Chapter Thirteen

Thirteen

"W hat is your purpose here, Lady?"

This is what the man who guards the dungeon door asks her. Roscille did not expect to be confronted at the top of the stairs, did not expect her motives to be questioned. It draws up an uncertainty deep inside of her, one she was content to let seethe and linger without challenge. She is silent. Every time she tries to speak, her tongue feels too slippery in her mouth.

At last, she lifts her head. She meets the guard's gaze—through the veil—and says, "I wish to see the prisoner."

"The Lord forbids it."

"The Lord will not know," says Roscille. "Or would you rather I tell him how you put your hands on me in the hall when no one was there to witness it?"

The guard blanches. It is crude, to manipulate him this way. There is no pleasure or victory in it. If she were a warrior, she would have just struck him the clumsiest, most deathless blow.

In the space between her threat and his answer, the sound of the ocean is strong and insistent under their feet.

At last, with a grimace, the guard says, "Do not be long."

"It will hardly be more than a moment." The guard steps aside, and Roscille descends the stairs.

The dungeon is a place that fills her mind with fire. She is only halfway down the stairs when a blinding light cuts across her vision, obscuring everything, and in that empty space, memories flower up: her face pressed roughly against the table, the lace of her veil chafing her lips and cheeks. The coldness ofthe air against her bare thighs. And the pain, always the pain, the coiled viper under the sun-warmed stone, which strikes when it is prodded.

Her legs burn at this reminder. She must keep this fire hidden in her skin; she must feel her pain in silence, or else the men will snarl madness and she will be pinned down and a trephine driven through her skull.

But she rights herself and reaches the bottom of the steps. Her cloak drags through the grimy puddles. She keeps her gaze straight ahead, so she does not see the rusted tools on the wall, and especially the whip, still stained with her blood. So that she does not see the mangled iron bars of the cell that once held Lisander inside of it.

She stops before the second cell. Fléance sits flush against the left wall, nearest to the torchlight; he does not hide himself in darkness. When he sees her, he rises to his feet, and his hand sweeps about his hips, as if searching for a weapon. A sword would do him no good, anyway. There is a collar around his throat, and a chain connecting that collar to the wall. Manacled like a dog indeed.

Straining the collar, Fléance turns to look at her. "Why are you here?"

The same question, just as impossible to answer as before. "Did you think you could beat me as you did, and face no recompense?"

His gaze flickers. "Was it worth it, your vengeance?"

If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men there is no debt of blood which goes unpaid. If the world tips in another's favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world is never in a woman's favor. She cannot tip the scale. The only choice is: live the same mute, unjust life you have always lived, or tear apart the world itself.

"I feel no satisfaction while you still draw breath," Roscille says, and this is honest, in a way.

A long silence. Fléance's gray eyes burn.

"Did ever a true word come from your mouth?" he rasps. "When you said your husband erred in overlooking me, that my father had done me a great injustice—did you believe it? Or were you merely stitching me into some great tapestry of deception?"

Her fingers curl into her hands. And then the words flow out, before she can stop them.

"I believe my husband errs in many ways," she says. "And your father—he treated you cruelly, without regard. Perhaps I desired your aid, but I never turned you over on your back and made you show your belly. We could have been allies. Friends, even. You name me witch, evil temptress, a thousand spitting insults, but it is you who first forsook me."

There is another long moment of silence. The gray hue of his eyes, once gleaming in the torchlight, now turns matte and churns like the ocean.

"Do not speak of my father." Fléance's voice is near to a whisper. "He was a good man. A just, loyal man. He was not like your father, that false weasel of Breizh, who sold you to Macbeth like a broodmare. Who loved no part of you but the flesh of your pretty face."

A tempest rises in her. Twisting, snarling fury, all of which spirals outward from the hidden eye of the storm. This old pain, in moments forgotten but never truly vanished, rises to life again now.

"This face could be the death of you." Roscille steps closer to the cell, until her hands touch the iron bars. "It would take only a moment. Avoid my gaze like the coward you are, or look into my eyes, and I will compel you to claw open your own throat. To dash your own head against the wall until your brain is pulp. So many agonizing deaths I could give you. My husband will perhaps offer you a painless demise. But I do not think you deserve to be shown such mercy."

