Chapter One

One

"L ady?"

She looks up and out the window of the carriage; night has fallen with a swift and total blackness. She waits to see how she will be addressed.

For the first days of their journey, through the damp, twisting, dark-green trees of Breizh, she was Lady Roscille,the name pinned to her so long as she was in her homeland, all the way to the choky gray sea. They crossed safely, her father, Wrybeard, having beaten back the Northmen who once menaced the channel. The waves that brushed the ship's hull were small and tight, like rolled parchment.

Then, to the shores of Bretaigne—a barbarian little place, this craggy island which looks, on maps, like a rotted piece of meat with bites taken out of it. Their carriage gained a new driver, who speaks in bizarre Saxon. Her name, then, vaguely Saxon: Lady Rosele ?

Bretaigne. First there had been trees, and then the trees had thinned to scruff and bramble, and the sky was sickishlyvast, as gray as the sea, angry clouds scrawled across it like smoke from distant fires. Now the horses are having trouble with the incline of the road. She hears, but cannot see, rocks coming loose under their hooves. She hears the wind's long, smooth shush ing, and that is how she knows it is only grass, grass and stone, no trees for the wind to get caught in, no branches or leaves to break the sound apart.

This is how she knows they have reached Glammis.

"Lady Roscilla?" her handmaiden prods her again, softly.

There it is, the Skos. No, Scots. She will have to speak the language of her husband's people. Her people, now. "Yes?"

Even under Hawise's veil, Roscille recognizes her quavering frown. "You haven't said a word in hours."

"I have nothing to say."

But that isn't entirely true; Roscille's silence is purposeful. The night makes it impossible to see anything out the window, but she can still listen, though she mostly hears the absence of sounds. No birds singing or insects trilling, no animals scuffling in the underbrush or scampering among the roots, no woodcutters felling oaks, no streams trickling over rock-beds, none of last night's rain dripping off leaves.

No sounds of life, and certainly no sounds of Breizh, which is all she has ever known. Hawise and her frown are the only familiar things here.

"The Duke will expect a letter from you when we arrive. When the proceedings are done," Hawise says vaguely. Half a dozen names she has for the Lady, in as many tongues, but she has somehow not found the word for "wedding."

Roscille finds it funny that Hawise cannot speak the word when, at the moment, she is pretending to be a bride. Roscille thought it was a silly plan, when she first heard it, and it feels even sillier now: to disguise herself as handmaiden and Hawise as bride. Roscille is dressed in dull colors and stiff, blocky wool, her hair tucked under a coif. On the other side of the carriage, pearls circle Hawise's wrists and throat. Her sleeves are yawning mouths, drooping to the floor. The train is so white and thick it looks like a snowdrift has blown in. A veil, nearly opaque, covers Hawise's hair, which is the wrong shade of pale.

She and Hawise are of age, but Hawise has a husky Norsewoman's build, all shoulders. These disguises will fool no one; even the sight of their shadows would reveal the ruse. It is an arbitrary exercise of power by her future husband, to see if the Duke will play along with his whimsical demands. She has considered, though, that perhaps his motive is more sinister: that the Thane of Glammis fears treachery in his own lands.

Just as Roscille is a gift to the Thane for his alliance, Hawise was a gift to Roscille's father the Duke, for not having sent ships when he could have sent ships. For letting the Northmen retreat from the channel in peace, Hastein, the Norse chieftain, offered the Duke one of his many useless daughters.

Roscille's father is so much more beneficent than Hawise's boorish pirate-people. In Wrybeard's court, even bastard daughters like Roscille get to be ladies, if the Duke thinks they can be put to some use.

But as Roscille has newly learned, she is not useful to her father because she can speak her native Brezhoneg, and fluent Angevin, and very good Norse, thanks to Hawise, and now Skos, out of necessity, even though the words scrape the back of her throat. She is not useful because she can remember the face of every noble who passes through Wrybeard's court, and the name of every midwife, every servant, every supplicant, every bastard child, every soldier, and a morsel about them as well, the hard, sharp bits of desire that flash out from them like quartz in a cave mouth, so when the Duke says, I have heard whispers of espionage in Naoned, how shall I discover its source? Roscille can reply, There is a stable boy whose Angevin is suspiciously unaccented. He sneaks away with one kitchen girl behind the barn every feast day. And then the Duke can send men to wait behind the barn, and catch the kitchen girl, and flog her naked thighs to red ribbons until the Angevin spy / stable boy confesses.

