Chapter Four

Four

The chancellor is the highest and holiest of the Druides, and he comes all the way from Moray, where the king keeps his court. Such grave matters and such gruesome rituals cannot be left to the discretion of just any priest.

Roscille is not presented to him, not introduced, but she sees him from the parapet as he enters the courtyard. He is on horseback, flanked by three soldiers in Duncane's colors. He wears robes finer than her bridal linens, and his gray beard is braided with fillets of gold. This is when Roscille begins to feel the floor slip out from under her. She feels as if she is plunging down the sheer face of the cliff, down to where Hawise's body likely lies, where the eels are sucking dead flesh from her bones.

The chancellor is imbued with Duncane's royal authority and the pope's holy authority and the celestial authority of God himself, and any of them alone would be enough to divine her secret treachery, but all three together will not only discover but also punish her, such that even her flimsy alliance with Fléance will not save her. Fléance will face judgment, too.

Banquho and Macbeth are greeting the chancellor, but their words cannot be heard from such a distance. Roscille is trying to listen anyway, so she leaps in surprise when, suddenly, Fléance is at her side.

"You must not go near the hall when the Druide is here," he says. Close to her ear, his voice is a rasp. "Whatever you must do to stay away, do it."

"I know," Roscille whispers. Her fingers are trembling.

"He is here to perform cruentation."

"I know."

To perform cruentation, a priest must stand over a dead body and speak some sacred, secret rites. Then, in the presence of the murderer, the body's death wound will begin to bleed anew, to bubble over in hot, dark gouts. In Wrybeard's court, this is the stuff of primitive superstition, such that he would not tolerate. A fortnight ago she would not have feared it. But Roscille has been in Glammis long enough to know that the rules of nature are different here. Witches rattle chains in a prison under her feet. The world is so much wilder than she has known. Fléance's wound stands out against his throat,as black as a burned tree.

Roscille feels as though she is choking on her own veil. She wants to tear it off, to gulp in the cold, unobstructed air. But she cannot, when Fléance is here. Instead she breathes in short, painful gasps.

"I did not know cruentation could be performed on the living," Roscille says at last—only for something to say, because Fléance is looking at her with a furrow of concern between his brows.

"Yes," he replies. His voice is tight. "And if the chancellor speaks the words in your presence, my wound will reveal us. So you must stay away. At any cost."

Roscille nods. Her heartbeat is a feral thing, furious in its pounding. Her eyes trace the line of Fléance's scar again.

"And your father," she asks, through the thickness in her throat, "was he pleased?"

"He was," Fléance replied. "He did not apologize for leaving me behind, but next time—he swears it—I will be on the battlefield beside him."

The corner of Fléance's mouth twitches, as if he wants to smile. He looks boyish to her again, almost more now because of the scar, how its gruesomeness contrasts so sharply with his unlined, plump-cheeked face. She wonders if this is the way she looked to her father, as she knelt before him and begged to be given a different fate. A sensation of disgust winds its way through her belly, like a lamprey in its pool.

It is easier than she expected, to stay away. When Banquho comes to her and explains what will happen—the chancellor's mystic words, the ghastly spilling of blood—Roscille makes her face a mask of terror and feigns swooning. Oh, please, she says, I could not bear to witness it.

Banquho frowns as he catches her, his hard fingers holding tight to her slippery form. He is thinking: Here is a seventeen-year-old bride, new to these lands, doted upon by her father, raised in luxury; the most horror she has ever witnessed is the pricking of a needle. None of this is true, aside from her age and her greenness in Glammis, but she is a good liar, and Banquho is a willing audience. He does not want her there, either, his Lord's unfirm foreign wife, exuding witchcraft.

So Roscille does not meet the chancellor, but she sees the train of villagers as they are brought into the hall. Broken-toothed farmers with black gums, shepherds with stooped shoulders leaning heavily on their crooks, millers old enough to be missing most of their hair. They are all accompanied by sons, grandsons, with smaller, younger versions of their faces. The faces are weather-burned, like ancient leather. Their eyes are squinted and damp and filled with fear.