Before she can react, Fléance's hands dart through the bars and grasp her by the front of her dress. Roscille fumbles for her veil, but even imprisoned, he is stronger and quicker: He catches her wrists and pins her arms against his chest. His collar and chains rattle.

"Say it again," he snarls. "Tell me you are the maker of my death."

With his grip so tight, this is the first time he has seemed to her like a man. Roscille lifts her veil far enough to spit in his face.

"Kill me if you like," she says, "but I will be the maker of your own death still, for Macbeth will slaughter you even more savagely."

"He will slaughter me anyway." Fléance blinks her spittle from his lashes. He pulls her closer, until her whole body is pressed against the cold, rust-gritted bars, and she feels the heat of him, the pulsing of hate and anger and perverse desire. "I should have raped you."

Such bald, ugly words make her stomach boil. She does not care if she crushes her own bones to dust, if they push up through her skin and burst through with blood—Roscille wrenches herself free of him. She shoves him backward, hard, and he stumbles against the wall. With satisfaction she notices that, thanks to his fruitless struggling, the collar has badly bruised his throat.

"You men have no imagination," she says.

Incredibly, Fléance schools his face into an expression of cold contempt. Perhaps it is the collar and chains, smothering the flames of rage, but she has never seen him like this before, composed and sneering.

"Perhaps you would not even protest it," he says. "You open your legs eagerly. I do not forget how you took the whipping in the prince's place. This is not something you would have done for a stranger. Does Macbeth know his wife has dishonored him in his own castle?"

Roscille stills. Her blood is cold.

"Adulteress," Fléance adds, as if she is too stupid to understand. "Whore."

But she is stupid indeed, not to have considered it. She is no selfless martyr, not pious enough to protest torture for its own sake. She has never pretended godliness. She has never knelt in this castle, not since the first night when the Druide tied her wrist to Macbeth's. Suddenly all her blood runs hot again and flushes her cheeks a furious red.

"Call me what names you will," she says, "but my husband will not believe them." Roscille does not even know if this is true. Clearing her throat, she goes on, "And you will be dead soon anyway."

"And perhaps you will follow me soon after. There is no dishonor in slitting a whore's throat."

Clever as she has always imagined herself to be, Roscille finds her mind cannot accept this. She must not torment herself thinking of it. The fear will murder reason, wisdom. And then she will fall into the black pit of madness, alongside Adelaide and all the other women who have looked up, like a fish through the surface of the water, and no matter how they flailed, could not stop the thrust of the spear through their bellies.

She rejects this terror. She flees from it.

"Enjoy this posthumous existence of yours," she spits at Fléance. And then she stumbles back up the stairs, nearly falling flat into the filthy puddles, and clinging desperately to the slick wall even when her fingers find no purchase against it.

When she reaches the top of the stairs, Macbeth is waiting for her.

The fear that Roscille only just evicted emerges again with the force of a river at melt. The sudden deluge makes her knees almost crumple beneath her.

"I am sorry, my Lord—" she starts, but Macbeth holds up a hand.

"You will not speak now," he says, and his voice is so gentle that it petrifies her. It is the way one speaks to a lame horse, to calm it before its slaughter. "You will listen."

Roscille drops her head and looks down at the floor.

"No," says Macbeth. "Look at me."

The veil is such a thin barrier between them, as frail as an infant's skin. Roscille lifts her gaze.

"I see now that this treachery in Glammis was following closely behind me, like a shadow. My own right hand, plotting my downfall in secret. I aimed my blade at a target, only to watch it vanish like smoke, all while my enemy's machinations turned on behind my back."

"My Lord—"

But then he reaches up to touch her face and the hardness of his palm, the heat of him, stuns her into muteness. He presses his thumb against her temple.

"This old wound of yours. I do not forget it. Were these masked men real at all?"

Her mind scrambles. She can play the guileless girl, swept up in schemes beyond her understanding, forced at blade-point into silence and obedience. But her husband knows her; at least, he knows Lady Macbeth. She cannot hide within this white cloak of innocence. He has seen the black heart of her. He has stoked this darkness, molded it, used it to his own advantage.

"It was as I said," she whispers. "The men came. Fléance fought them. I did not know it then—it must have been his fellow conspirators, in disguise. I began to suspect it, in your absence. It was Banquho who refused to torture the prince. I thought that they might be working against you. When I confronted them, they beat me."

