Chapter Five

Five

Roscille slides her hand through the bars of the kennel and the dogs all press toward her, yipping and sniffing, rasping their rough tongues across her palm. A dozen mouths are snapping and sinewy with spittle. Pink tongues loll over curved yellow teeth.

She has always liked animals. They do not cringe from her, unlike men. Also, they are uncomplicated. Amoral. They are concerned with merely their own survival and the idlest of pleasures. Even if it means bringing misery—a rabbit's neck snapped in those powerful jaws, a rival male turned on his belly and made to whimper.

Roscille consoles herself that she is doing the same thing, surviving. Her fingers grow damp with the dogs' licking. Theymust be tasting the oil of the morning's meal on her skin. Yet the more she tells herself she is not terrible, the less she believes it. A dog is always terrible to the stag it has cornered or the fox it has treed. She removes her hand.

At least the steady flow of peasants to the castle has ceased. The prophecy has overtaken her husband's mind, made his fear of treason small by comparison. But what blood has been stemmed for now will be compensated soon; Roscille knows that.

King Hereafter. The dogs whine, pushing their muzzles against the bars.

As if her thoughts have summoned him, Macbeth enters the kennel. The wooden doors are barely parted, just wide enough for Roscille to slip through slantways, and he does not pause to push them open farther with his hands; he lets his large, puffed-out chest split them apart. Light falls in a single beam, striping the dirt.

She has been crouched and now rises to her feet. "My Lord."

He does not ask why his wife has been kneeling among the dogs. "Lady," he says. "Fléance tells me you have the letter."

A cold feeling spreads in her stomach. "Yes," she says. "Here."

Roscille reaches into the folds of her skirt and removes the sealed parchment. She has kept it on her person since the moment she first stamped the wax. She gives it to Macbeth and says, "Fléance helped me to compose it." Another thread tying them together.

Macbeth's fingers crumple the parchment. "You should learn to write in Scots; it is your tongue now. I will have one of the Druides come to teach you."

"Thank you, my Lord."

"It is nothing to thank me for. It is your duty."

Queen Hereafter. Roscille's throat swells, chafing beneath the gold chain. Her gaze follows the letter as it is placed in the pocket of her husband's cloak, as it vanishes. She had thought she had created a talisman of protection, something to hold back the spilling of blood on the battlefield or in the sheets of her marriage bed. But she has only created an instrument of violence.

Yet she could not have known that. The world was different, before the witches spoke their prophecy. Now every glance that passes between Macbeth and the king will be singed with smoke, touched with poison.

The lampreys circle and circle their small pool.

"I—I have not yet made my second request," Roscille stammers out.

Macbeth's brows arch. For a moment she is afraid she has misjudged her position; perhaps Macbeth is not bound to this ancient custom, as she thought. Or perhaps the prophecy has imbued him with such arrogance that he no longer cares for his shackles.

But he merely replies, "Then make it now."

This, still, is arrogance. He thinks there is nothing on earth he cannot have. Whatever Roscille says next will be no hurdle; it will only be a way for him to enhance his own status, prove his own strength. But she is not ignorant of these things. She has had many hours to deliberate, to choose her words. Her request is an apple, and the first sweet bite will not reveal its rotted core.

"You have beautiful, exotic creatures in Alba," she says. "Ones that I have never seen before. It would delight me to have a cloak, stitched from the furs of six different white animals."

The second request is a natural successor to the first. On the surface it still shows her seventeen-year-old innocence, the enduring indulgences of Wrybeard's court. Yet it also shows a change in her she thinks will please him. She wants a cloak born from the soil of Scotland. She wants to robe her body in the natural beauties of her new home. If she were a lady of Breizh before, one foot still in the Loire's ice-white waters, now she has begun to cross over, to set her other foot firmly in the rocky lands of Glammis.

And, too, it will show this: that she is not so eager to keep her husband from her bed. This request will seem simpler than the first, her girlish resistance eroded. Six white hides is a single hunting trip, one blustery foray in the woods and fields, spear-tips flashing, cheeks high in color. This can be accomplished in an afternoon.

Or so Macbeth will think. He smiles, pleased by all the things Roscille has arranged to please him.

"Very well," he says. "A white fur cloak. It will complement your color beautifully."