No. Roscille understands now. She is useful for the same reason that the Duke's effort at disguising her is doomed: She is beautiful. It is not an ordinary beauty—whores and serving girls are sometimes beautiful but no one is rushing around to name them lady or robe them in bridal lace. It is an unearthly beauty that some in Wrybeard's court call death-touched. Poison-eyed. Witch-kissed. Are you sure, Lord Varvek, my noble Duke, Wry of beard, that she is not Angevin? They say the House of Anjou are all born from the blood of the serpent-woman Melusina.

Greymantle, lord of Anjou, has a dozen children and twice as many bastards and they always seem to slip into Wrybeard's court with their pale hair, sleek as wet-furred foxes. Her father would not have been shy in admitting to have had an Angevin mistress, though perhaps Greymantle would have chafed at the accusation that his line could have produced such an aberrant creature as Roscille. But the Duke said nothing, and so the whispers began.

The white of her hair is not natural; it is like draining moonlight. Her skin—have you seen it?—it will not hold a color. She is as bloodless as a trout. And her eyes—one look into them will drive mortal men to madness.

One visiting noble heard such rumors and refused to meet her gaze. Roscille's presence at the feast table was so unnerving that it scuttled a trade alliance, and then that same noble (le Tricheur, he is called) carried the story back with him to Chasteaudun and made all of Blois and Chartres shrink from having future dealings with Wrybeard and his court of tricky fairy-maidens. So Roscille was fitted with a gossamer veil, mesh and lace, to protect the world's men from her maddening eyes.

That was when her father realized it was in fact good to have a story of his own, one that could neaten all these unruly and far-flung fears. "Perhaps you were cursed by a witch." He said it in the same tone he used to proclaim the division of war spoils.

This is the Duke's telling of it, which is now the truth, since no one is any the wiser. His poor, innocent mistress bleeding out on her birthing bed, the oddly silent child in her arms, the witch sweeping through the window and out again, all shadows and smoke and the crackle of lightning. Her laughter echoed through every hall of the castle—for weeks afterward it all reeked of ash!

The Duke recounts this to a gathered audience of France's nobles, all who may have heard the rumors and been spooked out of arrangements and exchanges. As he speaks, some of Naoned's courtiers begin nodding grimly along, Yes, yes, I remember it now, too.

It is only when all the nobles and courtiers are gone and she is alone with her father that Roscille, not quite thirteen, risks a question.

Why did the witch curse me?

Wrybeard has his favorite draughts board before him, its latticework of black and white made dull with use. He arranges the tiles as he speaks. Dames, the pieces are called, women.

A witch needs no invitation, he says, only a way of slipping through the lock.

No one knows exactly what a witch looks like (so in fact everyone knows what a witch looks like), yet they can all agree, it sounds like the sort of curse a witch would give: the shiny apple with the rotted core. Your daughter will be the most beautiful maiden, Lord Varvek, but one look into her eyes will drive mortal men to madness. Roscille understands that this explanation offers her better prospects than the alternative. Better to be witch-cursed than witch; better hagseed than hag.

But—

"What, are you Roscille of the Thousand Questions?" Wrybeard waves his hand. "Go now, and count yourself lucky it was only le Tricheur who shook like a dog's leg at the sight of you, and not that Parisian imbecile with all his warmongering vassals whom he cannot keep to heel."

The Parisian imbecile goes on to start wars with half the other duchies and is then excommunicated twice over. This is how Roscille learns that any man may style himself the Great even if the only achievement of his life is spilling a dramatic ordeal of blood.

Her father teaches her to abandon the habit of asking questions, because a question may be answered dishonestly. Even the dullest stable hand can tell a convincing lie if it is the difference between the end of a whip and not. The truth is found in whispers, in sidelong glances, in twitching jaws and clenching fists. What is the need for a lie when no one is listening? And no one in Wrybeard's court suspects that Roscille is capable of listening, of noticing, especially with the veil that hides her eyes.

Roscille of the Veiled Eyes. They call her this in Breizh and beyond. It is a far kinder epithet than she has any right to expect, being a witch-marked girl. Yet she does not wear the thin veil now, not with Hawise. It has been pronounced that women are not afflicted by the madness that her stare induces in men.

