A Farewell Love

I

They say that the one you love will never leave you. If that were true, this empty space beside me would be filled by Morholt. He would be by my side and not buried six feet below the grassy knoll of the churchyard. The cold, clear sky glares down at me as I gaze into its infinite blue and wonder where my beloved is now.

He was murdered. That much I know. Why and by whom are a mystery to me but the wound in his gut that he was found with was not any accident. No doubt it was by the English. They are terrible, horrible brutes who have no consideration for human life. They take as they please and never give anything but pain and bloodshed in return. If they had any humanity in them at all, they would have known that man they killed could be no threat to anyone. Morholt had been good and kind and gentle and no one with any shred of dignity or goodness could've taken his life.

My whole body has become void of feeling as I have been laying beneath blades of dying, sky-scraping blades of grass for the majority of the day. The cold sun is beginning her decent below the horizon now and the already cold wind is gaining it's nightly chill. It stirs the long locks of my platinum hair that is strewn about my head and the black folds of my mourning dress. My bare toes are frozen and pale, my fingers in a similar condition. I no doubt look like a frozen corpse myself, if it weren't for my beating heart and rosy cheeks. The only movement I make is a flutter of my eyelashes and the rise and fall of my chest. Staying this still, I can pretend that I don't exist and it makes it a little easier to forget that Morholt is gone from this world, never to be seen again in this life.

Just this thought running through my head boiled agony inside me and coursed through me until I opened up and let out a pained moan. The sound breaks the still silence of the darkening day and bounces off every surface. Once it fades, I am left back in cold silence of the field.

Until the swishing of skirts in grass breaks the silence once again.

I don't twitch a muslce at the new sound even though there is a fleeting thought in my mind to find a better hiding place. But I knew my discovery would be inevitable. They would send someone to find me eventually. They still needed me.

It is my friend who calls my name and drags her skirts among the grasses in search of me. I had assumed they would send Aelwen, my maid, to find me but I guess they felt my disappearance was dire enough to send Bragnae out.

"Isolde please. Please don't do this. You'll catch cold and freeze out here," she calls to me.

"Maybe I want to catch cold and freeze," I call back. The sound of my voice is foreign and off. I hear Bragnae pause, then turn towards the sound of my voice. I close my eyes and wait for her to find me. Her shadow falls over me and my index finger twitches.

"You don't want that," Bragnae says. I pop one eye open and glare at her.

"I don't want anything without Morholt," I say. Bragnae frowns.

"Don't be fickle," she says and sits down next to me. The wind blows her shawl so that it brushes my face just slightly. "The world is so much bigger than just one boy."

"For some maybe but not for me," I say. Bragnae reaches down and picks my hand that lays beside her. She folds her warm hands over it, setting it on fire.

"You know he'd think you're being fickle too," she says.

"I don't care what he would say. He was an idiot," I bark.

"Yes. He was," Bragnae says softly. She gasps suddenly and looks back down to me. "Your parents want to tell you something. They seemed pretty excited."

"I don't care," I groan but straighten up anyway. Bragnae's freckled face looks hopefully at me. "But I suppose I could humor them all."

"Thank you," Bragnae says and we help each other up. She offers me a corner of her shawl to wrap myself in and bring feeling back into my muscles.