Roscille sits with her back against the wall outside the chamber, the stone leaching the heat from her body. She can hear muffled, indistinct words from the other side. Angry words, from her husband's mouth. And then the high-pitched, panicked pleading of the peasants. All of a sudden Roscille's legs cannot support her weight. She slides down, crumpling to the floor, knees pulled up to her chest.

Her mind writhes with possibilities, like maggots in rotten meat. Perhaps, when the chancellor speaks his words before one of the peasants—say this hunched, decrepit shepherd—Fléance's blood begins to run, not because of any divine power, but because Roscille's stitches were sloppy, because Fléance used his muscles too much before they were healed enough, for no reason, for any reason. Macbeth has said that he will kill the man and his sons and his grandsons. He will end their bloodline, cut it brusquely and bitterly, like the bodice of a protesting woman.

Here is another story: In the ancient world there was a war between the Greeks and their exotic Eastern enemies. The exotic prince killed the lover of one Greek soldier. The Greek soldier took his vengeance upon the prince. Then another Easterner killed the Greek soldier. Then the son of the Greek solder killed this Easterner. But he did not only kill the man: He killed his six sons, too. He dashed the head of the infant child against the castle walls, cracking its skull and pulverizing the yet-unformed brain beneath. This was so the Easterner's sons could never grow up and take revenge upon him.

Vengeance is not a wooden cup that empties. It is a jeweled chalice which endlessly spills over. Roscille puts her head between her knees. She fears she will be sick all over the floor. In her efforts to escape her husband's violence, she has only diverted it, flooded it to fill another vessel.

Strangely, here in the empty hall, her father's words return to her. You are whatever creature I make you. He sent her to Glammis as a bride, a limp body inside a white gown. But perhaps, disguised beneath the veil, he smuggled in an ermine after all. A clever creature—maybe. Or merely one with pitiless sharp teeth.

Hesitantly, Roscille lifts her veil and, with it, removes the real world. The gray stone of this windowless corridor shudders away. She slips into the memory easily, like a fish in a current.

It goes like this: Roscille is thirteen. The stories about her are only whispers, pale smoke at the edges of her vision. Other than that, she is beautiful; the Duke has high hopes that she will make a propitious match, forge a valuable alliance. She sometimes imagines herself being wed to a handsome Angevin prince, but such imaginings are distant, hazy. Now she thinks only of a certain stable hand, who has eyes like blue cut-glass and a furtive smile for her. She begins to linger around the stables, hoping to see his smile flash. The muscles of his back are strong, and where his sweat-damp tunic sticks to him, it shows every virile ridge.

Stable boys, of course, do not wed noble ladies, and noble ladies, unlike noblemen, cannot enjoy breezy couplings in haylofts with their servants. By then, Roscille has been taught not to make eye contact with a man, to keep her head down, just in case. The whispers have not yet solidified into truth. The rules are not rigid. There is no white veil to enforce them.

So one day, Roscille goes to the stables and takes the stable boy's hand. She lifts her head. She meets his eyes.

It is said that some memories are too appalling for the human mind to bear and are thus pitted with black holes, so that the miserable parts do not cut over and over again, like bits of shattered pottery, sharp on all sides. Roscille wishes she could remember this only in bearable flashes. But she remembers it all. The stable boy's eyes darkening. His grip on her hands tightening, pulling her body against his. Their lips, a whisper away from meeting.

And then a voice that comes from neither of them: the protest. The stable boy's hands unlatching from hers. He is hauled backward, and struck across the face by the stable master, and she hears the crack as his fine-boned nose breaks, skewing sideways, spraying blood.

Roscille screams.

He is brought to Wrybeard in chains. The Duke listens to the story, rubbing his long, twisted beard with ring-adorned fingers. Roscille shrinks into the corner of the hall, staring at the floor. Her terrible eyes prick with tears.

Her father's order is too low for Roscille to hear. There is only the choked gasp, and the splatter of something wet against the stone. By the time she looks up, all of it is cleared away: the boy's body removed, the stable master returned to the stables, her father's dagger back in its sheath.

The Duke approaches her. Maids are already scrubbing the red-dyed floor.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. Too afraid, now, to meet his gaze.

