Thirteen
"What is your purpose here, Lady?"
That was what the man guarding the dungeon door asked her. Roscille had not expected to be confronted at the top of the stairs, nor had she expected her motives to be questioned. It stirred an uncertainty deep inside her, one she had been content to let seethe and linger without challenge. She remained silent. Every time she tried to speak, her tongue felt too slippery in her mouth.
At last, she lifted her head. She met the guard's gaze through the veil and said, "I wish to see the prisoner."
"The Lord forbids it."
"The Lord will not know," Roscille said. "Or would you rather I tell him how you put your hands on me in the hall when no one was there to witness it?"
The guard blanched. It was crude to manipulate him this way. There was no pleasure or victory in it. If she were a warrior, she would have simply struck him the clumsiest, most killing blow possible.
In the space between her threat and his answer, the sound of the ocean was strong and insistent beneath their feet.
At last, with a grimace, the guard said, "Do not be long."
"It will hardly be more than a moment." The guard stepped aside, and Roscille descended the stairs.
The dungeon was a place that filled her mind with fire. She was only halfway down when a blinding light cut across her vision, obscuring everything. In that empty space, memories bloomed: her face pressed roughly against the table, the lace of her veil chafing her lips and cheeks. The coldness of the air against her bare thighs. And the pain—always the pain—the coiled viper under the sun-warmed stone, which strikes when it is prodded.
Her legs burned at the reminder. She had to keep this fire hidden in her skin; she had to feel her pain in silence, or else the men would snarl madness, and she would be pinned down with a trephine driven through her skull.
But she righted herself and reached the bottom of the steps. Her cloak dragged through the grimy puddles. She kept her gaze straight ahead so she would not see the rusted tools on the wall, and especially the whip, still stained with her blood. So that she would not see the mangled iron bars of the cell that had once held Lisander.
She stopped before the second cell. Fléance sat flush against the left wall, nearest to the torchlight; he did not hide himself in the darkness. When he saw her, he rose to his feet, his hand sweeping about his hips as if searching for a weapon. A sword would do him no good, anyway. There was a collar around his throat, and a chain connecting that collar to the wall. Manacled like a dog, indeed.
Straining against the collar, Fléance turned to look at her. "Why are you here?"
The same question, just as impossible to answer as before. "Did you think you could beat me as you did, and face no recompense?"
His gaze flickered. "Was it worth it, your vengeance?"
If she were a man, he would not ask her this. For men, there was no debt of blood that went unpaid. If the world tipped in another's favor, it must be made to tip back again. But the world was never in a woman's favor. She could not tip the scale. The only choice was: live the same mute, unjust life you had always lived, or tear apart the world itself.
"I feel no satisfaction while you still draw breath," Roscille said, and this was honest, in a way.
A long silence. Fléance's gray eyes burned.
"Did ever a true word come from your mouth?" he rasped. "When you said your husband erred in overlooking me, that my father had done me a great injustice—did you believe it? Or were you merely stitching me into some great tapestry of deception?"
Her fingers curled into her hands. And then the words flowed out before she could stop them.
"I believe my husband errs in many ways," she said. "And your father—he treated you cruelly, without regard. Perhaps I desired your aid, but I never turned you over on your back and made you show your belly. We could have been allies. Friends, even. You name me witch, evil temptress, a thousand spitting insults, but it is you who first forsook me."
There was another long moment of silence. The gray hue of his eyes, once gleaming in the torchlight, now turned matte and churned like the ocean.
"Do not speak of my father." Fléance's voice was near to a whisper. "He was a good man. A just, loyal man. He was not like your father, that false weasel of Breizh, who sold you to Macbeth like a broodmare. Who loved no part of you but the flesh of your pretty face."
A tempest rose in her. Twisting, snarling fury, all of which spiraled outward from the hidden eye of the storm. This old pain, in moments forgotten but never truly vanished, rose to life again now.
"This face could be the death of you." Roscille stepped closer to the cell until her hands touched the iron bars. "It would take only a moment. Avoid my gaze like the coward you are, or look into my eyes, and I will compel you to claw open your own throat. To dash your own head against the wall until your brain is pulp. So many agonizing deaths I could give you. My husband will perhaps offer you a painless demise. But I do not think you deserve to be shown such mercy."
Before she could react, Fléance's hands darted through the bars and grasped her by the front of her dress. Roscille fumbled for her veil, but even imprisoned, he was stronger and quicker. He caught her wrists and pinned her arms against his chest. His collar and chains rattled.
"Say it again," he snarled. "Tell me you are the maker of my death."
With his grip so tight, this was the first time he had seemed to her like a man. Roscille lifted her veil far enough to spit in his face.
"Kill me if you like," she said, "but I will be the maker of your own death still, for Macbeth will slaughter you even more savagely."
"He will slaughter me anyway." Fléance blinked her spittle from his lashes. He pulled her closer until her whole body was pressed against the cold, rust-gritted bars, and she felt the heat of him, the pulsing of hate and anger and perverse desire. "I should have raped you."
Such bald, ugly words made her stomach boil. She did not care if she crushed her own bones to dust, if they pushed up through her skin and burst through with blood. Roscille wrenched herself free of him. She shoved him backward, hard, and he stumbled against the wall. With satisfaction, she noticed that, thanks to his fruitless struggling, the collar had badly bruised his throat.
