Magia Posthuma ✓

Fourteen

"Bless me father for I have sinned," Irina said as she knelt down before the slatted, wooden screen within the confessional. "I believe it's been... well. Now let me think; it must be at least... yes, six months. It's been six months since my last confession."

Had it really been that long?

She glanced down at the blood red beads of the rosary entwined around her clasped hands – a name-day gift from the Empress that had lain entombed in the bottom drawer of her dressing table ever since leaving Vienna. She'd completely forgotten that she'd put them in there for safe keeping and had let her breakfast to go cold that morning as she ripped her room apart trying to hunt them down.

"...Yes, I think that's right," she whispered, wrinkling her nose. "...Sorry, excellency."

There was an impatient sigh from the other side of the screen, and then a flicker of light as Archbishop Sigismund made the sign of the cross. "You're here now. Better late than not at all. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti," he muttered. "May the lord be in your heart and upon your lips that you may truly and humbly confess your sins."

Irina dutifully crossed herself and then took a breath, but when she opened her lips to speak – strangely – she found that she couldn't seem to find the words.

The Archbishop sighed again. "...Please, there's no need to be shy my lady; unburden yourself," he gently urged.

Irina pressed her lips to her folded knuckles and closed her eyes.

After a week of fitful sleep and sensing her resolve slipping, attending confession had seemed like the only obvious thing left to do. She'd found surprising comfort in it over the summer months after Amalia had left court for Parma. Slipping out of the palace to visit the cathedral and ramble her worries away to whichever priest was unfortunate enough to be sitting in the confessional at the time had helped her to deal with the loss of her best friend – her usual confessor. She hoped that attending confession now would work to ease her thoughts just as had done back then.

She'd still written to Amalia of course; she'd jotted down everything bothering her in painstaking detail. A reply wouldn't arrive for weeks, but the process of purging her thoughts onto paper seemed at least to take the edge off. She'd scrawled page after page panicking about and pondering over her father's declining health, and had completely destroyed a quill when she scribbled about thick-headed Hungarian nobles and how the whole town - the whole Empire - was constantly gossiping about her... and not in a good way. How she longed for the days when they gossiped about her making a fool of herself falling off the back of a sled, or whispered about the neckline of the gown she'd chosen to wear to the opera.

But when it came to sharing the other thing – or rather, the other person – that had been keeping her awake late at night, she stopped short and sat at her writing desk for a long time stroking the feathered end of her quill against her lips.

If she couldn't tell her best friend everything, then what hope did she have of spilling her deepest, darkest thoughts in a confessional booth? And now that she was safely cocooned within its wooden walls, kneeling at the partition – she felt silly.

"Tell me, child, what sins have you committed? Confess them to me, and all will be forgiven."

Irina raised her eyebrows and tutted. "...I confess, eminence, that I don't know why I'm here," she admitted. "I feel... I feel lost. And alone."

Vlad immediately strolled out from the shadows of her mind just as he'd done that day in the woods. "Are you lost?" he'd asked her, a small smile on his lips.