Thus the marriage has been arranged on the condition that Roscille arrive by single carriage, with only her handmaiden as company. The carriage driver is a woman who handles the reins clumsily, as she has been taught to drive only for this specific purpose. Even the horses are mares, silver-white.

Roscille realizes it has been a long time since Hawise spoke and that the handmaiden is still waiting for a reply. She says, "You may write and tell the Duke whatever will be most pleasing for him to hear."

Once she would have written the letter in her own hand, and paced the room considering how best to relay all the details of the Thane's desires, the treasures that he left unguarded, ripe for Roscille's senses to plunder. Here is how he speaks when he believes no one is listening. Here is where his gaze cuts when he thinks no one is watching.

But that letter is to a man who no longer exists. The Wrybeard who sent her away is a man Roscille does not know. Still, she knows the things that will please this other man, as they are the same things that will please any man. The Duke will want to know that his strange cursed bastard daughter is an obedient broodmare and a docile pleasure slave. She understands that these are the two fundamental aspects of wifehood: Open your legs to your lord husband and bear a child that will mingle the blood of Alba with the blood of Breizh. A marriage alliance is only a temporary bond, thinly woven, but if Roscille is good enough it will hold until a son comes along and yokes the unicorn to the ermine.

The unicorn is the proud emblem of Skos, all its brutish clans finally and grudgingly united beneath one banner. And it is said that Lord Varvek is as canny as a weasel, so, not one to let an advantageous epithet go unremarked, the Duke put the barb-toothed creature on his coat of arms.

Before, Roscille would have claimed her father's epithetfor herself, too, a trait seeped from his blood into hers (is the daughter of an ermine not an ermine, too?). Now she wonders—is the weasel truly clever, or are its teeth merely sharp?

The carriage clatters and strains around a series of narrow turns, up the cliffside, the horses panting hard. The wind is flat and smooth and uninterrupted, as if it is being piped in through a pair of bellows. And then, shocking and sudden, Roscille hears the dragging pulse of the sea.

Naoned, the city of her birth, sits inland on the Loire; until traveling to Bretaigne, she had never seen the ocean. But this is not like that snarling gray channel. The water is black and muscular, and where the moonlight catches the small crests of the waves, it shows a pattern like a serpent's belly. And the water has a steadiness that the wind does not: The surf crashes the rock over and over and over again with the rhythm of a beating heart.

The graces of civilization spiral outward from the papalseat in Rome, that bright jewel in the center of everything. But the light of the Holy See dims with distance: Far from Rome, here is the world's naked, primitive darkness. The castle of Glammis hulks over the cliffside, vulgar and bleak. There is a single long parapet, running parallel to the edge of the cliff, so that the whole wall is a straight, sheer drop to the water below. What Roscille at first thinks are crosses are only arrow slits. There are no carvings along the barbican or the battlements, no etchings to protect against pale Ankou, the spirit of Death, who drives his creaking wagon of corpses—every parish and house in Breizh must have such ornaments, or he will come—but perhaps something else keeps Death at bay in Glammis.

Stop, Roscille thinks. The word falls in her mind like a stone. Please, no farther. Turn around and let me be gone.

The carriage rattles on.

The barbican grinds open to the courtyard. There is a man standing within it, just one. He wears a gray square cloak and a short tunic, tall leather boots, and a kilt. Roscille has never seen a man wear a skirt before. Wool stockings keep his knees from the cold.

At first she thinks it is her lord husband come to greet her, but as the carriage draws closer and then halts, she sees immediately that it is not. One thing she knows about the Thane of Glammis is that he is large, as large as a mortal man can reasonably be. This man in the courtyard is by no means small, but he does not have the mountainous stature reported of the Thane: He is ordinary. He has hair the color of a roof's thatching, sun-stripped yellow.

Hawise dismounts the carriage first, then Roscille. The man does not offer his hand to help her, which is terribly impolite by the standards of Wrybeard's court, and Greymantle's, and every duchy or county ruled by the House of Capet. Roscille stumbles a little bit, and she hasn't even donned her bridal gown.

"Lady Roscilla," says the man. "You are warmly received."

The walls of the courtyard might as well be made of paper, for how well they prohibit the wind. She has never been so cold in her life. Even Hawise, with her hardy Norse blood, shivers beneath the veil.

"Thank you," she says, in Scots. "This is my handmaiden, Hawise."

