Chapter Eleven

Eleven

Dawn slips in through the narrow cracks in the wall. That quiet, gray light. Roscille lies on her side under the covers, palms pressed together under her cheek. Beside her, Macbeth's body protrudes from the sheets. His naked shoulders rise and fall with the long, deep breaths of sleep.

She has had hours now, hours that she could not fill with sleep of her own. Time passed through her like air through an empty shell. Passes, still. Strangely, she finds she is afraid of nothing, not even the pain of moving her limbs. They do not feel like her limbs, after all. She does it in small, stiff increments: Sliding her arms out from under her. Pushing herself up onto her elbows. Then onto her knees. The covers fall off her body. She looks over at Macbeth, to make sure he has not been disturbed. His breaths are steady.

Roscille takes in the room, now filled with light. Her dress on the floor, Senga's careful stitching torn open. The white sheets curving up and down, showing blood in various states of age. The older blood, dried and gritty, like rust. Newer blood, garish and bright, and still wet enough that her finger will turn red if she touches it. When she brushes her hand against the back of her legs, only hard black bits of blood come off. Between her thighs it is newer, still slick.

The cloak is puddled on the floor where she left it. She kneels down—a shock of pain—and gathers it to her chest. It is astonishingly soft and she could spend hours feeling all these various degrees of softness, feathers versus fur, the gloss of the unicorn's horn. The rest of her dresses are in the trunk at the foot of the bed. She is afraid that if she opens it, Macbeth will wake. So she slips the cloak over her shoulders, fastens it at the hollow of her collarbones, and folds her arms across her chest to cover her naked body.

She takes one more thing from the table beside the bed and then slips silently through the door.

Down the winding corridors, the sea rising and falling beneath her feet. Out into the salt-pricked air of the courtyard. Her eyes sting. No one is there to stop her. Not even the horses whinny in the stables, breathing pale smoke from their nostrils. She remembers how cold she was the first time she stood in this courtyard; she does not even shiver now.

The barbican is shut, naturally, so she has to squeezethrough its bars. This is easy enough, for no one designs a castle's defenses with a woman's body in mind. Bare-footed onto the rough grass of the hill. Dew makes her exposed skin damp. Behind her is the insistent rush of the ocean, but Roscille does not want its hardness and grit, its crushing, snarling tide. It makes her sick to even imagine. Instead she treads on down the hill, the arches of her feet burning as the ground slopes beneath her.

She stops at the small copse of trees. They are bright and impossibly green, as if fed by a recent rainstorm, though it has not rained for weeks in Glammis.

The clearing is how she remembers it, only Fléance's blood no longer slicks the grass. Last time she was here, she was Lady Roscille, still chafing against her new kingdom, new language, new name. Now it all sloughs off her, like a snake's shed.

The tightly knitted branches protect the glade from the wind, so there is no sound, save her own footsteps, as she approaches the pool. The water is clear, showing her rippling reflection. Roscille watches herself disappear into it. First her ankles, then her legs, her hips, her breasts, until she is drowned up to the throat. Her hair floats out in strands of silver-white.

She feels the blood vanishing from her, but curiously it does not taint the water. The pool remains clear, like a gemstone refracting light. Her legs are slick, and when she reaches down, the ugly texture of the scars is gone. The water holds her in perfect suspension. She does not need to kick to stay afloat.

This moment, too, hangs in timeless suspension. No birdsongs, no early-risen crickets, no scurrying in the underbrush. This is a fairy place, made alive only by unnatural magic. Or so she thinks. Suddenly, the sounds return: birds tittering in the branches, crickets humming, animals blinking their yellow eyes from among the roots. The relief she feels is like a breath finally released. She touches herself. The pain is here again, too. But it is moving away from her with each passing moment, as she sinks deeper and deeper into the water. At last it closes over her head.

So long she has resisted this death by water, struggled and writhed against the fate of Hawise and the First Wife. Now it seems the only power she has left. Perhaps the First Wife thought so, too.

From underwater, there is a muffled sound—large and heavy, and Roscille breaks the surface in a panic. Branches part and twigs snap. She turns around, paddles backward to where she can stand. She is still half drowned, only her head and torso showing, as the serpent winds its way into the clearing.

