The bell in St. Giles’s never stopped. It was a new, constant companion to the city’s breath, a frantic metal tongue speaking a single word: death. A week after the priest’s visit, the sweating sickness had fallen upon the parish like a shroud. It came on swift and brutal, a chill followed by a drenching, foul-smelling sweat that seemed to pull the life from a body in a matter of hours. The physicians fled. The church offered prayers and last rites, their remedies proving as useless as a whisper against a storm. Thomas’s God had turned a deaf ear to London. The ceaseless tolling of the bell was the only answer to the prayers of the people.

From my window, I watched the death-carts trundle past, their grim cargo barely concealed. I heard the wailing that seeped through thin walls and closed shutters. His warning to me, his poetic curse, felt like a distant, hollow thing now. There is no grace in sorcery. But there was no grace in watching children burn from within, either. There was no salvation in kneeling on cold stone while the world dissolved into fever and fear.

My work became a fever of its own. By day, I kept my door barred, turning away the few healthy souls brave enough to venture out. By night, my small workshop was aglow with the steady flame of a lamp. The air grew thick with the sharp, medicinal scents of boiled willow bark, yarrow, and meadowsweet. I worked with a frantic, desperate focus, my hands stained with herbs, my mind a sharp, clear instrument. I measured and crushed, steeped and strained, pouring the dark, potent liquids into small glass vials I had hoarded for years. This was my prayer, offered not to the heavens, but to the suffering flesh of my neighbors.

For each vial, I prepared a message. On scraps of torn parchment, I wrote in my neat, small script. Not incantations, not spells, but verses meant to anchor a soul adrift in the delirium of sickness. A reminder that the body was of the earth, and the earth endured.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

They were small acts of rebellion against the bells, against the priest’s condemning God. They were my verses, my craft, and an act of defiance against his warnings.

When the moon was a sliver and the fog from the river crept through the alleys to swallow all sound but the tolling bell, I would slip out. With a basket of vials tucked under my cloak, I moved like a ghost through the city. I crept to the doors marked with the crude chalk cross of the plague, my heart a frantic drum against my ribs. I would leave a single vial on the doorstep, the small scroll of parchment tied around its neck with a bit of twine. A silent offering. I never waited to see if it was taken. I only left my small hope in the darkness and vanished back into the shadows, the priest’s beautiful, damning voice a faint echo in my memory.

The room was thick with the sweet, cloying odor of decay. Thomas knelt by the pallet, the rough wool of his cassock scratching his knees through the thin fabric. The woman on the bed was little more than a specter, her skin slick with the unending sweat, her breath a shallow, rattling thing. He had been with her for an hour, murmuring the Latin rites for the dying, his voice a low drone against the relentless clang of the bells outside. His words felt hollow, useless stones thrown against a tide of sickness. God was silent. Only the bell answered.

The woman’s husband, a stooped man with eyes hollowed out by grief and sleeplessness, pressed something small and cool into his hand. "A moment ago," the man whispered, his voice raw. "On the step. Someone left it."

Thomas looked down. It was a small glass vial filled with a dark liquid. Tied to its neck with a piece of rough twine was a tiny scroll of parchment. He felt a familiar surge of irritation. Peasant superstition. A useless charm against the wrath of God. He was about to set it aside, to gently admonish the man for placing his hope in such trifles, but his fingers brushed against the parchment. It was the same worn, fibrous texture as the pages of her book.

He pulled at the twine with his thumb, his movements slow. The scroll uncurled in his palm. The script was small, precise, and utterly familiar. A jolt went through him, a memory of her shop, of the scent of rosemary and damp earth. He held the parchment closer to the flickering candlelight.

When fever’s fire burns to bone,
The deepest root still holds its stone.
Drink deep of earth, and do not weep,
For life is held in slumber deep.

The rhythm was unmistakable. It was the same quiet, defiant cadence he had read aloud, the same voice that spoke of strength found not in prayer, but in the dirt. It was her. The witch. While he was on his knees offering platitudes to the dying, she was moving through the darkness, leaving her poison—her medicine—on their doorsteps.

He looked from the elegant script to the vial of dark liquid. He thought of the merchant’s child, recovered. He thought of the whispers of other miraculous survivals in the parish, stories he had dismissed as desperate rumor. His prayers filled the air with empty sound. Her verses offered a tangible thing: a liquid in a vial, a promise of the earth’s resilience. A cold shame washed over him, so forcful it felt like a physical sickness. She was doing his work. She, the heretic, the sinner, was tending to his flock with a faith more practical and potent than his own.

The verse was not just for the sick. He knew it with a certainty that chilled him to his core. It was a message sent across the dying city, a secret correspondence meant only for him. Drink deep of earth, and do not weep. It was a challenge. A rebuke. An invitation into her world of root and stone, a world that was saving lives while his world of scripture and sacrament failed. He closed his hand around the vial, the cool glass a solid, real thing against his skin. The bell tolled, and for the first time, it sounded like a summons.

He found me by the river. I had gone there to escape the bells, but their sound carried even here, muted by the thick, grey fog that rolled off the water, blurring the line between river and shore. The air was cold and wet, smelling of mud and decay. I was kneeling, my fingers numb as I dug for the pale roots near the bank, when a shape resolved itself from the mist. It was him.

My first instinct was to run. He was out of his territory, a black-robed predator strayed from its stone den. My basket of herbs felt like an indictment at my side. I rose slowly, my back stiff, my hand clutching the small trowel I’d been using, its sharp edge a pathetic weapon. He stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could see the exhaustion etched around his eyes, the grime on the hem of his cassock. He looked as if he had been walking through the filth of the city for days. He was not a priest delivering a verdict; he was a man drowning.

He did not look at the basket, or the roots in my hand. His eyes, dark and haunted, were fixed on my face. The silence stretched, thick with the damp air and all the things we had left unsaid. The clang of the distant bell was the only sound. I expected the accusation, the condemnation, the righteous fire.

His voice came out low and broken, stripped of all its priestly resonance. It was the voice of a man confessing in the dark, not to God, but to me.

"The bell tolls out a hollow sound,
For souls God left within the ground.
I speak His word, I plead His grace,
And see His absence on each face.
What prayer can halt the final breath,
When Heaven’s king is lord of death?"

The words were a blade, not turned on me, but on himself. On his God. It was a verse of pure, undiluted despair, a heresy more profound than any I had ever dared to write. The rhythm was perfect and dark. He had taken our shared language and steeped it in his own private hell.

In that moment, the priest vanished. The black robes, the cross he wore, the entire edifice of his faith crumbled away, and all that was left was Thomas. A man tearing himself apart with doubt. A poet whose verses were as secret and as damning as my own. The profound, aching loneliness I had first seen in his eyes was now naked and exposed in the twilight. He was not my judge. He was my reflection in a shattered piece of glass.

I did not speak. There were no words for what passed between us. I only gave a slow, small nod. It was an answer. An acceptance. His shoulders slumped in relief, a barely perceptible shift, but I saw it. The tension that held him so rigidly in place seemed to bleed out of him into the fog. For the first time since he had walked into my life, we were not witch and priest. We were merely two souls, standing on the edge of a dying world, speaking the only language that made any sense of it.