Chapter Six

Six

The veil is torn and it cannot be repaired. Macbeth leaves her, and Roscille stumbles through the dark halls, keeping her eyes on the ground. Beneath her feet, the water rises, meets the floor, and dissipates again, into tongues of foam that she can hear, for the way they simmer like grease.

She remembers how the king's hands shook as he struggled to lift his goblet to his mouth, how the wine spilled from the open corners of his lips, droplets that stained his jerkin. King Duncane (a righteous man) would not suffer a witch to live. That he tolerates the presence of Roscille (hagseed) is a miracle. Now Macbeth is asking her to steal the merciful breath from his lungs.

She will not do this. She cannot. She may be witch-marked, she may be cleverer than her sex allows, but she is not a murderer. Her single enchantment was a mistake, a folly of youth, one that colored her father's hands, not hers. But perhaps even this is absolution she does not deserve. Not once did she raise her voice to stop her father's dagger. Not once did she consider how she might have damned him, this inconsequential stable boy, by inviting his peasant lips to soil her noble face.

Perhaps it is not cleverness that seeps through the generations but cruelty. One cold creature weaning another.

Roscille's staggering footsteps take her to the parapet, where she breathes in dense, frigid night air. She can smell the salt that dries in white blisters on the black rock. She can hear the roiling tide. The wind on her cheeks is surprisingly painful; they have been turned raw with tears and, for the first time since arriving in Glammis, her face is bare, unprotected, unleashed. She presses her hands to her burning cheeks. Her palms are like two stones.

She looks down the sheer face of the cliff. She imagines Hawise's body tripping down it, and then she replaces Hawise with herself, her torn veil floating like a jellyfish, her hair spreading like seafoam. The water swallows this imagined Roscille in half the length of a heartbeat. It is fast and bleak and final.

It is difficult to hoist herself onto the balustrade, because the stone is cool and slippery and her hands are cool and slippery and her arms are river weeds, trembling. Her ripped veil blows around her face, snatched by the wind.

Now she imagines her body joining Hawise's on the seafloor, their bones curling together like mollusks. Her deathful eyes will be eaten out of her skull by the fish, her flesh sucked by the eels. Her heart rocks as though on a pendulum, swaying between comfort and terror.

A voice, behind her, as sudden as a clap of thunder. "Lady Roscille?"

Brezhoneg. Hearing her native tongue turns her blood to wine, florid and sweet. The shock of it unbalances her, feet slipping against the stone. Her fingers grasp for purchase and find only air. The black water surges up at her. But before she can fall forward, down the cliff and into the sea, a pair of strong arms lock around her waist.

"Close your eyes," comes that same low voice.

She does. Lisander lifts her gently down from the parapet, as if she is weightless, gripping her under her knees and her shoulders—it is what in Breizh they call the bridal carry, which would seem befitting to an outsider, with her tattered veil now draped loosely over them both, if they did not know she was not only not a bride, but another man's wife.

Lisander sets her on her feet again. Her knees are still weak beneath her.

"Whatever he has done," Lisander says, "it is not worth this."

Her eyes are still shut, but of course he can see her, the torn veil, the tears on her cheeks. In that moment she is any woman whose husband has handled her too roughly. Lisander need not know what words passed between them. He has no reason to think they spoke of magic, of murder. Of treason against his father. Perhaps she should make showier tears. Let him believe her no more than a misused wife.

"Please," she whispers. "Don't tell my husband."

"I won't." A pause. "Yet it would please my father to know he treats his second wife as brutishly as his first."

Roscille thinks of King Duncane's treatise on witches. 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. Perhaps she has misjudged the degree of his mercy. Perhaps he gladdens to see a witch-marked woman wed to a man who might as well be her jailer; perhaps this is the severe punishment of which he wrote.

Second wife. When Roscille speaks, her voice is far more tremulous than she wants it to be. "And was his first wife a hagseed, too?"

Silence. Roscille wishes she could see his face. His serpent-green eyes, and the tired bruises under them.