It looks both greater and less than when she saw it first, in the murk and darkness of the dungeon. Its long body flutters with muscle, stippled with gleaming scales. Its head is enormous, more than half the span of her arms. Its tail cuts the grass as it moves. The scutes that rise from its back make it look more a creature of water than fire, though she smells the smoke that tinges the air a hazy gray color. Among the stone and rusted iron of the castle, this creature was an abomination, an affront to nature, impossible to comprehend. The green hue of its scales was more vivid than anything she could name.

Here, it is the color of leaves that have been nourished by rain, the grass that has been protected from the coarse, stripping winds. It pulls the light of the clearing to it, gathering it and holding it in the long vessel of its body. It fits here, like the arrangement of stones in a streambed.

And Roscille is not afraid.

The dragon approaches her: slow, viperous creature it is. Its huge head tilts, as if to examine her from all angles. Serpents, she knows, see only by movement. Staying still will turn her invisible. So Roscille takes a trembling step forward, moving farther out of the water, until she is only drowned up to her knees, the rest of her body bared, waiting. Flesh and muscle, thick, a meal of milk and honey for this creature, if that is what it desires. She looks into its lidless eyes. Tries to find Lisander there.

But then the dragon is on her, its claws shearing the water. Its muscular body wraps her, constricts it. This is how serpents eat; Roscille has seen it, the adder with its unfortunate mouse. Yet the pressure is not quite tight enough to be painful. It is merely that, pressure, and where its belly scrapes her breasts she feels a throbbing somewhere quite far away from her breast, these two places connected as if by a taut string.

Consume me, she thinks. Have me, as you will.

Then, a slipping. The scales turning smooth. The musculature of the creature's body withers, until she feels the tenderness of flesh and the jutting of bones beneath it. The metamorphosis is quicker than nymph to tree, fish to flower. No claws, no teeth, nothing but Lisander's bare skin, his hand fisting her damp hair, and his breath hot against her throat. His chest heaves.

She grasps him by the shoulders, pulling him against her until their bodies seem to bleed together. She gasps out, "You."

He whispers into her neck, "Why did you not run?"

"I choose this death, over any other."

A swallow ticks in Lisander's throat. "I do not think the creature—my creature—would have harmed you. I have… some sense, still. I am changed, not vanished." He draws a breath. "But it is a viler curse than you know, Roscille. My desires are not stolen from me. Rather it is my own basest impulses, transfigured, made monstrous. I am myself, perhaps more truly than any mortal man could ever be."

Lisander leans forward. His head rests against her shoulder. It is a pose of penitence.

"I think I am much the same," she whispers back. "If I have a witch to thank for my curse, she did not change me. She only revealed me."

With a sudden urgency, he takes her face in his hands. His eyes blaze.

"Perhaps you will flee after I confess this," he says, hoarse, tormented. "I did not leave you alone in that dungeon because I wished to abandon you in your suffering. I feared that the creature might inflict upon you a worse fate than what you already had endured. It wanted— I wanted you in the manner a man desires a woman, yet cloaked within the dangerous glamour of claws and teeth."

"Then the beast is more humane than any mortal man," she says bitterly. "To resist such an urge—to flee rather than to feast."

She takes his hand from her face and guides it, slowly, between her legs. He must feel the newer blood there, wounds from the torture he did not have the misfortune to witness. All of a sudden he turns cold, like stone.

But she guides him farther, working his fingers inside her.

"Roscille—" he starts.

"No," she says, her voice breaking. "Please. Let me have this pleasure of my own choosing."

Lisander does not speak. He only swallows again, hard, throat bobbing. And then without a word he kneels.

His hands venture hesitantly, gently over the backs of her thighs, feeling the uneven landscape of scars. For a moment they were gone, the water paring away her ugly flesh and making it new. But that moment was a blink, and they are here again. She is so afraid he will now only see her as this broken, pitied thing. That, she cannot bear.

Roscille kneels beside him in the water. She touches her forehead to his.

Then she kisses him. It is a remorseless kiss. But still she feels his hesitation, the way his lips fumble to open under hers, and he pulls away and says, "Do not make me the monster now, in this human body."

She shakes her head fiercely. "I have vanished from myself. Please help me return."

So when she kisses him again, he does not pull back; without contrition, he obeys her. Their bodies join, knitted at the hips, beneath the surface of the water. It is so easy, the way he slides between her thighs, the way he slips into her: almost formless, a spiritual possession. Any pain that comes is invited. It is her pain, an ache she has welcomed; it belongs to no other creature, no other man. And there is the pleasure to match it, ecstasy running alongside the agony, two parallel cords that knot together in the throbbing place at the bottom of her belly.

