Chapter Three

Three

Dawn, in Glammis: a gray sky with the thinnest line of watery light at the horizon. The menare girded and braced, their horses saddled, their battle tartans donned. Swords are sheathed at hips and spears are chucked, clattering, into the back of a mule-drawn cart. There are no bows: That is a coward's weapon. Only birds and stags may suffer the ignominy of being slain by arrows.

Her husband is fixing his saddle, checking its tightness. Wrybeard would never saddle his own horse; that is what squires are for. It is a part she might have expected Fléance to play, only she cannot find his face among the crowd.

Roscille holds her breath and casts her gaze around the courtyard, noting each of the men that make up the war party, wondering which one of them killed Hawise. She will never know. It does not matter. Any of them would and would again. Even if she found the body—what then? The dead cannot speak.

Mountain Goat and Winter Fox and Weasel-cloak are of course among them, each flanked by six of their best men. They mutter; they grow silent and glance at Roscille and then mutter some more. Even though Macbeth did not tell them that her want of a trinket engendered this war, she sat at the council table, she spoke with assurance. That alone is enough to tarnish the glory of this fight.

She turns, and at last she spies him. Fléance. He is not saddling his horse or loading his spears; he stands at the edge ofthe courtyard, his face dark. From such a distance she cannot read his expression, but she watches Banquho approach his son and whisper something roughly in his ear. Fléance's shoulders rise and his hand grips the pommel of his sheathed sword.

Then Banquho, alone, walks away and sits astride his horse. He looks quite determinedly away from his son. Thissmall, foul interaction can mean only one thing: Fléance is being leftbehind. Roscille cannot help but wonder how this decision might have been reached, and whether it was Macbeth who ordered it. She can imagine the low tones, the gritted teeth. Dishonor encrusting Fléance like pond scum. Shewatches Fléance for a moment too long, and is surprised by the slippery feeling of deprival that sneaks beneath her skin.

When all the horses have been mounted, her husband comes to her. He cups her face and toys with the edge of her veil. His hand on her cheek is like rough fabric, scraped dry against river rocks. Thinking of laundry makes her think of the basement, the witches. Roscille flinches.

"You will have your rubies," he says. "And I will havewhat is mine."

The witches' words echo from the deep recesses of her mind.

Macbeth, Thane of Glammis.

Macbeth, Thane of Cawder.

And then, the voice of the Druide asserts itself.

Lord Macbeth, son of Findlay, Macbeth macFinlay, Macbethad mac Findlaích, the righteous man.

He does not kiss her, but their lips are close. Even though she does not close her eyes, she is not looking at him, she is outside of herself: a bird scuffling against a windowless wall, a boar with a spear in its side, a hart dogged through the woods. She is nothing but a panicked beating heart.

Then he lets go, paces back toward his horse, and mounts in one fluid motion. His huge body seems to dwarf even the horse. There is an obscenity to it, his largeness. It makes something as ordinary as riding a horse seem brutish. How much weight will the poor animal be forced to bear?

The wind funnels into the courtyard and then flattens, like water filling a trough. Her skirts blow back as the barbican grinds open and the party trots through it. It is a long train and it takes a long time for the last rider to vanish into the mist. The barbican shuts again.

Roscille wonders how many women have stood precisely where she is standing, watching their husbands disappear. Roscille wonders how many of them have imagined the sword-thrust that will make them widows. She wonders how many smiled at the thought.

Without noticing, Fléance has come to her side.

"Inside," he says. His voice is brusque. "Now."

The castle is empty of all but servants; there is not another sheathed blade or spear in sight. Fléance's footsteps ahead of her are rough and hurried.

Fléance's anger does not scare her. It is the first time, Roscille realizes, since arriving in Glammis, that she has not been afraid. In fact, his anger nourishes her, in a strange way. It is that same sweet-tasting poison, the last overripe fruit plucked from the otherwise empty vine, which will keep her alive but also kill her slowly. She stops walking.

Fléance turns. "What, Lady?"

"How long has this castle stood?"

This question is too innocent to provoke any alarm. He will not see the long strings that connect her words to the room in the basement, to Duncane's treatise, to sharp teeth and silver hair. She is a young girl from a foreign country, naturally curious about anything that is new (or old). Fléance's brows come down over his pale eyes.