"Some men like to see all women treated brutishly, no matter their nearness to witchcraft," he says at last. "But your husband does make a habit of choosing wives with their own…mythologies. It vexes my father, yes."

King Duncane, who robes his Druides in gold.

"Does it vex you?" she asks.

He exhales, sounding almost amused. "My father is heartier than he looks. You need not worry about what I think."

"I only meant the opinion of today's prince," she says. "Not tomorrow's king. Today's barely-prince," she adds.

Her angling is not subtle at all, and she does not really expect Lisander to give her the answer she seeks.

"You wonder whose head will wear the crown," he says. "The younger son, who has the nobility of a lion and the golden graces of a storybook knight, whose only defect was being born second, or the elder, whose grim presence makes men shrink from him, whose only asset is the order of his birth."

Roscille draws a breath. She had not thought he would state it so baldly.

"I know what it is," she says, "to see men shrink from you."

She feels the air shift, the coldness evaporating. Warmth seeps between their bodies, but it is a strange warmth, less like the blaze of an open flame and more like living flesh, heated by the blood pulsing below.

"I imagine so," he says softly. "Just as I imagine you are well aware—Glammis is not a safe place for women like you."

Her heart skips. "Tell me of her. The wife who came before."

But before Lisander can speak, there is some commotion in the hall. Footsteps and distant voices, voices she doesn't recognize—perhaps the guards in Duncane's retinue. With one hand on her shoulder, Lisander maneuvers her from the center of the corridor to the wall, pressing them both to the cool stone.

"Time escapes us," he says. "But—Lady Roscille. If your lord husband puts his hands on you, whisper to me the ugly deeds he does in the dark, and I will stop him."

Unexpectedly, his words land like an arrow, lodged painfully between her ribs. It is not the purview of a prince, the way a noble lord treats his wife. Surely it would be taken as a great offense. Surely Duncane would not allow it—allow his son, even the less preferred one, to disgrace himself by coming to the defense of a witch. He is prince, not king, not emperor. What right does he have to rescue the slave from his death by the eel's teeth?

"Why?" she manages. "Why dishonor yourself for my sake? Why risk your birthright?"

A stretch of silence, the night warping and shifting around them.

"Because," Lisander says at last, "I do not wish to see you live without shelter." He pauses. "And because the crown is not mine to lose."

They depart, each for their own windowless room. She opens her eyes at last, and they ache. It feels as if her lashes have turned inward, stabbing at the soft whites. She unclenches her fingers and the tattered veil falls to the ground. She watches it drift down, lace draping itself over stone.

Three things she has learned, from this exchange.

The first: Her husband has a proclivity for witch-women.

The second: He will not hesitate to replace one witch-wife with another.

Roscille imagines the fate of the First Wife, imagines her like Hawise, smothered by the black waves. She cannot be sure, of course, that the First Wife drowned. But it is the easiest death, in Glammis, where the sea is always here, always churning, and always hungry. If Roscille does not please Macbeth, she will share this fate. It is the dagger in her hand, or it is death by her husband's orchestration. Glammis is not a safe place for women like you. Macbeth is like Wrybeard, in this respect. All things in this castle must serve him.

The third: Lisander wishes to protect her. Yet this is a flimsy piece of knowledge; mostly, the prince of Cumberland is still a mystery to her. She should have been below his attention, just another lord's misused wife. He must have seen hundreds of them by now, girls cringing in their white cornettes, thighs freshly bloodied, or old matrons whose mouths have shrunken into their faces. His own mother was likely one of them. If ever he has a daughter, she will be the same.

She does not know why he stepped between her and death. And at the heart of things, she cannot be certain that he will again. He told her he had no inheritance to lose—but without the promise of a crown, what power does he have, truly, to save her?

Roscille leans over and rests her forehead against the castle's stone wall. In the theater behind her eyelids, she watches the eels circle in their pool. She hears the cut-off scream of the stable hand as he dies. And she thinks, perhaps, the poison has already seeped through, turning her heart black.