When the knot unfurls, it sends tremors through her own body, to the tips of her fingers and toes. Lisander shudders. Below their joined waists, the water blooms pink, like the opening of a rose.

They lie there in the grass, like an oyster shell split open, facing each other as mirrored halves: their noses the point of fastening. Morning light is leaking through the leaves. Soon the castle will be awake, the husband will be awake, searching for her. Roscille closes her eyes and breathes.

"What am I to do?" she whispers, when she opens them again. "I have nothing to return to but chains."

Lisander's lashes flutter. She can see his weariness, how sleep will take him at any moment. Roscille wants to hear him say: Stay, then. But even he cannot stay. The creature is a fire, licking at him from the inside out. He says, in a voice thick with exhaustion, "I will be here, as long as I can be myself."

"No," she says, with a bolt of panic. "Macbeth is hunting you. He has spread news of the dragon from the peak of the island to its pit. He is offering untold fortune to the man who brings him your head."

At this, Lisander stirs. Blinking, he says, "Evander will never meet him at the bargaining table then."

"Macbeth does not care about that anymore. He says all of Alba will kneel to him, and then he will beat back ?thelstan without difficulty."

"He will not. ?thelstan's army is larger than anything Macbeth can scrounge together, if he does not die of a blade to the back first."

Roscille is not so certain. Banquho is back at his side, his Lord's right hand. Fléance has escaped the fetters she tried to set upon him. All the machinations she thought so clever have amounted to nothing in the end. Her father sold her as a pleasure slave, and now that is indeed all she is, no canny ermine disguised in bridal lace. How long until she falls pregnant, and Roscille is stamped out beneath the feet of Lady Macbeth?

"This will be the last you see of me." Roscille gathers her cloak to her chest, holds it tightly, though it contains no warmth. "I will follow the fate of his first wife. I know it now."

Lisander sits up, brow furrowed. "How do you know the fate of his first wife?"

"She was a witch-marked woman, too. It is not hard to guess."

Lisander frowns. She is in love with the way he looks almost boyish in these moments, when he confers with himself in his own mind.

"Macbeth was once a forgettable lord," he says. "His father was Thane of Glammis, yes, but he was a second son, unexpected to inherit the title. His elder brother was a warrior, such a one that the Scots respect above all others, battle-scarred and battle-ready. So Macbeth was likely to be passed over, as most second sons are.

"Since he had no status to be envious of, he chose a wife without the king's consultation. This woman was herself a widow—odd, to be a widow so young, and without children from her first marriage, to some other lord of Scotland. She had no particular beauty, nor charm. Her house was not a great house. It confounded many when Macbeth chose her. Even then, though he was to inherit nothing, he was known for being adept in his dealings. The Scots do not respect this virtue so much as Lord Varvek does, of course. Still. It appeared to all to be strange.

"So this woman—she was not well liked, even in Macbeth's own household. She was cruel to her servants; she did not entertain visitors. Macbeth was curiously unperturbed by all of this. He insisted it was a marriage for love. A foreign thing, for Scots. But my father was moved by this sentiment. His marriage, too, had been for love." Lisander smiles crookedly, humorlessly.

Roscille listens, feeling her heartbeat thrum in her chest. "Go on."

"So this woman, this Lady Macbeth, decided to host a banquet for her husband's family, whom she had shown little regard up until then. Macbeth's father came, and of course his elder brother. Wives and children. There was nothing unusual about it, until the food was served. It is said that the stew had an odd taste, but there are few who can even remember such a thing. For anyone who touched that food with their tongue was suddenly overcome with great, heaving coughs. Their faces turned blue; their throats squeezed shut. Lady Macbeth had fed them all poison. The rest of Macbeth's clan, slaughtered. The women and children, too."

Her blood goes cold.

"How?" she manages. "How was Macbeth not executed for this crime? Patricide, filicide. His soul is damned forever. Nothing can wash it clean."

"Because he said it was his wife's doing, his wife's ambition for him to become Thane of Glammis." Lisander pauses. "The king came, and the chancellor. They found poison berries in Lady Macbeth's chamber—how easily she could have snuck them into the food."

