Vlad: The Last Confession Read Free

valley before, a monstrous silverback with tusks like scimitars.
    The boar breaks cover. Their spurs redden with blood from their stallions’ flanks as they strive to reach it first. There is a grove just ahead, whose interlocked boughs will not admit hunter and steed, only prey. So they kick in their heels, stride matching stride. It is a long throw, a last chance. He takes it, throws and his steel blade slices over the silvered back, its razored edge drawing blood, slowing, not halting. His companion, his brother in all but blood, has thrown also, but thrown true. The boar tumbles, over and over, until the tree that would have saved it, halts it. It is dying, yet it lives. And for the last moments of its life it is at its most dangerous.
    “Don’t,” he murmurs, in sudden fear, as his companion slides from his saddle, another boar spear already in his hand. “Wait till it is dead.”
    It was strange. Most faces faded from memory, from dreams. Even the most familiar—parents, children, lovers, enemies. His never had.
    He pauses now, looks up from beneath that black hair, with those green eyes. The smile comes. “How many times, Ion,” he says, in that soft voice. “You have to look into their eyes as they die.”
    In memory indistinguishable from dream, his friend advances. The boar rises, bellowing, blood pouring from its mouth, the shaft quivering in its side. It charges and the boy plants himself, his spear couched like a lance in the lists. As the beast swerves, the boy steps to the side, thrusts. The leaf-shaped blade takes the animal in its chest but doesn’t halt it. Steel precedes shaft into flesh as the boar pushes the length of the weapon up its body. Only when it reaches the steadying hand, when it has absorbed almost all the wood, does it stop, lay its great head down, lower a tusk onto the hand, gently, like a caress.
    “Die well,” says the Dragon’s son, smiling.
    Far above, a bolt was shot. It was a whisper of a sound but a shriek in that silence. While he’d been hunting elsewhere, he had heard another beast, snuffling its way out of the sluice pipe. The noise had sent it back. He cried out now in frustration, his chance for fresh flesh gone—all because they were bringing in a prisoner, one destined for a cell far above his own.
    Then another door opened and he jerked his face up, as if to see through stone. Rarely did a prisoner make it to the second level. Someone of higher rank perhaps, or more heinous crime? He sighed. At the second level, a grille would be cut high into the wall and though his eyesight was poor now, he’d still be able to see the patch of sky change shade. Better, he’d be able to scent…a hound’s fur wet with snow, applewood burning, mulling wine. Hear…the snort of a horse, the cry of a baby, laughter at some jest.
    Then, on the level directly above his, a bolt was worked loose. He was excited now, lost prey forgotten. It was not his feeding day; yet someone was coming. He lifted his eyelids open with his fingers and thumbs to make sure he didn’t blink. The rare flicker of lightbeyond the opened grille was all that stopped him going totally blind.
    He knelt, pressing his lips to the ceiling, moistening them on wet moss. The cell door above creaked open. But then he heard just a single footfall…and cowered down, crying out. For guards always came in pairs. Only a priest or a killer would come alone.
    His eyes were wide now without need of fingers, terror in the sound of that one man approaching the round stone in the floor. For if he was a killer and not a priest…
    He groped before him for the sharpened bone, clutched it, pressed the sharpened tip into the pulse in his neck. He had seen prisoners tortured to death. He had tortured some himself. He had always vowed that he would not die that way.
    Yet he did not thrust. He could have killed himself before, ended this misery. But to do so before he had made his last confession? Then the torments he’d suffered