Her father extends his hand to her. It is the only time she can remember seeing it stained with blood. He does not ever dirty his hands over trivial things. Grim, quotidian violence can always be deferred to someone lower and weaker. Her father taught her this: Violence is like coin. If you spend it easily, people will think you imprudent and reckless. If you save it and spend it only in the most vital moments, people will think you canny as an ermine. For this, Roscille thinks her father the cleverest man in the world.

"Apologize for nothing," the Duke says. "The boy is dead. And you have taught yourself a better lesson than I ever could. Sometimes no words are as eloquent as the spilling of blood."

Roscille takes her father's hand and stands. Her knees are trembling. Her gaze does not leave the ground.

Soon after, there is the visit from le Tricheur and the fitting of the veil. After that, she is given Hawise as a handmaiden: a shield against the ravening appetites of men, if a fragile one. But this story is not a secret. This story is known to her father, and to the stable master, and to Hawise, and secondhand to most members of Wrybeard's court. The story is a good lesson, a good warning.

The secret is this: Roscille wanted the stable boy's hands on her hands and his lips on her lips. It was lust that overtook him, not madness. It was her desire, fed into his blood like poison from a barb. She wanted him and she made him want her back. That is the danger of her eyes. That they may compel men to do as she wishes.

If the truth were known, it would not be a veil and a bridal gown and a marriage to a faraway lord. It would be a noose or a blade or a pyre. To cause lustful madness is one thing—any beautiful woman has that power, if she wishes to exercise it, and even if she doesn't, even if such a thing can be called power—to mold a man to her will is another. Wrybeard could not save her, if the truth were known. Nothing could. And so she has been sent here, to the bleakest, grimmest brink of humanity, so that the world may be kept safe from her.

Roscille reassumes her veil. It flutters with the long breath she exhales. Then she rises and walks far away from the chamber, so she cannot hear her husband's anger, and so she cannot hear the peasants, begging for their lives.

She is lying curled on her side in the bed, staring at nothing. Well—she is staring at the blank stone wall. It is impossible to stare at nothing. But behind her eyes, her death-touched eyes, the same scenes are playing out over and over again. The stable boy's lips, so near to touching. Her father's blood-slicked hand. The shepherd hobbling into the chamber, his son and grandson at his side. Her husband, roughly grasping her face, turning it over like a bauble he wants to buy.

The door opens and Roscille shoots up. Macbeth enters. There is no blood on him she can see, and no coppery rust-smell blooms outward from his body. But his eyes are angry slits.

He strides toward her, and Roscille cannot help but flinch. Perhaps it is better that she does. All men like it when women cower.

"Did you find them?" she asks in a small, tremulous voice, as her husband towers over her. He is so enormous it is almost farcical, a droll god's study in extremes.

One of her first thoughts was that her husband is handsomer than she expected, for a man near twice her age, but rough, his edges craggy, like the cliffs of Glammis. It looks as if he grew right out of the rocks. Now Roscille thinks this again. There may as well be a stone pillar between her and the door.

"Fléance's wound did not bleed," he says. "Nor did he recognize any of the men that were brought before him."

Roscille swallows. "It is difficult," she says. "They were masked. And it all happened quickly."

"Of course." Macbeth does not speak for a long time. His gaze runs over her. He does not fear staring right into her eyes, through the veil. Then he says, "Your prize would suit you better if the chain were tighter."

Roscille's hand jumps to her throat, to the necklace. Before she can protest, Macbeth moves behind her, pushing aside her hair, unclasping the necklace and then clasping it again. He has made it so tight that it chafes with every movement, even just the drawing of a breath. Now she will never forget that she is wearing it.

"Thank you," she says hoarsely, as he steps away again. "I am blessed to have a husband who honors me in such a manner."

"Yes, I honor you, and I honor the ancient customs of Glammis."

Ancient. Roscille thinks of the three washerwomen. It occurs to her that perhaps he must honor these old traditions, that he is bound up to les Lavandières the same way they are chained in his basement. Perhaps if he does not abide the ancient ways of the land, their power will weaken. They will no longer be able to protect him or speak his prophecies.

This thought makes her braver. "You have fulfilled the first of my three wishes, and so swiftly."

The room is suddenly blanketed in silence. And then, to her shock, Macbeth sits down on the bed beside her.