He raises a hand to her cheek. He is wearing gloves today, and the leather is soft as petals. A calf must have been slaughtered, to make leather so soft.

"Thank you," Roscille says.

Macbeth's hand slides from her face. Then he says, "Your father told me you had a certain fondness for animals."

Her skin pulses with heat, a pressure that might grow into panic. Why would the Duke pass along this petty piece of knowledge? Why would he imagine Macbeth might care to hear it? She can only think of that day in the stable. The blood gleaming on her father's hand; the boy's invisible death. Has he told this story to Macbeth? How much has her husband been given to learn?

Roscille's silence lasts long enough that Macbeth narrows his eyes. "Was Wrybeard wrong in his accounting?"

"No," she manages. "He was not wrong."

In Macbeth's presence the dogs have gone quiet, whimpering in the corner of the kennels. They must remember the feeling of his boot against their bellies, his lashes on their haunches. Roscille feels sorry for them.

"Well," Macbeth says, rolling back his shoulders. "Dress in your finest. The king is coming."

The king is coming, and the castle is bracing itself for his arrival as a warrior girds his body for battle. The king is coming, and Roscille can do nothing but put on her loveliest gown and softest slippers. She spends a long time deciding whether or not to cover her hair. It is not the tradition, in Glammis, as these last days have taught her. But Duncane is very pious. He is what the Brezhon would consider a righteous man. He keeps the chancellor in gold-limned habits and invites him into his strategy room for counsel, to ensure that each war he fights is a holy one. It would please him to know that Roscille is observing a married woman's proper Christian modesty, though she fears it will anger her husband if she chooses the king's preference over his.

Queen Hereafter. Roscille opens the trunk at the foot of her bed and retrieves her gray-blue gown. It is in the style of Wrybeard's court, but there has not been time to sew her any dresses adhering to the customs of Glammis. Roscille does not even know what such a gown would look like. There are no other ladies here.

Dressing without Hawise is still difficult. In the end, she chooses to leave her hair loose and uncovered, but to reassume the heavier bridal veil. Duncane will surely want another layer of protection against her death-touched stare. He knows the stories. He tracks witchcraft like a hound.

She is still unnerved by Macbeth's question at the kennel. All this time she has thought no one in Glammis clever; she has thought herself a lonely ermine among grunting boars. Now she is beginning to think her husband has his own wiles, masked by a brutish exterior. And there is nothing more dangerous than a creature who pretends to be one thing and is in truth another.

This time the bridal veil is a reassuring weight. She does not want to see these men, any of them. Roscille feels she can no longer trust her own eyes. There is another world, spreading cold beneath the one she has always known. Dark water and darker words. Bloody auguries. The stones of civilization have been built upon raw, perverse madness.

Roscille does not greet the king in the courtyard; she stands in the castle's main chamber, with Fléance, as Duncane and his party are led through the twisting halls. Fléance's scar is turning blue-white, but it is still raised and ugly enough that anyone who looks at him will marvel at how his life was nearly stolen. A falsehood, of course, but what does it matter? Most of the things men care about are their own inventions—titles, honors, crowns—imposed upon the world.

"The chancellor will perform no more cruentation," Fléance murmurs. "We are safe."

Roscille opens her mouth to reply, but then the archway to the main hall clusters with bodies. Her husband is first and largest by far. Banquho is at his side, his right hand. Then comes a smattering of soldiers, dressed curiously unlike the Scotsmen that they are, bereft of tartan, their hair and beards short.

Then comes Duncane. He is so small and hunched that she nearly misses him among his men. Stoop-shouldered, he looks old enough to be grandfather or great-grandfather. His short beard is patchy and leaden gray. When he comes into the torchlight, Roscille can see the pockmarks on his cheeks, the red blisters on his nose, the rheumy brightness of his wind-scalded eyes. He stops a moment to cough. Two of his men help him up onto the dais, where he sinks immediately into Macbeth's chair.

An t-llgarach, he is nicknamed in Scots. The wasting. There is no name for his affliction, and no cause. It is said he had the vigor of a man half his age until one day he was struck down, as if with a plague from God. But this cannot be divine punishment. It must be merely a cruel accident of nature. Duncane is God's loyal servant and powerful soldier. Yet Roscille cannot imagine the man before her penning the vicious treatise she has read.