Roscille has never been in her husband's chamber before. It is half again as big as hers, with a large window, gridded in iron. Right now, it is morning, and she slept only in choking stops and starts, and the rheumy gray light that leaks through the windows makes her vision ripple. She has replaced her torn veil with another one, and she is grateful for the screen it provides between her stinging eyes and the world.

Behind her there is a bear-rug, identical to the one in her room. The same immortal snarl, the same yellow teeth. Perhaps they were a pair, mates, slain by twin spears.

The bed is behind Macbeth, and it, too, is half again as big as hers. Large enough, easily, to hold both of them at once. Seeing it makes Roscille's stomach roil and churn. She reminds herself of her husband's vow, this ancient rite he must observe. She still has two requests left. Two impossible tasks separating her from blood-slicked sheets.

Where the light streams through the window grate, it makes a thatched pattern on the floor. There are a mere two squares of light between her and Macbeth. When he exhales, her veil ripples.

"Tell me," he says. "Tell me how you will do it."

It has all been laid out for her, like a map unfurled across the council table. His plan, his words, snuck into her brain. Roscille draws a breath.

"I will go to the king's chamber in the dead of night." Her voice is a whisper. "I will ensorcell his chamberlains. I will kill him."

"And tell me why I cannot do this myself."

"Because," she says softly, "when the king is found dead, the chancellor will perform the rite of cruentation. And when the words are spoken over Duncane's body, the death wound will start bleeding in your presence."

He lifts a hand, cups her cheek. "Exactly. And I will be sure to keep you far from the chamber. No one will suspect a woman capable of such violence."

When spoken aloud, it sounds so easy. Oversimple. But this plan is porous with black spaces, all of which Roscille may fall through. What if she cannot ensorcell the chamberlains? She has done it only once before, that day in the stable, and never since. She does not know the margins and contours of her power. What if she cannot kill the king before he cries out and alerts someone? What if she cannot bring herself to deliver the death blow?

And then there is Lisander, his words curling in the shell of her ear. I do not wish to see you live without shelter. Not even a promise, merely a desire—and if no vow was spoken, can she truly betray him?—yet a knife twists between her ribs when she thinks of him.

All she can manage to say is, "I am afraid of failing you, my Lord."

His thumb brushes her cheekbone, a fraction of an inch below her eye. "You will not fail. Do you remember? Your purpose is sanctified. The witches have spoken their prophecy. I did not fail in Cawder, did I?"

She shakes her head.

"Then your hand will not falter, either."

Roscille cannot bring herself to look at him. She merely nods, gaze on the ground. "Yes, my Lord."

His hand leaves her face, travels down her throat, until he grips the chain of the necklace. The ruby catches between his finger and his thumb.

"I drove my sword true," he rasps. "Cawder's blood was so thick and hot as it covered me that I thought I might never be clean again, my jerkin and my tartan, all soaked. My hands, red enough to shame a saint. And yet I did not hesitate; I do not regret. It is the way of the world, violence."

Men are all keen to say this, Yes, it is my will that is right, my desire that is natural, all things arranged to my pleasure. Even the Duke, who is more miserly with his violence, is no different. She envisions her father's hand again, slick to the touch with blood.

"I brought back this title for myself and this necklace for you," Macbeth goes on, quietly. "Two hungers sated with one act. And this will be the same. Queen, hereafter."

She wants to close her ears to his voice. She does not want to think that she has started this, set it all in motion with one request, for the ruby that now chafes painfully against her throat. Her fear, transfigured by her husband's appetites, made swollen and monstrous with his greed. All because she could not bear to submit herself to him like all the world's women have before. This is the cruelty that her father's seed engendered. The wickedness, growing long green tendrils through her veins.

When she looks down at her hands, for a moment she sees red. Red and red and red. Her heart gives a horrified jolt. But when she blinks, they are pale again, unblemished and saintly white. They will not remain this way. She tucks her hands back into the trumpet sleeves of her gown, so that they vanish from her sight.