Roscille's heart stutters with panic. But he merely lays a hand on the edge of her dress, as if to gently pin her in place, and his gaze looks past her, thoughtful.

"Lady Roscilla," he says, "do you know what it means to be a righteous man?"

That is what Macbeth means. Righteous one. It is not a patronym, as she initially thought. It is not his father's name, passed to him through birth and blood. It is one he has earned by his own actions.

In Breizh, to be righteous means to be pious, to accede to the directives of the pope, to take a priest into your rooms for counsel. Lord Varvek is not a righteous man, nor has he ever pretended to be one. He prefers to be the ermine, not the lion. He luxuriates in stories of his wily nature.

Macbeth is not a righteous man. He keeps witches for counsel. He is wed to a foreign hagseed. But perhaps in Glammis, righteous means something more.

"I am just a woman," Roscille says. "My mind is not disposed to wonder about such things."

Macbeth does not make a noise of agreement, but he does not dispute her, either.

"In Alba," he says, "to be a righteous man means to honor your oaths to your clan. I am Thane of Glammis, the head of clan Findlaích. It is my duty to protect my people and to always seek their advancement. But what am I to do when my clan does not honor me in return?"

Roscille blinks at him. Is he asking her for counsel? No, it cannot possibly be so. He is merely speaking to the air, and she is an incidental audience. At least, this is what she thinks, until Macbeth turns to look at her, his gaze serious.

"You must seek out those who truly honor you," she says, uncertainly. "And keep them close."

"Yes," Macbeth says. His fingers curl into the fabric of her dress. "I should hold you close, then—my clever wife, my loyal wife, who keeps my secrets and honors her vows."

It sounds like a compliment but it is a threat. She will only continue to be his wife if she continues to do these things, to be clever, to be loyal, to keep his secrets, to bow to him always. And if she is not his wife she will be Hawise, rotting at the bottom of the ocean.

Roscille nods.

"Good," Macbeth says. When he rises, his head nearly brushes the ceiling. "The chancellor's efforts at cruentation have failed, for now, and Fléance's memory fails him, too. I shall seek counsel elsewhere. I have no other choice. I must know where the treachery grows, and tear it out by its roots."

Roscille stays silent, perched on the edge of the bed.

"Come," says Macbeth.

And then she rises, too.

Roscille knows the path to the basement well, even after only one visit. She could feel her way down these narrow, twisting corridors in the dark. She needs only to listen to the nearing sound of the ocean, louder with every step, as if brushing against the floor that separates her from the sea, like the thin membrane between life and death, the earth and the underworld, as the Romans believed.

In Breizh, there is a story about a drowned city, Ys, which will rise again someday from the waves. Whoever first sees its church's spire or hears its bells will become king. And then Paris will be swallowed by the water and Ys will surge up to take its place. This story exists beyond the purview of the pope and has outlasted all of Christianity's civilizing efforts.

Of all the ancient tales, this is the one Roscille has heard the most, for it speaks to man's basest desire: that his enemies will be destroyed and that he may be the ruler of the world's new order. It is a very equalizing story, beloved by peasants and nobles both. Any man with the faculty of eyesight has a chance at becoming king.

As she walks, Roscille runs her hand along the wall, feeling the stone. She wonders if it is as old as Fléance claims. Her dress drags on the ground, making a second hushing sound, slightly out of rhythm with the waves beneath the floor. Macbeth walks without looking back. And, with every movement, the necklace rubs a red rash upon her throat.

Macbeth turns the last corner to the wood-rotted door and slips the key into the lock. Before he turns it, Roscille risks a question.

"Do they always speak prophecy to you?"

Macbeth turns, surprised but not displeased. "Sometimes it is prophecy. Sometimes it is counsel. But all counsel is prophecy, I suppose. A warning of what will happen if you do or do not act."

Perhaps her husband is wiser than the brute she has considered him to be. "Did they speak such to your father, as well?"

Then Macbeth's face shutters. She has ventured too far.

"You are not given to know this much, Lady Roscilla," he says. "This power is for the Thane of Glammis alone."