The fearfull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of the Wytches, or enchaunters, hath moved me to dispatch this following treatise of mine. My intention in this labour is to prove only two things: The one, that such devilish arts have been and are. The other, what exact trial and severe punishment they merite.

It is still a wonder to Roscille how Macbeth could be convinced to marry such a creature as her, and how he has the recklessness to show her openly to a king who abhors witches with every sickly drop of blood in his body.

Macbeth knows better than to grimace at seeing the king sit in his chair. He says, "My wife, the Lady Roscilla."

Duncane lifts his bleary gaze to her. When he speaks, it is with a clarity that is belied by his weak state and by the dead skin gathered in the corners of his mouth.

"I do not know why you are moved always to marry such troublesome women," he says. "But I trust you to keep your new wife as biddable as the first."

New? Roscille's mind stumbles through his words. She isMacbeth's second wife? No one has told her this. Was her father even told? And what has happened—she must know, she must —to the first Lady of Glammis, the other Lady Macbeth?

"Roscille is docile as a lamb," her husband says.

Her heart is beating fast at this revelation. There must be a reason such vital information was kept from her. Perhaps the first Lady Macbeth died of illness; perhaps her husband mourns too much to speak of her.

But Roscille cannot make herself trust such banal thinking. Not when her husband keeps a whole second world hidden beneath his castle, witches in chains, forced to parrot out his prophecies. He is slippery like the cold side of a cliff. And layered, like striated bands of erosion, green and white and rust-colored lash-marks of the sea. Each time she thinks she knows him, the water level lowers, and another shade is revealed.

Roscille is panicking silently, privately, when two more men enter the hall.

They are as different as the seasons of winter and summer. There is one shorter, stockier, with a copper-colored beard and hair. His face is pleasantly ruddy, as if his journey herewas a vigorous one on horseback rather than sheltered inside a carriage. His gait is robust and eager. He clops to the dais and sits beside the king, cracking his proud jaw open with a yawn. He cannot be anything other than a prince.

"My Lord," he says, nodding to Macbeth. "And Lady. Thank you for receiving us."

"My son," Duncane says, "Evander."

Evander, the Latin variant of a common Scottish name. Iomhar, Ivor, he could choose to go by either. Yet the king chooses Latin. This is not insignificant.

The second man is a prince, too. The king has two sons. But this man does not walk in the assiduous manner of a prince, and he does not sit beside his father. Instead, he stands at the edge of the dais, dark where his brother is light, sallow where is brother is sun-reddened.

"My elder son," the king says. "Lisander, prince of Cumberland."

Lisander, too, is a strange name for a Scot. His mother (dead now, felled on the birthing bed), some half cousin of ?thelstan, was very pious. ?thelstan is now calling himself rex Anglorum, king of the English, and he has the dispensation of the pope to do it. Perhaps these names are to appease his dead mother's people. In Angevin he would be Landevale, in Norse, Launfale. In Brezhoneg, Lanval.

He is very handsome. Tall, but not bulky. When he does move there is a stunning grace to his limbs that makes Roscille think of the capal-uisce, the water horse that takes the form of a man and seduces maidens to follow him into the drowning drink. (If the serpent-woman Melusina had a mate, it would be such a creature, she thinks.) The prince's hair is black and shines like the sea under moonlight. His features are fine—almost delicate, in a way men usually are not.

It is a beauty that would be well appreciated in Breizh, or Anjou, or even Paris, a beauty that would make kitchen girls go weak in the knees, that would make them trip and stumble just to put themselves in the path of his gaze. But here in Alba, Roscille knows it must be the subject of disparagement and suspicion, even greed. What sort of man is twenty and bears no marks of battle? One whose crown has been given to him like a child is given a toy. One whose crown might be taken from him just as easily.

It is true, the prince has no scars Roscille can see. It is strange to look at skin so immaculate after spending weeks observing only her husband and his men, all of them scraggly and loutish with old wounds. The prince's face is beardless, pale, and unmarred save for the deep, dark circles under his eyes. He looks very, very tired.

"My Lord." Lisander nods to Macbeth. And then he turns to her. "Lady Roscille. What they say is true. You are so beautiful the moon itself is shamed from rising."

Roscille. Her Brezhoneg name. Its familiar syllables have not caressed her ears in so long. If the Duke's courtiers could see her now, they would know that she can indeed blush.