The man frowns. At least, she thinks he does. There are so many furrows on his face—the marks of battle or the marks of age, Roscille cannot tell—that she can barely read his expression. His eyes dart to Hawise for a moment, and then back to Roscille, though he does not meet her gaze. He knows the stories.

"I am Lord Banquho, Thane of Lochquhaber and your husband's right hand," he says. "Come. I will show you to your chamber."

He directs the driver to the stables and then directs Roscille and Hawise to the castle. They go up through twisting, half-lit halls. Many of the torches are gone, and there are only black scorch-marks to indicate where they had once been. The abrupt absences of light make their shadows warp and judder against the walls. Now the wind's howling is hushed, yet from the floors there is a strange rasping sound, like the scrape of a ship's hull against the pebbled beach.

"Is that the water?" Roscille asks. "The sea?"

"You will hear it from every corner of the castle," says Lord Banquho, without turning. "After enough time, you will not hear it at all."

She thinks she might go mad before her brain learns to omit it. This frightens her more than any ignominy she might—she will —suffer to her body, that her mind could be so reduced, turned to pulp like grapes crushed for wine.

Even her father's cold relinquishment of her cannot entirely disabuse Roscille of her oldest habits. To soothe herself, she returns to them now. She observes.

Lord Banquho is a warrior; there is no doubt about that. Even when he strides, he keeps his arm crooked, so that his thumb may occasionally brush the hilt of his sheathed sword. He will draw his blade in half the length of a heartbeat, she knows.

This is nothing new—Roscille has lived among soldiers, even if the Duke's men have the decency to leave their weapons behind when they are in the company of women. She notices that the brooch which fastens his cloak is small and round, and made of base metal, not silver. It is something that will rust quickly, especially in this briny air.

Banquho stops in front of a wooden door. It is gridded with iron. He says, "Your chamber, Lady Roscilla." He is hard on the c, making it into one of those braying Scottish consonants.

She nods, but before she can reply, Banquho removes an iron key from his belt and opens the door. Her empty stomach shrivels. This is a bad sign, that her room has a lock which can only be opened from the outside. She does not even indulge the hope that she will be given a key of her own.

The room itself is a wardrobe, a candlestick with three prongs, and a bed. There is a large pelt draped across the floor, dark and thick, its head still attached. A bear. Its death-empty eyes are two pools that hold the torchlight. Its black lip is pulled back in an immortal grimace of pain. Roscille has never seen a bear before, alive or dead; she has only seen their images decorating house seals and war banners. They have already been hunted to extinction in Breizh, but of course they still roam here. She leans down and examines the bear's curved yellow teeth, each one the length of her finger.

Banquho lights the tapers, casting the room and all its cold stone in a waxy gleam. "The banquet has been set. The Lord is waiting."

Roscille stands up again. Her knees feel limp, like jellied broth. "Yes. Apologies. I will dress now."

She waits, for the span of a breath, to see if Banquho will leave. The Scots have strange beliefs about women. There are whispers that they still practice the jus primae noctis, the droit du seigneur, the right of a lord to share his wife among his men as he does the spoils from his conquests. These whispers have preyed upon her so fiercely that even after she accepted she would be wed, still she did not sleep for days, did not eat for longer, did not even drink until her lips turned white and chapped and Hawise had to force the thinned wine down her throat.

Roscille has heard of a Scottish king, Durstus, who forsook the company of his lawful wife Agasia. This caused her to be forced and abused by his men, in the most villainous and vile manner. Twelve she was when she heard this story, and she knew what it meant.

But Banquho turns without sound and slips through the door. She is alone with Hawise again, and Roscille nearly collapses onto the bear-rug.

There is one small relief, like a slant of light through broken stone. The bed is large enough for her and Hawise to share, but no bigger. Not large enough to accommodate the Lord.

They both disrobe in silence. Nakedness, even among women in private, is still uncommon, uncouth. Bodies are meant to be guarded like gold. The flash of a bare ankle is like dropping a pendant, so that everyone can see it clatter to the ground and know that you hold its richness and likely more. What else are you hiding in your stores, against your breast? How easily might it be stolen? You cannot blame a man for snatching something which has been taunted in front of him like meat before a dog.

As a handmaiden, as a spoil of war, as a girl with no status, Hawise's stores are easy to plunder. Yet her attachment to Roscille has kept her safe, safe from drunken courtiers and their searching hands. She is as virginal as a nun. Soon she will be the only virgin between them.

