The drowned had a peculiar habit of confessing long after death.

They sent their secrets inside jellyfish.

Nobody knew how it worked. The church had spent two hundred years arguing about it, which was considerably easier than admitting ignorance.

Lady Veyra held one of the little creatures against her cheek. Its translucent bell pulsed between her fingers, casting a gentle blue light across the gold crosses sewn into her veil.

“Go on, then,” she whispered.

The jellyfish shivered.

A man's voice emerged, thin and uncertain.

“I heard him knocking. I pretended to be asleep.”

Veyra waited.

That was all.

She glanced towards the enormous golden lion carved into the wall behind her. Its jaws were spread in perpetual judgement, every fang gilded by craftsmen who had probably considered themselves very holy men.

“Cowardice,” she told the lion. “You'll be delighted.”

The creature pulsed again.

She studied its delicate tendrils, the little gold cross suspended within its body. Someone had placed it there before the animal had learned to glow.

Perhaps they had thought it would help.

Veyra had heard thousands of confessions. Murderers, adulterers, thieves, kings. Most people imagined the terrible ones were hardest to bear.

They weren't.

It was the small cruelties that stayed with her. The words withheld. The doors left closed. The moments when kindness would have cost almost nothing.

She brushed one finger across the jellyfish's translucent crown.

“I wonder who was knocking,” she said.

The creature offered no answer.

From the tall windows came the dull groan of shifting ocean currents. Around her, hundreds of blue lights flickered inside their golden reliquaries.

Veyra lowered her hand towards an empty vessel, then hesitated.

“Not just yet.”

She settled deeper into her chair, drawing the creature into the shelter of her veil.

“You can stay with me a little longer.”

And for a while, neither of them spoke.