"I had not heard the prince of Cumberland was a poet," she says, face warm.

"I am barely a prince, and even less a poet."

The room falls into a discomfiting silence. Duncane's succession is a matter still left unsettled, though it is a mystery as to why. Lisander is the elder; by the laws of any kingdom his head should be next to wear the crown. Yet Duncane has not proclaimed this.

Is he sickly? Roscille wonders. Like his father? But no, he cannot be. Duncane would swiftly have passed over an ailing son and onto the next. Even a bastard might be named, if the first legitimate child were so enfeebled—the Scots would understand; there is no pity spared for a crippled horse or a hen that cannot lay. Evander would have been named and all questions put to rest. But he has not been, and so despite his sallow, tired face, it cannot be that the prince of Cumberland is in ill health.

Banquho clears his throat, ending the unnerving silence. "My lords. I hope your journey was not too rough."

"Not so rough, no," Evander says. "We stopped over and took rest at the keep of Macduff. A day's ride away."

Roscille does not miss the way Macbeth stiffens at this name. She wonders if there is some private discord between him and this other lord, or if he merely bristles at any man who keeps close company with the king.

"Your chambers have been prepared," Banquho says. "I hope tonight will prove restful as well."

Evander then begins to thank his hosts, to speak of stag hunts and suppers, and of course ceremonies, to officially name her husband Thane of Cawder. Lisander is quiet and still. The gulf between the brothers seems vaster now than ever. It should be the elder son making such arrangements, dealing in pleasantries. What strange circumstances have occurred, to reverse their roles in a manner so extreme?

From beneath her veil, Roscille watches Lisander. She thinks she is being furtive, but evidently she is not—his gaze darts to her, as though he can feel her stare. His eyes are as green as a serpent's tail and, set within his ashen face, curiously gemstone-bright.

It is then that her husband reaches into the pocket of his cloak and retrieves the letter. Her letter. Roscille's blood grows cold. He passes the parchment to the king, whose hand rises, trembling, fingers carbuncled with gold rings. It is a long time before those thin fingers finally manage to grasp the letter. He stares down at it, blinking, straining to clear the moisture from his eyes but cannot.

"Father," Lisander says. He steps forward, and without another word the king gives him the letter. The necklace seems to tighten around Roscille's throat. Lisander breaks the seal and unfurls the paper.

"This was discovered among the Thane of Cawder's things," Macbeth says. "For a long time treachery has grown like rot in Cawder. I believe this to be proof."

Lisander's eyes skim the page. Roscille's cheeks are warm. He might as well be staring at her with equal scrutiny; she feels the heat of his gaze as if it were running over her instead of the paper. Fléance directed her, but perhaps there is still something about her penmanship that gives away the ruse. Perhaps there is something irrepressibly womanlike about her hand. Or perhaps it is merely that Lisander's senses are not dulled like his father's. No sickness of the body leaves the mind untouched.

Duncane has been living this posthumous existence for years, since at least the births of his sons. There is the mark of a trephine on his forehead: the place where a Druide sliced into his skull to let the evil spirits seep out. It has not worked, and now he will wear this mortifying blemish forever, until his dragging, miserable death. There is no honor in dying of disease.

At last Lisander looks up. "The writer professes displeasure at your rule," he says. "But only in the vaguest terms—there is no firm plan to unseat the House of Dunkeld."

Roscille blushes more furiously. She wrote the letter in vagaries on purpose—she feared the minutiae might be her ruin—but now Macbeth's gaze has snapped to her, just for amoment. The same fear from her wedding night fills her body, cold and familiar, like water flooding its accustomed tributaries.

Duncane stares into the middle distance—stares at nothing, stares at the dust-choked air. He says, "Better to kill the serpent while it is still in its shell."

A slow, pleased smile overtakes Macbeth's face.

"I knew I carried out your will," he says. "If any snakes remain in Cawder, I will snap their spines and break their teeth."

The king nods. It is a painful gesture to observe, his head bobbing precariously on his scrawny neck.

"That is my will indeed," he rasps.

Suppers, ceremonies. No stag hunts—yet. Roscille cannot help but wonder when Macbeth will set out to fulfill her second request. She reassures herself that it will not be at least until Duncane is gone. He is otherwise too occupied.