Hawise has a Norsewoman's build: broad shoulders, small breasts, narrow hips which mean she will struggle to bear children. They are a study in opposites. Roscille's breasts are full enough to need binding under her square-necked gown (why tempt a man with even the suggestion of treasure?). Yet otherwise her body is still girlish, slender, making for an unnatural contrast. Above her waist she has a woman's form, but below she is as lithe as a serpent, something sleek and made for twisting. She wonders what the Lord will think of it.

There is no mirror in the room, only a pail of water, which shows Roscille her bleary, rippling reflection. The veil is as absurd as she imagined it would be. Her limbs are mummified in white linen and lace. Her sleeves are heavy with pearls. Her gown drags after her like a sodden thing. It is difficult to walk.

"Lady Rosalie," Hawise says—in Angevin, for it is the language these Scots are least likely to know. All of a sudden she reaches out and squeezes her hand. "You are the cleverest woman I have ever known, the bravest—"

"You say this as if you are making remarks over my grave," Roscille replies. But she holds on to Hawise's hand.

"I only mean…you will survive this, too."

This, too. Hawise does not mention the other thing, the first. She doesn't have to; they both know.

Through the thick door, she hears Banquho's voice. "It is time, Lady Roscilla."

The first thing she notices about the banquet hall is how empty it is. There are six long tables, but none of them are filled to their capacity; in fact, the two farthest from the dais are not occupied at all. Servants skulk about the walls, like brown mice, carrying platters, making no sound. The silence is strange, too. In Naoned, feast days are dense with noise: bards and their songs, courtiers and their gossiping, men bragging of their achievements, women swooning at the attention, draughts tiles rattling, ale mugs clinking. Toasts are made to fruitful harvests and profitable wars. The women wear their brightest gowns and the men comb their beards.

All Roscille hears now is the murmuring of voices, almost as low as the hushing sea. The men at the table press their faces close, so that their words pass only in that tight circle. There is the smell of ale, but certainly no mugs are being raised, no toasts made. The men are dressed in the same square cloaks and kilts, weapons at their sides. Warriors, all of them, who will draw their blades as easily as breathing. There are no bardsor draughts tiles, and—Roscille realizes with a shocked inhale—no women.

This is the strangest thing of all. In the Duke's court, it is essential that there be wives for gossiping and bearing children, serving girls for filling plates, kitchen girls for cooking, and even whores for using, though such things must be done with discretion. It was so dark on their journey that Roscille cannot remember the closest town they passed in the carriage; she does not know how far the peasants live who keep their goats and sheep (this rocky land is no good for farming, not green enough for cattle). Where do the men of Glammis find their pleasure, feed their appetites?

She is so shaken by this she does not notice, at first, that Hawise is being led away from her. "Wait—" she chokes out, too loudly—all the men turn to stare. "Please, Hawise is my…"

But Banquho does not turn or falter in his course. Roscille watches as Hawise is taken by the elbow and maneuvered past the tables; she cannot keep her eyes on where, because then her lord husband is upon her.

She knows him at once, for his enormity. He blots out half her vision. Reith, they call him, Scots for "red," which is either for his hair or for his prowess at spilling blood. His hair is tied back with a thong. The Scots, she remembers, wear their hair long. He is younger than she thought he would be, no silver in his beard.

He is handsome, too, though not in the manner of Brezhon men. She had not expected this, yet it does not make anything easier—his features are brusque, rough. His hands arecallused and his shoulders huge as rocks. The hair on his arms is tufted and scraggly, like hill grass. He looks like he has been born right from the land of Glammis itself, grown out of the earth; his mother the dirt and his father the rain that waters it.

"My lady wife," he says, in his Scotsman's rasp.

"My lord husband," she replies. Her voice is like wind passing through reeds, almost inaudible.

She is wearing her veil, so it is safe for him to look her in the eyes. Even his stare is heavy, and it weighs upon her. Roscille decides it is wise to shrink from him, for now. He will not tolerate anything less than absolute obedience in the presence of his men. She gathers her arms around her middle. She looks down at the floor.

"Your beauty has not been falsely alleged," he murmurs. "Come now. Let us begin."

The next few moments unfold in near silence. They approach the dais, but before she can step upon it, two of the men advance toward her. They wear the same tartan as her Lord, so she suspects they are kin. They seize her under her armpits, and Roscille chokes on her breath, remembering the story of Durstus and Agasia, that unloved, rudely forced wife—but while these two men lift her, another man, beardless, his flaxen hair rumpled with youth, kneels before her and tears off her stockings and slippers. Before she can speak, a pail of cold water is thrown over her bare feet.