"Yes," she whispers back at last. "It will be so."

First she must survive another supper with the king. This one is for Macbeth and his treasured guests only. There is Banquho, of course. And Fléance. Her actions have ensured him a place at the table beside his father, proudly wearing his garish new honor-wound.

Yet—it is now Roscille who sits at her husband's side. Not the man who has been his right hand. She can feel Banquho's gaze on her all evening, his anger scorching her skin. He has been displaced, the order of his world made unfavorable and bizarre.

King Duncane sits at the table's head, and he is having trouble eating, dribbling wine on his jerkin, the food falling before he can put it into his mouth. It is horrible to watch, his helplessness, his infirmity. Roscille stares down at her plate. Macbeth leans away, as if the king's shame is catching. Or perhaps it is only the knowledge that this is the last time he will see Duncane alive.

Yet whatever guilt he feels now will not buffet him from his course.

"We will hunt tomorrow," Evander—Iomhar—says. "Banquho says the sun will be high. A rare thing, in Glammis!" He laughs loudly, and the huge empty room throws the sound back at them. Roscille flinches.

"Good weather portends a fruitful hunt," Banquho says.

There will be no hunt. Tomorrow there will only be a cold body and grieving sons and a kingdom breaking apart like the ground over a tree's new roots.

Lisander sits at the other end of the table, in a good position for her to watch him. As before, he eats very little, and does not say much, but his quick-darting gaze shows that he listens intently to the words passing around him. And every so often, he does glance toward Roscille. Her skin heats when he does, blood drawing close to the surface.

Can she risk confessing? Can she speak of her husband's intent and let the king clap him in chains? Lisander said he would protect her—but that does not mean he will believe her, or that his protection would be enough, in this court of men. Macbeth is Duncane's cousin, and he has only just proven himself loyal with the killing of Cawder. They would sooner kill her for treason against her lord husband, or perhaps they would merely laugh, at this woman with her addled mind. Is she one of those prostrating martyrs who claims she can talk to God? Does she believe the wind speaks to her in auguries? Better keep a tight grasp on this tricky wife. Even better: Cut out her tongue. Stitch her lips shut.

No one notices that she, too, cannot eat. Evander lords over the chamber with his boisterous words, until her husband cuts in.

"Have your accommodations been comfortable?" Macbeth asks.

The king's cloudy eyes prick with interest. "Oh. Yes. Lisander?"

Lisander lifts his stare. For a moment Roscille half fears, half hopes, that he will look at her. But he merely meets Macbeth's gaze steadily and replies, "Comfortable enough."

"Good," says Macbeth. "I am pleased."

Roscille is sure that no one except her pays attention to his fingers, clenched tight around the edge of the table. His bitten-off, yellowed nails dig into the wood. Time passes sluggishly, like a river still choked with ice, and then supper is over, and the servants come to take the platters and uneaten food away.

The king's chamberlains help him up from his seat. There is a streak of dried wine on his chin. Lisander rises when his father does, and unexpectedly reaches over the table, using a cloth to wipe the king's chin clean. The tenderness of it shocks her, as it does the rest of the hall. They cannot decide if he is a good son, for attending to his father so vigilantly, or if he is a bad son, for calling attention to his shame. Duncane reaches up, tremulously, and grips Lisander's hand. With dry, chapped lips, he kisses his son's fingers and closes his eyes. The moment seems to halt the progression of time, and when Duncane at last releases his hand and Lisander steps away, the minutes begin to pass again, though strangely, like a ship rocking in unruly waters.

More pleasantries: Good night, good night, good night. Hunt tomorrow, high temperatures, honors done.

Duncane limps out of the room, his chamberlains girding him and his sons following behind. Macbeth's eyes cut to Roscille, and he gives the most imperceptible of nods.

The corridors are empty of all servants; Macbeth has made it so. Roscille walks slowly, slippers hushing against the stone. The impossible has happened already: She has begun not to hear the ocean at all. She must pause and listen for it, reacquaint herself with its rhythm, to be sure that her senses are not dulled. Most of the torches on the wall are extinguished, but she follows the ones that are lit (perhaps this is Macbeth'sdoing as well) and they lead her to King Duncane's chamber.