They are sitting in the main hall, which has been reconfigured to accommodate the presence of the king. There is a longer table on the dais, with enough room for Duncane and his sons, and Macbeth, and Roscille, and then Banquho at the very end. Duncane is at the center, but not really. There is an even number of occupants, so there is no true middle—well. The true middle would be somewhere between Macbeth and Duncane. Right now, the center is a blank space, empty of all but breath and air.

Roscille takes decorous bites of her stew, which is difficult from under the thick mesh of the veil. She has not removed it, scarcely even lifted it; she is afraid to, in Duncane's presence. Yet it allows her to look where she pleases, without drawing another's notice. She looks down the table at Lisander, who leaves his food mostly untouched. He watched her before—she knows she did not imagine it—but his eyes do not find her now.

She wonders about the dark bruises under those eyes. What keeps the prince of Cumberland awake at night? Is he bookish, pious like his name suggests, hours at some philosophical toil until the candles burn down to their ends? Perhaps. Does he amuse himself, as so many men do, with women—servinggirls and pleasure slaves? This is harder to imagine. It would certainly displease his father, Duncane, the righteous man. And for some reason the thought displeases her, too. It winds a strange, deep-green, serpentine feeling through her belly.

He is half English—is he ?thelstan's lion, noble and preeminent? Perhaps the unicorn of his father's blood, mystic andpure? The bold stag of Ireland, or the scaled dragon of Wales? All these free, wild creatures, stamped with the virtues of men. From the way his gaze cuts through the room so cleanly, she wonders if he is the ermine of Breizh, canny, a master of disguise. There is something glimmering behind his eyes that she cannot flush out. She watches him until his gaze lands upon her, finally, and then she turns away, her skin prickling.

The endowment of Macbeth's new title amounts to this: Her husband kneels before the king. The king makes the sign of the cross with his trembling, jewel-thick fingers. His crown, a plain iron circlet, barely disguises the mark of trepanation on his forehead. The contrast between this simple crown and the thick, gleaming rings is poignant, even from a distance. Roscille will later learn these rings are more function than decoration, that they keep the king's trembling fingers from slipping out of their joints. Weakness, dressing up as strength.

"Thane of Cawder," he says. "Rise."

And Macbeth does, his largeness dwarfing the king. It casts a sheen of absurdity upon the ritual, making it perverse. A wolfkneeling to a sheep. He takes his seat, and the meal goes on, mostly in silence. Roscille turns to Lisander again. The prince of Cumberland who dared to speak to her in Brezhoneg.

There is no reason for him to know her language, and yet he does. She imagines Lisander speaking it again: not only what he would say, but the shape his mouth would make when saying it, the flicker of his tongue across his lips, the quick white flash of his teeth. She wants to bathe herself in the clear blue waters of Brezhoneg diphthongs and vowel sounds, cleaning off the grime of Scotland. To do it she would have to strip off all her clothes, the veil, the ruby choker, and reveal her flesh to the air. Thinking of these things while looking at the prince of Cumberland makes her face grow hot. She has to avert her eyes.

When the banquet is done and the servants are carrying away the trays, Evander speaks with Banquho, arranging for tomorrow's hunt (much wine has been imbibed between them and their voices are loud, syllables scraping the ceiling). The king is helped down from the dais by his two chamberlains, who all this time have kept their swords sheathed at their sides. The king himself is not armed. No one will indulge the fantasy that he is strong enough to wield a blade.

"Are your accommodations satisfactory?" Macbeth asks.

Duncane blinks. "My chambers, yes. But for my son, a room without a window."

He indicates Lisander, who says nothing to confirm or deny this. A room without a window? Both Roscille and her husband are silenced by such a bizarre request. All of the explanations that her mind supplies are hollow and trivial: that he cannot sleep with the sound of the wind so close, that the salt air makes him sick, that he has a fear of heights and does not want to be reminded of how steep the cliffs are upon which the castle of Glammis sits. Lisander's expression gives nothing away.

After a moment, Macbeth says, "A room courtyard-side, then. I will have my servants show the way."

They depart: the king, his chamberlains, Lisander, Evander, Fléance, and Banquho. The room empties of all other occupants, even the scuttling servants. Roscille and her husband are alone. The air is greasy with the smells of the feast, thick with odors of wine and men's sweat. She adjusts the necklace at her throat; the rash is growing beneath the gold.