Men love nothing more than to be proven right. This strange wife. They were right to suspect her all along. So clever! So perceptive! They must have thought themselves thus, preening in their unstained clothes.

"She was executed for this, of course." Roscille closes her eyes. The darkness of her vision is pricked with red.

"No," Lisander says. "There was a trial organized. My father, in those days, still aping the civilized ways of England and Rome. Lady Macbeth was to be kept in chains until she was summoned before judge and jury. That same old cell, in the dungeon." His gaze travels past her, remembering. "I was a boy then. I saw her only once, a brief passing in the corridor. She was already in her chains. There was little to remark about her, save this—her eyes were very pale. Almost like water."

Roscille's mind, which has been so long asleep, trapped in the tight stricture of pain, smothered, silenced, begins to turn again.

"The morning of the trial two men went to bring her up from the dungeon. But they found the cell empty. Yet the door was not open—it was as though she had slipped through the bars. They sounded the castle's bells, as if there were an enemy's army on the horizon. The search was long and desperate. At last, some keen-eyed servant spotted a woman's dress in the water below the cliffs, churning amid the foam like laundry. The gown was recovered, but Lady Macbeth's body was not."

"And there were no other search efforts? All were happy to believe that she drowned?"

"There was nothing else to believe. She had vanished, like a spirit vacating its vessel."

Roscille stares into Lisander's eyes, letting his green gaze throw her reflection back at her. She sees herself truly, at last. She sees the face that makes men cower and cringe. She sees the shades of her father, in small ways: The pertness of her chin. The high, jutting cheekbones. Wrybeard would never claim this resemblance; perhaps he would be blind to it entirely, as a nocturnal creature is unaccustomed to the light.

"You did not say anything about Macbeth's mother."

"I did not know her," says Lisander. "She was dead, I believe, long before my birth. There were some rumors about strange fates befalling the women of Glammis, but—"

"Surely," Roscille cuts in, "there is some record of her. Perhaps not of the mother. But the wife? At least a name."

He nods slowly. "The name, I do know."

The name rises from Lisander's throat, drifts between his lips, and hangs in the air between them. And then it presses itself upon her, with the heat and heaviness of a brand, marking her naked skin. This pain, this other pain she has chosen, makes her blood run with a vitality she has not felt in so long, as if she is a corpse, revived.

Roscille's limbs unfold. She rises, and with two hands, she pulls Lisander up with her.

"You must go," she says. "Promise me you will stay safe. Far away from here. Free."

"There is no freedom for me when I am absent from you."

"Please."

"What are you going to do, Roscille? Do not ask me to leave you again; I cannot. The longing is with me even when I am the beast; perhaps it is greater, even."

The clearing's natural sounds surround them. Birdsongs, cricket tunes, romping animals. The grass, beneath their feet, damp with the impressions of their bodies. So easily, she could slip back into the water, hold her head underneath until she became a part of the clearing, too, her bones lilting to the floor, silver fish darting through the empty cathedral of her rib cage. As easily as Lisander will slip out of his human skin when the exhaustion forces his eyes shut.

She considers running, too, of course. But the spear-tips of men would find them before they could make it far. The brightness of her cloak is like a beacon for arrows—there is a reason the weasel only sheds his sturdy brown camouflage at first snowfall.

"You will haunt me, too," she says at last. "We can never be truly apart then, if we are each other's ghosts."

Lisander takes her face into his hands and kisses her. He does not release her until his scales begin to show.

Roscille picks up the heavy cloak and robes herself in it. Tucked cannily into one of the folds, right where the rabbit's fur meets the feathers of the swan, the iron key hums with a mystic warmth.

If she cannot have safety, if she cannot have love, at least she can have this. Vengeance.

Macbeth must slumber still, because Roscille is able to slideback through the barbican and into the castle without being detected. The light is still the same rheumy gray, as if the sun has been constrained. Perhaps time slowed around the clearing, as river water freezes in winter, ice framing the arrangement of stones. Through the corridors, chasing the sound of the ocean. The key, the lock. The harsh sting of thesalt on her skin, its hostile grit. The darkness that is like a wall of smoke. Now Roscille does not hesitate. She steps into the water.

