing, is crying out, somehow, for her. She hopes that she has touched his soul in the same way he has left his mark tattooed on hers, that it’s not too late to press her love against his sternum, as if her lips could speak through his breastbone and into his heart.
It won’t be long now.
She prays that her loneliness will not last long.
She prays that somewhere above the mist, the road along which they will carry their bodies at dawn, there is life eternal.