"Since before the Northmen were raiding. And before the Romans came with their roads. Do they say, in Breizh, that Flatnose built all of the isles?"

Flatnose is a Norse king of many centuries past. He stuck his flag all over the rockiest, bitterest soils of Scotland, grim and savage Glammis among them. In Breizh, it is said that the Scots could build nothing with their two hands except the oak barrels for spirits. It is said that they lapped water straight from the river like dogs. But Roscille shakes her head.

"Your Druides," she ventures. "They are older than the Northmen and the Romans, too."

"Of course."

"So they have seen the native evils of the land."

Fléance's gaze flickers. He will not hurt her, Macbeth would kill him for it, but he will tell his father of the Lady's strange questions and then his father, the Lord's right hand, will tell the Lord.

Or will he? Roscille remembers the coldness of Banquho's face in the courtyard. She has seen enough displeased fathers and displeasing children to know when the ice is starting to show its black-veined cracks.

"Yes," Fléance says slowly. "Every old soil has its evils. But they do not live in Glammis. The clan of Macbeth is powerful and pious enough to expunge them."

He does not know. Why would he? The basement is Macbeth's secret, guarded like a hoard of gold. It is safe for her to step farther. The ground will not yet give way.

"But your king, Duncane," she says, her voice soft and guileless, "has written a treatise on witchcraft in Alba."

At this, Fléance's brow darkens. He will not hurt her—but perhaps Roscille has misjudged her position. She is still a foreign bride, her edges singed with the smoke of witchcraft, robed in the ghostly tales of her unnatural eyes, her unpropitious birth. Ill omens are writ on her skin like runes.

"The Lord does not believe the rumors that come from Francia," Fléance says. "He may be the king's vassal, but they are not always of like mind."

Roscille almost laughs in relief. He thinks she worries only for her own stature, her own esteem.

"That is good," she says. "But others—they might believe such rumors."

"Perhaps. But they will never speak their suspicions aloud to the Lord."

"True, men are honest only in whispers."

Fléance's mouth twists in a peculiar expression, as if he wants to laugh at her wit but is perplexed by the urge. "You will be safe here," he says at last. "In Glammis."

"I know I will be safe with you."

It is crude flattery, but it works. Fléance's face opens.

"Yet King Duncane says witchcraft is alive and well in Alba," she presses on carefully. "Do you know of such acts? Have you seen them?"

In Breizh, they are called les Lavandières. They stand in the shallows and wash the clothes of dead souls. They have webbed feet and webbed fingers. Seeing them is a portent of doom. If you step between them and the water, you will die. If they ask you for help in their washing and you refuse, they will drown you.

"There are stories," Fléance says. "Witches are women, but malformed. Likely they have some traits of animals—perhaps a naked tail, or scales on their bellies. Perhaps they cannot speak, but only yowl like a hound or squawk like a crow. A fish's unblinking eyes, set on the sides of their faces, or wings that unfold from their backs. A feline's sharp teeth. To cross one is death, or a curse upon your blood. Your grandson's grandsons will know well a witch's wickedness."

He does not mention silver hair. Perhaps she is safer with him than she imagined.

"A curse," Roscille repeats. "What sort of curse makes the king quiver under his crown?"

Torchlight spasms across the wall. The corridor they are in has no windows. Fléance's eyes narrow to slivers.

"There is one story known across Alba," he says. "Once, a nobleman offended such a virulent creature. The witch cast a curse, not upon the nobleman, but upon his infant son. Every night, when the boy slept, he would grow fur and fangs and become a vicious, killing thing. His blood ran with hunger in the moonlight. He ravened under the black sky. Only the rising sun restored him to his natural form."

Roscille wants to ask why, but she already knows. A witch does not need a reason, only an opportunity.

Instead, she asks, "And what did the nobleman do to his blighted boy?"

She thinks she knows the answer to this, too.

"He put a blade through its black-furred chest," Fléance says. "But the sword rusted and fell away, and the wound resolved itself. The boy could not be slain by mortal means. So he tied his son to his bed each night and closed his ears to the sound of the beast slavering and yowling and twisting under his binds."