This is a ritual in Breizh, too, the washing of the bride's feet. But there it is performed by older, widowed women, and gently, with warm water and perfumed soap, while handmaidens flutter about like birds and give advice about wifely duties. Roscille gasps as the cold climbs her veins. Not a moment is spared for her shock, her upset. She is set down again, bare-footed, on the dais.

Then the priest comes, the Druide, as they are called here. Unlike the religious men in Breizh and France, with their bald heads like little polished rosary beads, the Druide has a long gray beard that touches the floor. It is held in many places with leather thongs, as a maiden's hair is sometimes held with fillets. He does not have a Bible; he knows the words by heart. He speaks first in Latin, while Roscille's teeth are chattering so hard she can barely hear, and makes the sign of the cross over her and then Macbeth.

Her teeth stop chattering long enough that she can listen when he switches to Scots.

"Now is the joining of Lord Macbeth, son of Findlay,Macbeth macFinlay, Macbethad mac Findlaích, the righteous man, Thane of Glammis, and the Lady Roscilla of Breizh," he says seriously, and his words fill the silent hall.

A length of red rope is procured, and she is yoked to her new husband. His left hand and her right. A Scotsman must keep his right hand to himself, in case he needs to draw a weapon. The hilt of the Lord's blade pushes out from beneath his cloak.

"The Lord and Lady Macbeth," says the Druide.

They are both made to turn toward the audience of men. There are scattered grunts of approval, the rapping of palms against the wooden table. Roscille's feet have gone numb. She cannot find Hawise in the crowd; where has Banquho taken her?

Macbeth sits, tugging Roscille along like a child's horse-on-a-string. His hand looks enormous beside hers, the knuckles split, his calluses yellow and thick. His nails are bitten to the quick. She cannot imagine the Lord chewing on his own fingernails, an anxious habit, betraying an unsettled mind. Nothing else about him suggests such infirmity.

The men raise their cups, and she follows suit, with some clumsiness. She is right-handed and must hold the heavy mug in her left. They mumble a toast in Old Scots, which Roscille cannot understand, but which has the cadence of a song. Then the meal comes steaming before them. Cubes of meat in a dark stew. Mutton, not beef (as it would have been in Naoned). She was right about the goats and sheep.

Before she is allowed to eat, the quaich must be passed. The double-handed silver bowl is filled with amber liquid, that strong drink of the Scots, which is said to scorch your throat like fire. Macbeth takes one handle, Roscille the other, and together they lift the quaich to their lips. The corner of her mouth brushes his beard. It is a quick swipe of her cheek, like the sting of running through bramble. She barely tastes the spirit; there is no flavor, only the burning pain it leaves behind.

The quaich is then passed through the banquet hall: first to the eldest and most proven warriors, then to the youngest, the not-yet-proven. Some of them are even younger than Roscille, boyish still, and they lap hesitantly from the bowl, like puppies. At last, it arrives in the hands of the flaxen-haired boy, whose cheeks flush angrily as he lifts the quaich. It is bad fortune to be the one who has the last sip, the one who finally drains it.

Roscille takes slow bites with her left hand. As she eats, she observes. The men all wear cloaks and kilts of wool, grays and grayed-out greens, occasionally a slash of red in the tartan. Some of their cloaks have furred collars: a fox here, its bushy tail and black eyes intact, an ermine, showing its winter white. She focuses on the brooch pinned to each man's chest. Like Banquho's, they are all made of base metal, iron or something else. No gold or silver, no jeweled inset. In fact, she sees nothing finer in the room than an amber cuff on one of the men, and her own pearls. Even the hilt of Macbeth's sword is no more than tempered bronze.

A hundred years ago, a king, Reutha, sent for craftsmen and artificers from the continent to come to Scotland, to teach the Scots methods of building and smithing and weaving and dyeing. Macbeth is a lord and should not live so sparsely. He is a warrior, too, so where are his spoils?

Slowly, behind her impassive eyes, Roscille's mind begins to turn.