His two chamberlains are at the door. They are whispering to each other in low, rough voices, amusing themselves as they pass the long hours at their post. These are not good guards. If they were Wrybeard's men, they would not be talking or laughing. They would be as still and silent as his draughts tiles, arms folded behind their backs. Roscille approaches them.

They stop their snickering, but their faces still show proof of their laxity; their cheeks are red. Roscille would not be surprised if they had snuck some wine from the kitchens. The left one straightens, clears his throat, and says, "Lady Macbeth. What are you doing here at so late an hour?"

Naturally, she has considered what she will say. But the words turn to ash on her tongue. The men's swords are sheathed at their sides and, unlike the weapons of her husband's men, they are hilted in gold. Roscille tries to see them for what they are: servants, and displeasing ones at that. Their bladesare irrelevant to her aims. They will not raise them in a lady's presence.

Instead of speaking, she reaches up and carefully folds back her veil. The men startle, choking on their protests. Before they can raise their voices, she meets the gaze of one, then the other, and says, "Quiet."

Their mouths snap shut. Their eyes fix on her, unblinking. The change has come over them so suddenly, the metamorphosis almost invisible, no panicked writhing like a nymph turned to a tree or a mortal into a flower or fish. Roscille's throat tightens.

This is power. With a single word, a single look, she has arranged the world to her liking. This is how kings must feel, every moment of the day, how her father must feel as all of Breizh bends and warps to his will.

The men are still silent and staring at her. They rock slightly back and forth but their gazes never falter. Roscille inhales.

"Open the door," she says. "Let me into the chamber."

Their bodies move as naturally as breathing.

The king sleeps on his back, hands clasped across his chest. His wheezing snores fill the room.

Roscille approaches the bed. Duncane does not stir. She is able to take in his features as she could not before, from a distance: his bushy brows, threaded with silver. The deep lines that bracket his mouth, suggesting that once upon a time he smiled often and easily. Despite his age, his hair is thick and full, and in places Roscille can still see patches of its original color—copper, like Evander's. His chest rises and falls gently with his breaths.

This is a man with a beating heart and pulsing lungs and hot-running blood and Roscille cannot do it. She claps a hand over her mouth so the king will not wake to her choked-out whimper. When Macbeth told her how he killed the Thane of Cawder, he made it sound like the simplest, headiest of pleasures. How can it be so?

She has the dagger in the bodice of her gown—Macbeth's dagger, the one he wielded against Cawder. Anointed, she supposes, with the prophecy of les Lavandières. But as she begins to draw it out, something occurs to her, something that passed beneath her husband's attention. He was certain he could keep her from the Druide as he performed cruentation, but what if he cannot? And what if—Roscille does not know the shape of her power, how long it will stretch, whether she can plant a thought in these chamberlains' minds that will not wither away when she is gone from their sight. What if, when she vanishes down the hall and they blink to themselves, as if woken from slumber, they remember the Lady who slipped into the chamber and slipped out with blood coating her hands?

Panic crests like a wave, then dissolves into sickly foam that turns her stomach. At least the king does not stir. Even in sleep he wears those thick, jeweled rings. Very slowly, Roscille turns around and faces the two chamberlains.

Their stares have not averted; they have not even blinked. All the rough amusement, the jesting in their eyes, the wine-flush on their cheeks—gone. Her belly is slippery with nausea. Will power always feel so precarious? Will it ever be so natural that when it is taken from her, it will be like someone has slashed open her throat?

"Come," she says hoarsely. "Draw your swords, and—"

The men move like bronze statues roused to life, excited only by her will. They come to the king's bedside and unsheathe their blades, and the whisper of metal against hide makes Duncane twitch at last, eyelids fluttering. The only light is from the hearth, a steady but distant orange glow, and he is half blind even in the best of circumstances, so now he cannot see; he can only hear the presence of others, and—

Fearfully, he spasms, crying out, "Lisander! Lisander!"