Yet he has answered her question anyway. The Thane of Glammis was his father, too, and his grandfather—this she learned back in Naoned, before they wed. Such a thing is rare in Alba, and even in Breizh. Titles are slippery things. Sometimes they fall out of a father's hands before they can be passed to his son. A birthright is never guaranteed. There have been whole generations extinguished in a single battle. Crowns and castles smuggled away, melted in the forge, burned to ash.

There is power in having held the same title for the span of three men's lives. But there is also danger. Time does not strengthen. It withers.

Macbeth opens the door and the cold salt air blows back her skirts. Her veil pushes itself into her mouth. She coughs and steps through the threshold into the cave's imperfect, distorted darkness. The torch in the center is still lit, and it casts strange patterns on the ceiling—no, not patterns, nothing that could ever be constellated or mapped or made reasonable. It is obscure. This is all she has been given to know.

The chains sing their inconsonant song, rattling like bells. They emerge from the darkness, pale and sudden as bolts of lightning. In the sallow glow, their white skin turns a nauseous, iridescent color, slick and sickly. The silvering that comes when meat has begun to rot. This time Roscille does not cross herself, even though the instinct rises.

Macbeth wades into the water. In the witches' hands, the fabric is so wet that it is translucent, showing the knobs of their finger bones. Over and over again, slapping the clothes in the water, lifting them, wringing them out. Letting them fall again. They do not appear to even notice Macbeth until he reaches the torch, and then they look up with their milky, unseeing eyes.

"Macbeth," the one in the center says. The teeth in her mouth are broken, but sharp.

"Macbeth."

"Macbeth."

He acknowledges each one. " Buidseach. Buidseach. Buidseach. The prophecy has been fulfilled. The Thane of Cawder is dead. I wear his mantle now."

"Then the Thane of Cawder lives," says the leftmost one. Her rasping voice has a wry amusement in it, as if she is delighting herself in the jest. It is the first time Roscille has thought of them as even remotely human. Serving their own purposes rather than merely acting as an extension of her husband's will.

"Yes," says Macbeth. The word curls from his mouth, a cold spiral. "But there is treason in Glammis. Someone in my own clan works against me."

The torchlight glimmers in the witches' eyes, like silver fish darting through murky water, showing themselves only in quick, bright bursts.

"Seek out treason," murmurs one.

"I do," says Macbeth. "But so far I have failed in finding it. What counsel will you give me?"

The witches murmur unintelligibly among themselves. Roscille wonders if they even know she is here. They have never given any evidence of it. Is her presence nothing, not even a shift in the currents of stale air?

"No counsel," the center one says at last. "Prophecy, again. Would you like to hear it?"

Macbeth's face is damp, icy condensation gathering on his beard. "Always."

"All hail Macbeth," the leftmost one says. "Thane of Glammis."

"All hail Macbeth," the rightmost one says. "Thane of Cawder."

There is a pause. Water drips somewhere in the silence.

"All hail Macbeth," the center one says. She raises her head to the ceiling, to the jutting rocks that pierce the air like daggers, to the water that falls like sand through the siphon of an hourglass. "King Hereafter."

And then they are slapping the water and shouting, in their unrestrained, freakish joy, as a stone hardens in Roscille's throat and drops down into her stomach, as Macbeth turns to her, a look of disbelief on his face, which soon molds to pleasure.

"All hail Macbeth!"

"All hail Macbeth!"

"All hail Macbeth!"

"You have heard it," Macbeth says, in breathy awe. " King Hereafter. Once told, the prophecy cannot be undone."

He returns to her, trudging through the water. The witches scream behind him, so loud that Roscille cannot believe it is not heard beyond these rooms, that it does not echo through the halls, their sound and fury signifying what carnage is to come.

Macbeth nearly slips on the steps, and thrusts his arm out to catch himself. Roscille does not know what possesses her to do this, but she reaches for him in turn, catching his arm, steadying him. The smile on her husband's face is almost innocent. But this innocence looks deranged in the darkness, with the witches howling, with their words turning the air smog-choked and filthy.

"Do you understand?" Macbeth asks, when he has righted himself. He holds both of her wrists in one hand, dragging her until their faces are close.

Roscille's heart flutters. "I am only a woman—"

"No," he says. His grasp on her is tight enough to bruise. "You are Lady Macbeth. Queen Hereafter."