A servant enters suddenly from the dark corridor, and Roscille lifts her gaze. She is hopeful that Hawise is being returned. But the man is only carrying a large iron cage, and inside it, a white bird. She has never seen such a bird in Breizh. It does not have the long beak of a waterfowl, nor the faintly iridescent neck of a dove. It is pure white, like the season's earliest snow, each feather arranged snugly against the next, so that it has a sleek, almost wet look.

"Oh!" she says, in heartfelt surprise. Many of the noblewomen in Wrybeard's court keep pretty birds like this, to sing pretty songs. Has her lord husband thought to bring some of Naoned's civility to Glammis? Does he want to please his new wife with a gesture that reminds her of home? "This is a generous gift, my Lord—"

But the servant does not pass her the cage; instead, he flings open the door and the bird flutters out of it, squealing.The men watch it flail around the ceiling, thrashing about the iron chandelier, bouncing from one stone wall to the next, like a bee drunk on pollen. Roscille is too shocked to speak.

Her husband's hand wrenches from hers. He does not untie the knot; he merely pulls hard enough to tear through the rope entirely, leaving her with a rash of red down her wrist and on her palm, which hurts and makes her gasp. Then he has a bow, drawn out from somewhere behind the table, and he is nocking an arrow, and the bird is flapping and then suddenly it is not.

Its movement ceases instantly, gripped by the sudden rictus of death. It falls through the air and lands on the stone floor, hard enough to snap all its fragile bones, but Roscille cannot hear the breaking over the sound of the men cheering and stamping their feet. One of them sweeps up the bird and jerks the arrow from its breast. It has been so immaculately aimed that there is only the smallest spurt of blood, like the pricking of a thorn against the pad of a thumb.

Animal sacrifice is a barbarian practice, sternly abolished by the pope, but Roscille knows it was hard enough for the civilizing Romans to extinguish the tradition of human sacrifice here in Bretaigne; before Christianity the Druides practiced strange rites, casking some of their offerings inside a large wicker statue and setting it alight; others still were submerged by force into peat bogs, which mummified their bodies. Sometimes these bodies surface from their hundred-year-old graves, and they look as shriveled as unborn children, yanked untimely from the womb, skin dyed charcoal black.

As the bird is brought toward the dais, Roscille realizes that it is a gift, after all, though not as she initially imagined. This is a show of her husband's strength and skill and virtue, a promise that she will be well protected and well fed and well honored. Not like Agasia.

She reaches down and touches the bird's breast, which is still warm. Its feathers are as smooth as she thought they would be. She thinks of plucking one to keep as a token, but for some reason the idea makes her sad. Macbeth's smile is resplendent. Under her veil, Roscille tries to smile back.

When all the cups have been drained, Roscille walks bare-footed to her chamber. The hem of her dress is still damp; the linen is so thick it will take hours and hours to dry. Her lord husband walks beside her. He wears leather boots and his steps are heavy like falling stones.

They reach the door, and Macbeth removes an iron key from his belt. Roscille wants to ask how many keys there are, and who has them, and if she will get one (though she knows she will not), and where Hawise is, please, and a thousand other things, but she must save up her words and only spend them wisely, because she does not know how many she will be allowed.

He goes into the room first and she follows. The tapers arestill lit, though they are mostly burned down now, to stubby white ends that look like a beast's dull teeth. Macbeth glances around, almost as if it is the first time he has seen this room, and then his gaze pins Roscille in place. Her arms are held perfectly straight at her sides, her fingers curled inward.

"Lord Varvek is an honest man," he says. "So far I have been given no reason to think otherwise. You are beautiful, yes, there are none other in the world like you."

Very slowly he is approaching her, until he has her white veil between his finger and thumb, and he is rubbing it like it is an amulet he wishes to polish.

"But is the rest true?" he asks. "Do your eyes, disrobed, cause madness in men?"

"The Duke would not lie to such an esteemed and valuable ally."

Roscille thinks this is the right thing to say. She knows that Macbeth admires Wrybeard, for having defeated the Northmen and banished them from Breizh. In Alba, the Northmen are the most loathsome villains; the Scots have even made peace with ?thelstan, for God's sake, and no one ever believed there could be any love between Scotland and England, much less a joining of the lion and the unicorn.

No, the Norse are the vilest enemy of all. Roscille worries again what has happened to Hawise.

"It would be unwise to do so," Macbeth agrees. "And your father is reputed to be an exceptionally clever man."