It is the best story she can manage, in these circumstances. It allows her both innocence— I did not know; I could not imagine the treachery —and wiles— I began to suspect it, that they were working against you. She occupies the space Macbeth wishes her to occupy. Clever but not too clever. Working always for his advancement, his preservation, his pride. And perhaps when Fléance accuses her of adultery, Macbeth will have her story already in his mind, and reject the tale this chained boy tries to spin.

Macbeth's face darkens. "You should have told me at once. A husband and wife should have no secrets from each other."

Roscille flinches. "I am sorry. I feared their private retribution."

A moment passes, and then Macbeth takes her face between his palms. He turns it over. Like she is a shell tossed to the tide, her skin worn to translucence.

"You have nothing to fear from them," he says. "You are my wife and you are a queen. Fléance will be killed, and this treachery will die with him. You can feed a dog from your hand all your life, and still one day it may decide to bite."

Dogs do not bite without cause. They are thinking, feeling creatures. But Roscille does not dare to say it.

"Well," Macbeth murmurs. "The witches spoke of sons, and this prophecy was not for Banquho's ears alone. It has been beneath my attention until now—but I will not allow my line to end. You will lie with me every night until my child grows in you. If it is a girl, it will be snuffed out before it can make its way into the world. You are to bear me a son only. Do you understand?"

There is not a woman alive who is ignorant to this. Roscille does not know how many times she has watched this play out before her eyes: A woman falls pregnant. Her husband puffs his chest, swanning the proof of his virility around the court. And yet—there is the waiting, the vulture that watches from its remote perch. Everyone sees him but they do not speak of him. The man may choose to turn his eyes away as well, to luxuriate in his pride until the child's birth, when his honor will either be augmented or stripped from him entirely. There is no honor, after all, in a seed that sprouts daughters.

Or he will do this: There is always a woman in the castle who sees things which are beyond the capacity of mortal eyes. She can feel a swollen stomach and know from its shape whether the child inside is boy or girl. And then, the blankness on the would-be father's face, the few long seconds before his body can display his mind's relief or fury, before he either embraces his wife or yanks her roughly out of the room. She will weep, and he will not care. If he is kind, he will merely force the foul-tasting herb mix down her throat, until the girl-child leaks out from her legs like a monthly blood. If he is not kind, he will shove her belly-first down the stairs, an easy dive, a descent smoothed by the thousands of women who have made this same fall. If her teeth or nose break, this is an acceptable casualty. She will wear these wounds shamefully, and the husband will keep his head down, until the memory of this episode fades, until there is another belly, swollen with the hope of a son.

Roscille says, "I understand."

Her husband is not a kind man.

"Good," says Macbeth.

His large hand curls around the back of her skull. He pulls her into him, and then places a kiss on her forehead. Roscille waits there, silent, her skin turning to bark, her arms to branches, her hair to leaves, Please please please, leave me alone, let me go, I am just a dead thing—living, but dead—and can foster no new life inside of me. The pain no longer feels like a protest. It is merely pain. She feels as alive as a tree and as dead as a stone.

Her mind is escaping her.

At last, Macbeth lets go. Roscille watches as he limps down the hall, the blue-black stain behind his knee spreading, growing, blooming.

Roscille goes to her chamber—well. Not her chamber, anymore. She is her husband's bedmate now. The bear-rug is not her bear-rug. The small narrow bed is where Senga sleeps alone. She finds her handmaiden there now, sitting in the room's single chair, embroidering a bolt of gray fabric.

When she sees Roscille, she rises, dips her head, and says, "Lady."

How quickly she has learned to be deferent, to be a slave. Roscille feels the bile rising from her empty stomach to her throat.

"Please," she says. "Call me Roscille."

Senga's brow furrows as her Scottish mouth forms the Brezhoneg sounds. "Roscille." She pauses. "But you are still my Lady."

"I hoped to be your friend."

What a foolish hope. Roscille has never had a friend who was not tied by duty to her side. The other women in Wrybeard's court cringed from her, as though witchery were catching. Men, of course, do not make friends of women. They make wives or whores or servants, and since Roscille was a noble lady, the Duke's daughter, she could be none of those. And after the stable hand, the boys were wise to stay away. Hawise, her only friend, yoked to her with a long chain of fear that began with Hastein and flowed through the Duke.