The world is rheumy from beneath the veil. Roscilleblinks her death-touched eyes.

"So he was not dressed in bridal lace and married to a lord," she says.

"No," Fléance says.

"King Duncane must chafe at this union." Macbeth may have the authority to silence his men's voices, but he does not have the power to shape their thoughts; no man has such power. The rumors of her silver hair and maddening gaze will drift silently through these halls, like cold mist. The words may never be spoken aloud. Yet the mind itself can make the sea into a desert and a frozen waste into the greenest meadow.

"Macbeth is the king's distant cousin," says Fléance. "Duncane trusts him to keep his wife in check, even if such rumors abound."

Of course. Roscille is chained, too, in her marriage bed.

And this is when she realizes, with the slick, sudden heat of a fever, that she has made a mistake. She is Macbeth's wife now, his property, and if he dies in his fight, she will be part of the spoils claimed by his enemies. Macbeth values his alliance with the Duke, yet such vows are worth nothing to the Thane of Cawder. Macbeth may keep his witches in chains, but if the Thane of Cawder is anything like Duncane, he will put his blade through their hearts. She has not saved herself. She has only given herself a different death.

In this state of fever, her mind returns her to Naoned. She is deposited at the feet of her father, kneeling like a supplicant. When she looks up, she can see only the wily black twists of his beard.

"I am more than a draughts tile," she says, her voice trembling. "I am the blood of the ermine, I am—"

"You are whatever creature I make you," Wrybeard says. "All things in Naoned serve me."

"But—" Her voice shrivels in her throat. She stares down, pitifully, at the floor. "Do you not love me?"

A stupid question. The Duke will not even deign to answer it. She might as well have asked if he loves his own hand or his own mouth.

Naoned fades, and the winding corridor of Glammis flowers up again before her. Here she is, believing herself a canny animal, believing she could cheat the fate her father so coldly imposed upon her, when in truth she has done nothing other than promise the spilling of a great ordeal of blood—between her legs and from the throats of so many nameless, faceless men. Roscille of the Veiled Eyes, Roscille of the Witless Plans, Roscille the Great Fool.

Roscille is fiercely glad that Fléance is too afraid to meet her gaze, so that he has not seen the water gathering along her lashes.

She cannot undo what she has done; her husband and his war party are already miles gone. Yet—she is not completely bereft. If Macbeth falls beneath Cawder's blade, if Cawder's men pound at Glammis's gates, perhaps she may still survive, if she has but one friend inside these walls, one sword that might rise to defend her.

Roscille gulps down the castle's stale air. Two quick inhales, and her nickering heartbeat begins to calm. She can still save herself, maybe. She can bind herself to Fléance with a secret. With a debt. And already she has seen his desires gleam out from him, those hard, sharp, angry pieces, whetted by bitterness, polished by his father's cold rebuffs.

Very slowly, she lifts her gaze.

"I have to write a letter," she says. "Will you help me?"

In the castle's largest chamber, which is both the banquet hall and the war room, Fléance brings her a quill and parchment. He tells her the Thane of Cawder's name, shows her his sigil. Roscille's quill tip hovers above the page, hesitant. She has never forged a letter before; she has never tried writing in any hand beside her own.

"Will Duncane know it is a woman's script?" Roscille wonders aloud.

"He will not suspect it," says Fléance. "Most women in Alba do not write."

She should have known. The women in Naoned read only the Bible. Hawise could not read or write until Roscille began to teach her. Thinking of Hawise makes her throat tighten. With some difficulty, Roscille says, "Who are Cawder's allies?"

Fléance names several lords. Roscille chooses the one whose name will be easiest to spell. Since she does not know how to write in Scots, Fléance leans over her shoulder and places his hand on her hand, guiding the quill. She feels him flinch as he touches her skin. The blue marbling of her veins looks particularly garish against his ruddy flesh, cold where he is warm, lifeless where he is vital. As soon as the words are done, Fléance steps briskly away, red coloring his cheeks.