Clever indeed, to use his beautiful bastard daughter to secure a valuable alliance. After years of training her to be an ermine, he has pulled a magician's trick and turned her into a pretty bird instead. Yet for months the question has been wheeling like a gyre, ever since the Duke announced her betrothal: Can the canny mind of a weasel exist within a bird's fragile, feathered body?

Macbeth tucks his hand beneath the veil and runs a finger along her bodice. Roscille's words spill out then, not at all as she planned them, but rather in a nasty rush of fear: "I know that there is a custom, in your lands. A wedding-night custom."

His brows arch in surprise. He removes his hand. "What custom is that?"

Her breath squeezes through the narrow siphon of her throat. "It is said that the bride has the right to ask three things of her husband, before they share a bed."

This is her slinking little rodent's plan, cloaked in a girl's shaky nervousness. She worried she would have to feign this nervousness, but right now it feels more real than the wisdom underneath.

There are not many books on Alba in the Duke's library, but there is an abbey nearby, and one of the monks is from Scotland, and he knows its history and its rites. The day her father proclaimed she would be wed, Roscille ran to the abbey. She girded herself in the knowledge of this monk, and began polishing the talisman of her own strategy.

It is something she has clung to in dark hours, like a little girl and her straw doll, when the thoughts of her wedding night come. Part of her did not believe she would speak it out loud, that she would try—perhaps still she will be punished for trying, and it will be worse than it ever would have been before. But she must try, or she will lose her mind, too, the mind she has spent so many years trying to whet like a blade. She must keep something of her own, even if it is no more than the belief that, somehow, she may have stopped the ravishment that is to come.

But Macbeth only replies mildly, "And what would you ask of me, my lady wife?"

Roscille is stunned by his placidness. For a moment she freezes, waiting for a cruel rejoinder, the knife hidden in his sleeve. Yet no blades flash. She swallows.

"A necklace," she says at last. "Gold, with a ruby inset."

This was not part of her initial plan. This she fabricated only hours ago, at dinner, while watching her husband and his men. None of them wore gold or silver or gemstones, and she only has to think back to the whispers she heard in Wrybeard's court to understand why.

There is no precious metal mined in Glammis. It is the remotest, most barren county of Scotland, its only virtues being its enviable position on the water, and the impregnable hills that surround it. All of Alba's gold and jewels are mined in Cawder, and because she has listened for so long, she knows: The Thane of Glammis has many enemies, and the Thane of Cawder is one of them.

Macbeth will not suspect that she knows any of this. A necklace is a very common thing for a wife to ask of her husband, especially when that wife is only seventeen, and especially when she has been raised in a court known for its languid opulence. She will seem frivolous and vain and na?ve. Not conniving.

Of course, it is well within her husband's rights to simply laugh at her, or even to strike her for her frivolity and vanity and na?veté. But Roscille thinks of the white bird and she is sure, in that moment, he will not do any of those things. He cares for her honor, if only out of respect for his alliance with the Duke. She is not some spoil of war, like Hawise.

And Roscille's value is in her face. She will be less beautiful with a bruised cheek, and he will be less illustrious in the eyes of his men, for having so rudely damaged this thing that is valuable only for its beauty. It would be like slashing a horse's knees and then shouting, Well, will it not run? He would look barbaric. Worse, foolish.

Macbeth steps back for a moment, and his gaze goes elsewhere. He is not thinking of her anymore. He is imagining the campaign he will wage against Cawder for her gold and her rubies. He is thinking of the glory he will win, all the lands he will be ceded, the riches he will be heaped with, the praises that will be sung in his name. And then, perhaps, in the end he will place the necklace around Roscille's throat, and she will be worth even more to him, because now she is the gleaming symbol that proves his might. He is, after all, a warrior at heart.

"A necklace of gold," he repeats, at last. "Set with a ruby."

She nods.

He is silent a moment longer. Roscille listens to the sea roaring beneath the floor. Finally, Macbeth meets her eyes, through the swaddling veil, and says, "It will add immensely to your beauty, Lady Roscilla."

And then he turns and is gone. It happens so quickly that it stops Roscille's breath and she collapses to the floor at last, onto the bear-rug, matted down beneath her bridal veil and lace, tucking her cold feet under herself, and pressing her hand to her mouth so no one will hear her sob.

She is not thinking of the necklace either, not anymore. She is imagining her lord husband's throat opening under the Thane of Cawder's blade, and his blood spilling, ruby-hued, before he can even gutter out a noise of shock.