Senga regards her curiously. She stands, laying the unfinished embroidery over the arms of the chair, then sits down on the bed. She pats the mattress beside her. "Sit, then. Friend."

Roscille approaches her. She sits down on the bed that was once her bed, her smallest comfort. Its softness against her skin now feels like a punishment—undeserving skin, still gruesome with scar tissue, black pits of dried blood like a scattering of leeches. She draws in a breath and moves her hand to lift her veil.

"Do not be afraid," she says. "My gaze does not induce madness in women."

"I am not afraid."

Cool air on her cheeks. Relief, like a parched mouth sipping sweet water. She knows she is still trapped, but even horses run in spirited circles around their pens, imagining freedom.

Senga watches her with narrowed eyes, and Roscille watches her back. She is older; Roscille cannot tell by how much. Her hips have the width and laxity of past childbirth. How long ago? Roscille wonders. How many children? She is old enough to have had five or six or even seven children. Roscille, at seventeen, is late to it; she could have filled a lord's castle with sons by now.

Yet this is as foreign to her as the Northman tongue. Her mother died when Roscille slipped, blood-glazed, from between her legs. There was the blind midwife who nursed her, a name Roscille has now forgotten. Hawise was still a girl and virginal.

She thinks of the rumors of Senga, the reason she was cast out of her village, threatened with a shaved head and a wimple and a scapular and ceaseless repentance to God. What did she seek in these couplings—pleasure? What man has ever been punished for that? Love? Is that a sin? Roscille presses her hands flat against her thighs. There is a humming from somewhere deep inside her, the memory of the dragon's strength and muscle as it bore over her body—this is all she has now; the memory.

"Is it possible," she blurts out, "in Alba—a marriage for love? A child born not out of mere obligation?"

Senga's eyes soften, then harden, then soften again. "You are seventeen, yes? Barely more than a child yourself. Your life…Well, you are a noble lady, so you know this. Your husband's whims will shape all your years to come. That is the way. I cannot imagine it is so different in your country. But you have a choice. You may pretend love is the reason you submit to him, why you bear his son, and even if it is not true at first, it will be true someday; you have the strength of mind to fashion it so."

"Was it love you sought, when you lay with those men?" Roscille flushes at the boldness of her own question.

Senga's eyebrows dart up her face. A moment passes, then anger. "Have you ever met, Lady, a woman with three children or more?"

Met, Roscille thinks, never. But she has seen them, from a distance. Peasant women, their eyes cast on the muddy ground, ushering their dirty-faced broods. If there is a father, he stands at a distance, observing grimly, then turning to slouch toward the fields for labor. Sometimes Roscille cannot find the father, and the children clamber up their mother, clinging to her hips like growing vines. And there is always the curled lip, the scoffing, why did she not keep her legs closed, she has more children than she can afford, she may as well go peddle herself, now.

"I have not," Roscille admits.

"Well," says Senga, "now you have. There are four, and thank God all are old enough to work, so they do not miss me much. Perhaps they are better for it—their mother, the village slattern. They love me but I shame them. And they shame me, too. You want to know why, but there is no reason that would absolve me. I thought you would have sent me to a nunnery."

"A man would not have to answer for it." Roscille pauses. "He would never imagine being asked why. "

"So what does it matter? Love, greed, need, appetite—they are not the purview of men alone."

"Love is not as easy to smother as the rest."

Roscille stares into the middle distance for a long time in silence. She imagines herself lying on that soft grass again, nose-to-nose with Lisander, like an amulet unclasped, two matching halves facing each other.

"I am sorry," she manages. "I do not want this for myself, these stupid girlish hopes."

Astonishingly, Senga takes her hand and brushes the hair back from Roscille's face. So tenderly; she has practiced this gesture many times upon her own children.

"Do men not hope?" Her voice is soft. "They imagine themselves mighty and clever and virile and powerful. This hope of yours is quite small by comparison."

Small, yes. But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green matter with her teeth.

Macbeth comes into the room and Roscille immediately dries her tears and puts on her veil. Her husband's face is nothing. The ghostly smudge of a thumbprint on a windowpane. He holds a length of white fabric in his hands.