The torch flickers to life. Stretching flames illuminate their white, crooked limbs, which fork the black air. Their wet clothes rise from the water, then descend, then rise again, with the torturous rhythm of the tide. Their feet shuffle against sand and stone. Their chains drag like shells on the seafloor. All the flesh and fabric clinging to their taut bones looks translucent, as the bellies of thin-skinned fish.

Until now Roscille has been stumbling with a mortal's blindness. Now she strides toward les Lavandières without fear. They advance upon her. They circle her, until they are within the reach of one another's arms. Roscille does not need the torchlight to see. In fact, when she closes her eyes, her vision breaks apart with color. Smoke and green and purple miasmas. Memories that are not her own.

She opens her eyes. "I know you."

The center witch responds drily: "It has taken you long enough, to cut off your earthly sight. Roscille. Rosele. Rosalie. Roscilla. Lady Macbeth."

Roscille fixes her eyes on this witch. "Lady Macbeth."

The witch blinks slowly. Like a cat. A serpent. The other two witches continue with their washing. It is only now that Roscille sees the differences between them, where before they were all copies of the other. The right witch is the oldest, wrinkled like aged grapes. The left is second oldest. There are still youthful streaks of black in her hair, braided neatly among the white.

The center witch is waiting. Time slurries around them. The world grows older—or newer—but they do not.

In Breizh, to name a thing is to claim some power over it. They carve runes into the walls of their monasteries—false, un-Christian names, which will fool black-clad Ankou into passing without adding their corpses to his wagon. To banish a fairy, one must only speak their true name aloud. Then theywill disappear with a peal of thunder, in a cloud of smoke.

Roscille asked her father once, Perhaps it is better to have no name at all, so you cannot lose your power to another? And Lord Alan Varvek, Duke of Breizh, Wrybeard, vanquisher of the wretched Northmen from the narrow channel, replied, It is not for women to worry about these matters. You will take your husband's name when you wed anyway.

"Gruoch," Roscille says. "I am pleased to meet you."

At the sound of her name, the witch's eyes crackle with light. Gruoch. It is a name that demands a lot of Roscille's Brezhon mouth, drawing low, harsh sounds from the back of her throat. A name Lisander had to school her tongue in speaking; repeating the word three times over until she could mimic it perfectly. This name is a weed that grows from the rocky soil of Glammis, a plant that, if it is torn up, will merely grow again, showing its vines even in the dry-cracked earth.

"So now you know me," Gruoch says. "What will you ask? Counsel? Prophecy?"

Roscille looks at the other two witches, who have paused in their washing. Still like this, she can examine them: One is squint-eyed. The other has a mole on her cheek. They were wives, too. Ladies Macbeth.

She takes a breath.

"No," she says. "I want to be like you."

Gruoch's white face grows whiter. She scoffs. "You do not want to be like us. Washing clothes for the length of how many mortal lifetimes."

"You are doing his laundry, truly?"

Left Witch: What else are old women good for?

"Yet Macbeth seeks you out for advice, for your farseeing power. If you were truly powerless, surely you would be dead."

Right Witch: What is power, Lady? It is a word that grows more distant from its meaning each time it is spoken. We tell the King what he wishes to hear. And if he does not wish to hear it, he molds it into whatever prophecy pleases him. Bad omens are good omens. The sea is a hellish desert. The desert is a heavenly spring.

Roscille falls silent. She sees the flimsiness of her previous schemes, falling like cut flowers around her. She sent her husband on a deadly mission only for him to come back more powerful than ever. She tried to yoke Fléance to her will, only to have the same ropes turned on her.

Perhaps her greatest mistake was trying to ape the power of mortal men. Now she knows there is another world, waiting beneath the one she knows. Here, in the darkness, she can walk without shielding her eyes.

Left Witch: I see the wounds on you, Lady.

Right Witch: I see the fury behind your silence.

Gruoch says, "I see the protest in your pain."

The darkness around her seems to stretch and ripple. When Roscille looks down, she sees the silver of her reflection, murky and strange, more color than discernible shape. White is bleeding from her body and into the water. As it drains from her, it spills out in all directions, taking on its own forms. Like shadow puppets on a wall, they appear: A bloody dagger and a bloody hand. The crescent-shaped silhouette of a face. And at last, a crown, raised high over this head by a pair of disembodied arms.

When Roscille blinks, all of it vanishes, the dark water sucking the color away.

She lifts her gaze.

"I have a prophecy of my own," she says. "Will you speak it for me?"