Even if he has, by some chance, touched a woman before, he has never touched a creature like Roscille—bloodless, as they say, like a trout—and he has certainly never touched the wife of a lord. Roscille wonders if he recognizes the danger in this. He has already seen how easily her fingers can spin lies; can her lips not also fashion falsehoods?

To copy the signature she must carefully layer one parchment over another, and trace the Thane of Cawder's name. Fléance watches her at a distance, his mouth a thin line. She notices the mangled tip of his ear again, the accidental and inglorious scar.

"The Lord has placed my life in your hands," she says.

Fléance's gray eyes flash. When he speaks, his voice cannot hide his anger. "It was my father's choice, too. He says there will be other wars. Other occasions to wet my sword."

"The battlefield is not the only place where one may wet their sword."

"Lady—" His brow furrows.

"Roscilla," she says. "Please, call me Roscilla."

"Lady Roscilla," he says, after a moment. His expression is uneasy, but not uncurious. "What do you suggest?"

"My husband has done you a disservice, I recognize this," she says. "He is a great warrior, though his judgment was too hasty on this occasion."

She must be as light-footed as a fawn on frozen water. She must appear hesitant, even if she is not. She must not dishonor her husband with a word or a look.

Fléance's gaze is still hesitant, but there is a lidded desire in his eyes. She has nearly coaxed it out into the light—the lamprey within him, waiting for flesh to suck.

"And your father," she goes on, voice lowering, "has been uncivil in this matter as well. To not help grow his own son's valor, to not wish for him to win acclaim on the field of battle, to enhance his pride…it is a boorish slight."

His eyes' desire gleams brighter. The lamprey slinks ever forward.

"But you can mend their mistakes," Roscille says. "You can illuminate their errors, and show your own strengths."

Silence seeps between them, cool and clear, like the air at evening's last hour.

"How," Fléance says slowly, "do you mean to prove such a thing?"

It is the first time she has been outside the castle in Glammis when it is light. Dawn has come, and gone, and the sun has settled at its highest point, swaddled in fleecy clouds. The wind has the same obliterating rhythm of the ocean, pressing the green-gold grasses flat, making her veil cling tightly to her face, like a caul.

A near-forgotten panic stirs in her. She felt this panic the first time Hawise placed the veil over her eyes. The way it obscured the world, dulled her most important sense, made her feel like an animal, bucking under its yoke. Prey animals have their eyes on the sides of their heads, a blind spot in what should be the center of their vision. It took a long time for Roscille to adjust to the world this way, darkened and muddled, to its dangerous blurry spaces. Glammis makes this old fear feel new again.

But she prods her horse along, so that it follows Fléance's mount down the hillside. These horses are accustomed to the terrain. Their hoof-steps are sure, no pebbles caught in their shoes, no tripping over the sun-warmed rocks that jut up dangerously from beneath overgrown tufts of grass.

From this distance, with the castle at her back, Roscille can finally see Macbeth's advantage, the reason Wrybeard thought it worth sending a daughter all this way. Every cluster of trees, every thatched-roof hut, every spire of chimney smoke: all set out before her like trays on a banquet table. Miles and miles and miles. No enemy can so much as flash his sword without giving her husband an hour's warning, at least. The castle has held Roscille in a stricture of fear, a newt writhing in a cupped hand, but by this measure, Glammis is the safest place she has ever been.

"These villages," she says, sweeping her arm toward the specks of houses below, "they all pay tribute to Macbeth?"

She has to raise her voice to be heard over the wind. Fléance nods.

"Yes, they are all Findlaích, if not by blood then by allegiance. The clan," he adds, as though Roscille does not remember her own husband's status. She is a part of clan Findlaích now.

"Surely," Roscille says, "there is some discontent among them."

Every strong man has his enemies. Even if it is just the kitchen boy whipped for spilling soup. Even if it is a farmer forced to foster soldiers who ate all his food and then took his wife to bed. Perhaps it is a nephew or a cousin, passed over when honors were given. An ally left without his apportioned spoils. A beggared miller chafing under the Lord's exorbitant tithe. Someone. Anyone.

Fléance narrows his eyes in thought. "There is a man—"

"Good," she says. "That is enough."

Most men do not need a reason, either. Only an opportunity.