"Come, Roscilla," he says, in this hollow nothing of a voice. "There will be a council meeting."

She rises and approaches him without a word. The mattress crumples as Senga moves, as if to reach out for Roscille and keep her from leaving. But Macbeth's presence crushes them both into silence. Roscille looks down and waits for her husband to open the door, to turn into the corridor, so she can follow.

Instead, he says, "Wait."

Her mind is a smooth channel through which such brusque directives flow easily. She must keep it empty so she does not think of what awaits her tonight, and the next night, and the next. Macbeth sweeps her hair back from her neck.

Before she can speak, or even think, Macbeth knots the white fabric over her eyes. Blinding her entirely. When she blinks her crumpled lashes, she sees only a fuzzy blackness.

Panic overtakes her, curdling the words in her throat. When she can still her racing heart, quiet the pounding of blood in her ears, Roscille only manages one word: "Why?"

"I should have done it sooner," Macbeth says, though there is no cruelty in his tone, only the flatness of reason. "My men will not cringe from you so much, or question whether my dominion over my wife is total. And you do not need to see. When you are to leave this room, I will guide you."

And then, true to his word, Roscille is maneuvered through the door, even as Senga makes some inarticulate noise of protest, and into the corridor, all in the rough grip of her husband's hands.

The floor is cold through the soles of her slippers, and there is the ocean underneath it, surging up as it always does, against the stone barrier which seems thinner with every passing moment. She can sense how far they have gone based on how much their footsteps echo. This is a long corridor, empty. The sound of Macbeth's limping gait fills the silent hallway.

Roscille knows, Now we are turning a corner, now another one, seven paces and then one more, and then down the longest, narrowest hallway. See, she thinks with some relief, my mind has not been lost entirely. The salt air, as they approach, lifts the skin on the back of her neck. The key slides into the lock. She inhales sharply.

It is the first time she has been here without seeing. Well— perhaps it is merely the blindest she has ever been. In the beginning, she came only with her paltry mortal vision. She begins to suspect, as Macbeth guides her through the door, that he has not blindfolded her for the sake of his men. She thinks he has some preternatural sense of his own, that he can sniff out the affinity that grows between his wife and the witches. Perhaps he merely thinks she visited them in his absence. Perhaps that is enough to make him take such precautions, to ensure that she is always bound to him first, that she can never look into the milky eyes of les Lavandières and see herself reflected back.

Any light Roscille could glimpse from behind the cloth has now vanished. The blackness is solid and cold. She feels as if she could put a hand to it and leave the impression of her palm.

Macbeth splashes into the water. She hears a low grunt of pain as he does—that wound on his leg. Has he even allowed a doctor or a Druide to see it? He trusts nothing and no one, now. An herbal poultice might be poison. Roscille has stolen this from him, she realizes. Safety. Or perhaps it could be said she has transformed him. A slow metamorphosis, unfolding in stages, like a night-blooming flower. Macbeth, the righteous man. Now he is Macbeth, King of Alba, but bereft of his right hand and unsteady on his left leg.

"?thelstan and his army come for my head," Macbeth says into the blackness. "Tell me—do I have to fear my demise?"

Slow, dragging footsteps. The chain clattering. The water forced and churned. Once, Roscille would not have been able to tell apart their voices. But now she knows who speaks and when.

Left Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Glammis. Thane of Cawder. King Hereafter. No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth.

Right Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Glammis. Thane of Cawder. King Hereafter. He shall never be vanquished until the wood comes high upon the hill.

Gruoch says: nothing.

Macbeth turns in the water, and Roscille can see it, even without sight: the torchlight freckling the cave ceiling, the deep rise and fall of her husband's chest, the resplendent smile drawing wide across his face, the burning triumph in his eyes.

"I will never fail," her husband says. Awestruck, almost childlike. "These prophecies ensure me. King Hereafter, indeed." A raucous laugh that is too loud, that breaks like surf upon the rocks.

Roscille can see three pairs of hands outstretched, palms turned up to the heavens. And then three voices rise, mingling in the pitch-dark air, curling wickedly as smoke: "All hail Macbeth! All hail Macbeth! All hail Macbeth!"