Vlad: The Last Confession Read Free Page A

for these five years would last for all eternity. Worse! Unless he was absolved of his sins, the suicide’s fate would be as nothing to his—for the ninth, last and deepest circle of hell, just like the oubliette in the castle of Bucharest, was reserved only for traitors.
    He heard the clink of metal. It was not the bolt on the grille being pulled back. It was a bar slipped under a hook. And then the stone, that had not been lifted in five years, was.
    The torch flaring above him was like a desert sun at noon. A dark shape held it high. Priest or killer?
    He pressed bone tip into flesh. Yet still he could not drive it in, could only croak his one, his ultimate hope. “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you.”
    For a moment of silence, nothing moved. Then an arm reached slowly down…

– II –
     
    The Chamber
     
    He reached for her as he always did, just before he woke, as he had every morning for twenty years. For a time, there had been nameless others beside him and, touching their softness, he’d sometimes mistaken it for another’s, woken with joy, one moment of it. But the bitterness of the next moment, when realization turned to despair, meant that he had long chosen to sleep alone. Companions were dispatched after they had fulfilled their function, assuaged some need. For ten years, he had not even bothered with that.
    Janos Horvathy, Count of Pecs, reached, realized…yet kept his single eye closed. He was trying to see Katarina’s face. Sometimes he could, for that brief instant of reaching, of realizing—the only time he could. He had her portrait, but that showed merely her beauty; nothing of what he truly loved—the feel of her skin, her calmness, her laugh.
    No. This morning she wouldn’t come, even so briefly, her features dissolving into a memory of inadequate paint. A breeze flapped the beeswax-dipped cloth in the arrow slit, admitting a little light, making the room even colder. At first he wondered why his servants had not repaired it; and then he remembered that he was not in his own castle in Hungary. He was in another man’s castle, in another country.
    And then he remembered why. Remembered that today might be the beginning of the lifting of the curse that had killed his wife twenty years before; that had sent their three children to the family vault, one lost to childbirth, one to battle, one to plague.
    A knock at the door. “Yes?” he called.
    A man entered. It was Petru, the young Spatar who held this fortress for his prince, the Voivode of Wallachia. He stood in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot, as nervous as he had been when the Count had first arrived the day before. Horvathy understood why. It wasn’t often that one of the highest noblemen of Hungary came to such a remote place with such a purpose. And before he’d arrived, Petru had had to make many arrangements, in the greatest secrecy.
    “Is all ready?” Horvathy asked.
    The man licked his lips. “I…I believe so, my lord. If you would…” He gestured to the stairs behind him.
    “I will. Wait for me.”
    The knight bowed, closed the door behind him. Horvathy slid from beneath the furs, sat for a moment on the bed’s edge, rubbing the thick gray stubble of his hair. The bedchamber, despite the breeze, was no colder than his own back in Pecs. Besides, he’d discovered long since that the castle for which he’d traded his soul could never be warmed when no one he loved could survive within it.
    He dressed swiftly then went in search of warmth. Not for his body, he’d never really required that. For his soul.
    —
    “My lord,” the young Spatar said, pushing the door inwards, stepping back.
    Horvathy entered. The hall, lit by four reed torches and dawn’s lightbeyond the arrow slits, was as modest as the rest of the castle—a rectangular stone chamber twenty paces long, a dozen wide, its walls lined with cheap tapestries, its floor strewn with skins, both trying to retain the warmth of the large