Fléance leads her to a copse of trees, warped by the wind, scraggly and strange. Yet there is a small hidden place among them, where the grass is soft, as if the weather-beaten trees have protected it. A pool—curiously bright and clear, though fed from no source that Roscille can see.

She catches her reflection in the water, a quicksilver flash. Long, loose pale hair, more white than gold. A sharp chin whittling down an otherwise round face. Her eyes are as black as a swan's, wide-set, pupil and iris barely distinct from each other. Unsettling eyes, she cannot deny it. Superstitions have been built on less. She looks away.

"Tell the Lord I begged you to show me my new home," Roscille says, sliding down from her horse. "But we were not even out of sight of the castle when the masked men came."

"How many?" Fléance dismounts his own horse with a heavy thud.

Roscille thinks. "Three," she says at last. Three is not so many that it taxes belief, but it is enough that Fléance's courage and skill will be commended. Three is also a propitious number, a Christian fetish, whatever that is worth here in Glammis.

The memory of les Lavandières leaps up at her, the white shock of their emaciated bodies in the dark. Roscille's stomach clenches.

"Will the Lord not ask to see their corpses? Proof of blood?"

"No, you need not have killed them," Roscille says slowly. This is the trickiest part of her plan. "We will say you sent them running—if we have our own blood to prove the labor of battle. The nearness of death."

Fléance's brow furrows as he begins to understand. "I will have to strike my own near-death blow."

Roscille thinks of Macbeth's wound, the long, ropy band of scar tissue that adorns his throat. She does not know how he survived it. To another man it would be certain death.

She thinks of les Lavandières again. My lust for blood will be rewarded. They anointed this mission to Cawder, armored him in favorable prophecy. Could they have done the same before? Is their magic more than mere augury—is it protection in battle? An aegis that covers these lands like new-fallen snow? Are these unholy creatures what keeps Death at bay in Glammis?

"Yes," Roscille says at last. "Or—I will do it for you."

Fléance says nothing, and Roscille's chest tightens, fearing he will refuse. He does not. He only asks, "Why? Why will you aid me in this?"

"I am the Lady of Glammis," Roscille says. "Is it not for my benefit that the strength of its men is recognized, and allocated and awarded?"

Her face is hot, but her cheeks—bloodless—will not show it. Fléance looks at her for a long time without blinking. Then, wordlessly, with only the hushing sound of metal against hide, he removes his sword from its sheath.

He will want to have a scar that shows proudly. Nothing as stark as her husband's—he cannot outdo his own Lord, of course—and nothing that will truly risk death. Nothing that will not heal in time, or that will leave him less able on the battlefield. Roscille is pondering where, and how, when Fléance puts the sword in her hands.

And then he tugs down his jerkin, straining the fabric to expose his collarbone. Roscille sees the small hollow, just below his throat, where she is meant to aim. The skin is pulled taut, thin over muscle, with little fat to slow the progression of the blade. It will hurt. Badly.

"Here," Fléance says.

Roscille feels the blood turn to ice in her body.

"You will have to press harder than you think."

Her gorge rises. She does not want to do this. Always she has prized herself on her strategy, the coldly removed arranging of tiles on a draughts board, never a butcher. But she needs this secret, the alliance it will spin. The lampreys are writhing, hungry. She will not deny them their feast.

"Wait," she says suddenly. "My— I must show proof of this skirmish as well."

Fléance frowns. "How do you mean?"

There is a spear in one of his horse's saddlebags. She takes it. It is light, the wood smooth as a rosary bead. The tip flashes silver in the muted light. But she does not hand it to him tip-first. Instead, she offers Fléance the shaft.

She points at her own temple, right at the corner of her eyebrow. One thrust of the spear-shaft and it will show a perfect circle, a single bruise that proves Fléance's courage and Roscille's worth (for what else do men value if not the things other men wish to take from them?) and the silent union which will, however fragilely, protect her. Perhaps Fléance is not the lamprey at all. Perhaps he is the nobleman, puffing with pride in his little power, only to be degraded by the emperor's preeminent scorn.

"Together," Roscille says.