When the footsteps of the other men have faded, Macbeth turns to her.

"You nearly dishonored me," he says. "With that letter."

His voice is rough and low. Anger shows in the lines of his face, the lines that remind her that he is twice her age, that he had a wife before her ( how, who? ). Roscille's heart stutters.

"I am sorry, my Lord," she says. "I did not know—I did not mean—"

"The prince of Cumberland is too clever," Macbeth cuts in. "There is a chance he has seen through the ruse. And all because your hand faltered. It was on your advice that I accused Cawder of treachery."

She is shocked to hear him admit it, that he acted upon her directive. That this was arranged by her hand. Roscille draws a breath, trying to steady herself.

"I am sorry to have failed you," she says softly. "Please, my Lord, tell me what I can do to make it right."

She has barely finished speaking before Macbeth grabs her by the arm. He drags her toward him. Roscille closes her eyes and ducks her head, biting her lip on a whimper.

She will be struck: She has seen it done a hundred times to women, by their husbands or fathers or brothers, by their lovers or their masters. One of the Duke's courtiers showed Hawise the back of his hand and for a week a violet bruise pulsed on her cheek, and every time Roscille looked at it she was filled with a sick, fettered anger. Roscille has never been struck, having been a noble lady, a dutiful daughter and heretofore wife. She was foolish enough to believe that the Duke would never allow such a grievous assault upon her person. But the father she thought she knew has shriveled and vanished from this earth. He is, at most, a ghost—nothing solid enough to put between Macbeth's hand and her cheek.

But her husband does not strike her. Instead, he tears the veil from her face. She is so shocked she cannot help crying out, a short, bitten-off sound. Before she can move or truly speak, Macbeth's broad, hard-callused hand claps over her eyes. Blinding her completely. The world is black, swimming with bleary stars.

His other arm holds her around the middle and pins her back to his chest. His mouth is close to her ear. His voice dampens the nape of her neck.

"I know what you are," he rasps. "Witch-marked, they call you, hagseed, but no. You are more than just an unlucky maiden, cursed with supernatural beauty. Your wiles are beyond those of a duke's bastard daughter. I know witchery. I cansmell the power on you like smoke from a pyre. That flesh-burning scent. You do not enchant by accident. You compel."

"Please." A rising sob chokes the word. "I have no power."

"You will not lie to me," he snarls. "You are my lady wife."

Her mind falls through the cracks in the floor. It flounders in deep waters. "I would never harm you, my Lord, I swear it. Please. I am no spy, no traitor—"

A sudden laugh, spittle against her cheek. "Harm me? I do not think you spy or traitor—if you were, Wrybeard would better disguise you."

"He would not…" Tears sting her eyes. "My father would never betray an ally or broker a false peace."

But she does not know that. Her father has become obscure to her. You are whatever creature I make you. Yet blinded like this, she cannot see her own hands, whether they are sullied with blood. She feels the points of her teeth—are they sharp or dull? Perhaps all of this is occurring at her father's design, a plan deeper and more devious than she can fathom—or perhaps she wants to believe there is a strategy behind it, because that is more bearable than the thought that her father has merely thrust her down the cliff to drown.

Macbeth's hand is so large that it covers her nose, too. She can only breathe through her mouth, and she gulps as a fish starved for water.

"Think no more of your father," he says. "You are not a lady of Breizh anymore. You are a lady of Alba, of Glammis, of Cawder. Lady Macbeth. And if you choose it, you can be more."

She cannot see, but her other senses rally to her like men-at-arms, and hold up the workings of her mind like a spoil of war: blood. She tastes it on her tongue. She smells it in the air. She feels it gather on her palms and hears it drip down onto the floor.

"More?" she manages.

Macbeth retracts the arm that has been holding her middle. Slowly, almost tenderly, he reaches up to stroke the hair back from her face.

"You are my wife," he says again. Lower, now, almost a whisper. "Your purpose is yoked to my own. And I am not infirm of purpose. I am sanctioned by prophecy. There is not a man who would squander what is his right."

Roscille swallows. The ruby presses against her throat. " King Hereafter. "

"Yes." Macbeth breathes the word. "And now you are the dagger in my hand."