Father Wulfric, the Abby of Saint Edeth’s visiting priest, was mostly a patient and uncomplaining man whose theology was deeply imbued with the kinder and more compassionate side of Christianity. He had, however, been taking confessions from the convent’s nuns and novices for going on three decades, and he did not look forward to the time he spent in the chapel’s cramped, stuffy confessional.
Listening to novice after nun after novice recite their litany of petty sins—coveting the biggest slice of bread at supper, inadvertently looking at a shirtless man walking past the convent’s orchard, forgetting the Lord’s pain on the cross for almost an hour on the Thursday before last—had, as he’d once admitted to his bishop in a confessional moment of his own, come to feel to him as if he were being slowly martyred by the pricks of a thousand embroidery needles. The bishop had chortled, given him quick absolution, and told a story of falling asleep during an abbess’s confession.
Since then, Wulfric’s two chief goals on his visits to Saint Edeth had been to keep from falling asleep during Hildegarth’s confessions (which, like her sermons, were always erudite, usually lengthy, and often obscure), and to get through the rest as quickly as possible. Excepting the abbess, for whom he carried and consulted an annotated list of penitential prayers, he kept a count of each penitent’s transgressions on his fingers, dispensed a recitation of the fifty-first psalm for each offence, forgave her, and told her to sin no more. Then he’d close his eyes and shake his head to clear his mind of the self-excoriating fluff while he waited for the next nun or novice to send him back into a somnambulant stupor.
Having seen little of the kinder and more compassionate side of Christianity, Caelym was not expecting to have Aleswina stammer out a pitiful piffle of an invocation hardly sufficient to placate an affronted wood sprite, much less any deity as harsh and vengeful as the Christians’ chief god. Determined to make up in verve and variety what the chant lacked in substance, he summoned the spirits of his bardic ancestors and began his recitations, shifting from exhortations as wild and despairing as a man’s final words before he threw himself off a cliff to entreaties as soft and wistful as an errant lover wheedling his way back into his consort’s bed.
Aleswina was awed.
Annwr wasn’t and snapped, “That’s enough! She forgives you!”
Caelym, however, had begun to relish the resonance of the psalm’s long, lingering vowels so, after he finished with his estimate of the number of times he’d thought that Aleswina was a stupid coward, he went on to repent the times he’d thought she was a whiny weakling or a sniveling nuisance.