Fléance hesitates. She does not. She sees the blood spray, speckling her gown with red. It comes in such quick spurts that it slicks the grass under her feet, but Roscille does not have to witness the horror long, for Fléance gives a furious growl, the base anger of being wounded so suddenly and remorselessly, and then he drives the spear-shaft hard against her temple.

Her vision turns white. Heat spikes through her skull, following a straight path from one temple to the other, as if the pain is an arrow, cleanly slicing the muscle and meat of her. And then there is only the fuzzy, star-pricked darkness.

Dusk, in Glammis: purple light spread through the irregular pattern of clouds. A grayish, bruised miasma, like smoke from a cauldron. Roscille stands against the wind, so that her own veil does not choke and blind her.

Fléance is at her side, hand resting on his sword's pommel. The barbican grinds open, and the war party floods the courtyard, all these loutish, scraggly men boasting their victory, tartans torn, blood still in their beards. It is the blood of many: some soldiers, some not, anyone unfortunate enough to be found in the path of Macbeth's army. All blood spilled at Roscille's orchestration. She looks down at her hands, as if she might see them stained, too. But they are white, cold as they have always been, which is almost more sickening, somehow. She looks up again, and searches for her husband among the returning men.

He cleaves through the crowd, nearly twice as big as the next-biggest man. His hair is matted with dried blood, but the first thing she notices is that he bears no new scars. It announces clearly that the Thane of Cawder is dead, and that he did not protest his end too much. Macbeth did not even have to imagine his own death, his own absence from the world. As if this is a thing most men are capable of imagining.

He dismounts with a thud that seems to crack the earth. His legs are bare between the cuff of his boots and the hem of his tartan, and Roscille sees that his knees are bloody, too—a dense, dark blood, which has come from deep inside the body. She knows the difference between the thin, bright-red blood that surfaces easily, which can be drawn from any prick of a blade, and the blood that flows black and thick near the heart.

Macbeth's smile is all teeth. He approaches her, something gleaming between his large fingers.

And then—the smile is gone. The gleeful light in his eyes goes dark. The languid, preening victory of his gait turns stiff, muscles tensing. He grasps her face roughly in his hand, turning it to the side, so that he can look at the bruise on her temple. Even beneath the veil, it pulses a fresh and garish violet.

"Who has done this?" Of course he recognizes immediately that the bruise has been made by the thrust of a spear-shaft. He has delivered the same wounds to countless women before her, the ones who spat at him as he burned their huts and snatched the meat from their larders. Still holding her face, he whirls toward Fléance.

"My Lord—" Fléance begins.

But Macbeth sees his scar, too. Roscille struck cleverly and struck true: The mark cannot be fully hidden beneath the collar of his jerkin. It snakes upward, along the side of his throat, still gruesome with old blood and the sloppy dark stitches that Roscille sewed herself, trembling as the needle worked its way through gristle and fat.

"There is treachery in Glammis," he snarls. "I have known it—now there is proof. Tell me, now. Who has made this despicable assault on my wife?"

Fléance starts to speak, to explain, and Macbeth listens, though all the while he is opening his other hand and showing the necklace with its thick, heavy chain. He unwinds it, slow and deliberate. Roscille says nothing, her cheekbone burning from the unremitting press of his thumb.

A ruby gleams at the necklace's center. When he clasps it around her throat, the metal is hot, from being held so long in his hand. Macbeth lets go at last and steps back, appraising her. But the pride he should feel at robing his beautiful wife in beautiful things is sullied by that ugly bruise on her face. He makes a wordless noise of disgust.

"Tell me," he says again. "Who has done this? I will kill him. I will kill his sons. His line will end at the point of my sword."

"The men were masked," Fléance says. "I could not see—"

Macbeth draws himself up to his full, obscene, horrifying height. "Did they not strike you a near-death blow?"

"They did," Fléance says hesitantly.

Roscille notices Banquho peering over his Lord's shoulder. His gaze skims across his son, eyes fixing on the throat-wound that Fléance wears openly. Pride flickers in his eyes. Brisk, but unmistakable.

"Perhaps the traitors will not speak," Macbeth says. "It is no matter. There are rites which can be performed. Your blood will speak for them."