Vlad: The Last Confession Read Online Free

gestured to the dais, raised before the fireplace, to the three chairs upon it. “We shall sit there, my lord, closest to the warmth. The chairs are the most comfortable I possess. My wife was sorry to give hers up, heavy as she is with our first child…” He cut himself off, flushing, and to cover his embarrassment led the way past the dais to a table beside it. “And here is the best that a humble fortress at winter’s end can provide for sustenance.”
    Horvathy looked down at the table which was well-stocked with wine, rough bread, cinder-coated goat’s cheese, herb-encrusted sausage. Then he saw what lay beside the food. “And what are these,” he said, though he knew.
    “They came in the satchel, my lord. The Voivode ordered them to be displayed.” Petru lifted the top one. On its front page a crude woodcut depicted a nobleman eating his dinner among ranks of bodies twitching on stakes. Before him a servant hacked limbs, severed noses and ears. “‘The Story of a Bloodthirsty Madman,’” Petru read aloud, then offered the pamphlet. “Do you wish to read, my lord?”
    “No,” Horvathy replied, curtly. He had seen them before, many times. “And now,” he said, turning back.
    He had avoided looking at them, after the first glance into the hall, though they were the biggest things there. For they spoke, too clearly to his innermost thoughts. To sin. To redemption. To absolution, sought and never found.
    The three confessionals stood in a line in the very center of the room, facing the dais. Each was divided into two cubicles, one for supplicant, one for priest. Their curtains were open, and Horvathy could see that they had been adapted for long periods of sitting. There were cushions, wolfskins. “Why these?” he said softly, moving forward, laying his hand upon the dark-stained wood.
    “The Voivode ordered them, my lord,” Petru said, joining him. “And this was the hardest command to fulfill. As you know, we of the Orthodox faith do not have them, but are happy to kneel before our priests in plain sight at the altar screen door. So I was forced to go to those damned Catholic Saxons across the border here in Transylvania, who cheated me as is their way…” He broke off, flushed. “I…mean no disrespect, Count Horvathy. I know you are of the Roman faith.”
    Horvathy waved him down. “Do not concern yourself, Spatar.” He stepped into the priest’s side of the cubicle. “What’s this?” he said, folding down a hinged table.
    “I had them installed. The orders spoke of scribes who would sit there. The…confessions are to be written down, are they not?”
    “They are. I have brought the scribes. You thought well.” Horvathy rose swiftly. “And the last?” He squinted to the shadows at the far end of the hall, opposite the fireplace. “What is there?”
    “Ah. This is perhaps the only time I have exceeded my orders.” He gestured and Horvathy followed him, to another table. “There is plainer food for the scribes, for the…witnesses.” He swallowed. “But my Latin is weak and I was unsure exactly what the Voivode meant by… quaestio . If some sort of interrogation is planned, I thought…”
    He pointed to objects on the table. Horvathy reached down, touched the metal head cage, pressed a fingertip into the spurs within it. He glanced over the other implements—the bone-crushing boot, the thumb screws, the flesh tongs. Hardly a complete set; just what the Spatar traveled with to enforce the Voivode’s will at the local villages, no doubt.
    Sucking at his finger—the spur had drawn blood—he nodded. He did not believe they would be necessary. But he did not want to condemn the Spatar’s zeal. Then he noticed,beyond the table, something embedded in the wall. “What’s that?” he murmured.
    The younger man smiled. “A curiosity. It is said that the former Voivode punished his traitorous nobles by forcing them and their families to work as slaves here and build this castle.