Roscille's heart briefly stops. Here is a man withered, ancient, sick, hardly lucid, still half dreaming, and yet he keens for his son like a mother over her infant's cold crib. In that moment she thinks she would rather slash open her own throat than harm him. But his cries grow louder, and someone will come soon, so she presses her hand across his mouth (across the same lips that kissed Lisander's fingers) until his words are garbled, and only his rheumy eyes dart with blind, animal terror.

"Kill him," Roscille chokes out. "Please, make it quick, please—"

She sounds like a child herself. And then—she will never know if it was true or not, her fear. Because that is when her mind unlatches from her body, as if someone has taken a trephine to her skull, cracked it, and released the black mist of bad spirits. She watches, outside herself, as two blades vanish inside the king's slack belly. The hilts twist and twist. Duncane coughs, blood running down his chin. But they have stolen the breath from him, and thus stolen his screams.

The blades reveal themselves, gleaming and slickly red. The wounds they have made are mostly hidden beneath the sheets and the king's sleeping tunic, but the blood pours forth anyway, sluicing through the fabric, splattering the floor. Every second stretches to the length of a lifetime. Roscille, still outside her body, hears herself gasp.

The chamberlains' arms fall to their sides. Their blade-points drip. How long until her power is used up, wrung out? This is the thought that presses her mind back; she inhabits her body again like a spectral possession. She cannot keep the men under her charm forever. Their eyes will clear. Their limbs will move again of their own accord. And then their mouths will open, their lips will move, and they will say, It was the witch-woman, that foreign bride, that Lady Macbeth.

Roscille meets the eyes of each one. It is easier, this time. They are already inhuman, no more than expedients to her, swords without arms attached, tools, draughts tiles. It is not pleasure, exactly, but it is still something that fills her up. She is satiated, gorged, even, though the food she has consumed has no particular taste.

"You will take your swords," she says, and now her voice does not shake, "and put them to each other's hearts. You will need to press harder than you think."

The blood on their swords has not even had time to dry. It is still gleaming, ruby-hued, holding the firelight. And this time, there are no blankets to stop Roscille from seeing: The blades are driven forward, slicing through the sinew and gristle of their chests, shearing bone. Two mirrored wounds. The blood sprays as the swords are wrenched out again. It splatters Roscille's face, the front of her dress, hot as licks of flame.

Roscille has already stolen their humanity, so the mendo not cry out as they die. Their bodies topple wordlessly, like felled trees. Their eyes do not even close. They crumple where they stood, limbs folding at odd and gruesome angles, cheeks against the cold stone.

The blood pools. It laps at the hem of her gown. Her slippers soak quickly, sticking her to the floor. It is what every man says, when he first kills another: I did not know there would be so much. Roscille hates herself for thinking this dull, common thought.

There is a bucket of water in her room, which she uses to clean her hands and face. The dress cannot be saved. She strips it off as the blood dries on the linen, turning it stiff, the color of rust. She lights a fire in the hearth and tosses the dress inside. Sparks erupt.

This part, at least, is passionless, function only. Roscille kneels naked on the bear-rug and scrubs her skin until it is stinging and raw. The ends of her hair, beneath her fingernails. The blood clings in clever, curious places: behind her ear. In the cleft of her chin. She scrubs until the veins show blue through her skin, standing out as clear as cracks in ice.

Near the end, she catches her reflection in the murky water. Once she would have seen a girl, beautiful, yes, but a bit strange, especially in the eyes. Once she would have opened her mouth to see if she had suddenly grown an ermine's sharp teeth. She had so badly craved that little power, whatever would make her more than a limp body inside a bridal gown.

Now she sees her cheeks, reddened at last, by the blood of King Duncane. Has she been transformed? Or merely revealed? All she knows is that she is not Roscille of Breizh, not Rosele, Rosalie, not even Roscilla. She is now only Lady Macbeth.