"You men have no imagination," she said.
Incredibly, Fléance schooled his face into an expression of cold contempt. Perhaps it was the collar and chains, smothering the flames of rage, but she had never seen him like this before, composed and sneering.
"Perhaps you would not even protest it," he said. "You open your legs eagerly. I do not forget how you took the whipping in the prince's place. This is not something you would have done for a stranger. Does Macbeth know his wife has dishonored him in his own castle?"
Roscille stilled. Her blood ran cold.
"Adulteress," Fléance added, as if she were too stupid to understand. "Whore."
But she was stupid indeed, not to have considered it. She was no selfless martyr, not pious enough to protest torture for its own sake. She had never pretended godliness. She had never knelt in this castle, not since the first night when the Druide tied her wrist to Macbeth's. Suddenly all her blood ran hot again and flushed her cheeks a furious red.
"Call me what names you will," she said, "but my husband will not believe them." Roscille did not even know if this was true. Clearing her throat, she went on, "And you will be dead soon anyway."
"And perhaps you will follow me soon after. There is no dishonor in slitting a whore's throat."
Clever as she had always imagined herself to be, Roscille found her mind could not accept this. She must not torment herself thinking of it. The fear would murder reason, wisdom. And then she would fall into the black pit of madness, alongside Adelaide and all the other women who had looked up, like a fish through the surface of the water, and no matter how they flailed, could not stop the thrust of the spear through their bellies.
She rejected this terror. She fled from it.
"Enjoy this posthumous existence of yours," she spat at Fléance. And then she stumbled back up the stairs, nearly falling flat into the filthy puddles, clinging desperately to the slick wall even when her fingers found no purchase against it.
When she reached the top of the stairs, Macbeth was waiting for her.
The fear that Roscille had only just evicted emerged again with the force of a river at melt. The sudden deluge made her knees almost crumble beneath her.
"I am sorry, my Lord—" she started, but Macbeth held up a hand.
"You will not speak now," he said, and his voice was so gentle that it petrified her. It was the way one speaks to a lame horse, to calm it before its slaughter. "You will listen."
Roscille dropped her head and looked down at the floor.
"No," said Macbeth. "Look at me."
The veil was such a thin barrier between them, as frail as an infant's skin. Roscille lifted her gaze.
"I see now that this treachery in Glammis was following closely behind me, like a shadow. My own right hand, plotting my downfall in secret. I aimed my blade at a target, only to watch it vanish like smoke, all while my enemy's machinations turned on behind my back."
"My Lord—"
But then he reached up to touch her face, and the hardness of his palm, the heat of him, stunned her into muteness. He pressed his thumb against her temple.
"This old wound of yours. I do not forget it. Were these masked men real at all?"
Her mind scrambled. She could play the guileless girl, swept up in schemes beyond her understanding, forced at blade-point into silence and obedience. But her husband knew her; at least, he knew Lady Macbeth. She could not hide within this white cloak of innocence. He had seen the black heart of her. He had stoked this darkness, molded it, used it to his own advantage.
"It was as I said," she whispered. "The men came. Fléance fought them. I did not know it then—it must have been his fellow conspirators, in disguise. I began to suspect it in your absence. It was Banquho who refused to torture the prince. I thought that they might be working against you. When I confronted them, they beat me."
It was the best story she could manage under these circumstances. It allowed her both innocence—I did not know; I could not imagine the treachery—and wiles—I began to suspect it, that they were working against you. She occupied the space Macbeth wished her to occupy. Clever but not too clever. Working always for his advancement, his preservation, his pride. And perhaps when Fléance accused her of adultery, Macbeth would have her story already in his mind, and reject the tale this chained boy tried to spin.
Macbeth's face darkened. "You should have told me at once. A husband and wife should have no secrets from each other."
Roscille flinched. "I am sorry. I feared their private retribution."
A moment passed, and then Macbeth took her face between his palms. He turned it over. Like she was a shell tossed to the tide, her skin worn to translucence.
"You have nothing to fear from them," he said. "You are my wife and you are a queen. Fléance will be killed, and this treachery will die with him. You can feed a dog from your hand all your life, and still one day it may decide to bite."
Dogs do not bite without cause. They are thinking, feeling creatures. But Roscille did not dare to say it.
"Well," Macbeth murmured. "The witches spoke of sons, and this prophecy was not for Banquho's ears alone. It has been beneath my attention until now—but I will not allow my line to end. You will lie with me every night until my child grows in you. If it is a girl, it will be snuffed out before it can make its way into the world. You are to bear me a son only. Do you understand?"
There was not a woman alive who was ignorant of this. Roscille did not know how many times she had watched this play out before her eyes: A woman falls pregnant. Her husband puffs his chest, swanning the proof of his virility around the court. And yet—there is the waiting, the vulture that watches from its remote perch. Everyone sees him but they do not speak of him. The man may choose to turn his eyes away as well, to luxuriate in his pride until the child's birth, when his honor will either be augmented or stripped from him entirely. There is no honor, after all, in a seed that sprouts daughters.
Or he will do this: There is always a woman in the castle who sees things which are beyond the capacity of mortal eyes. She can feel a swollen stomach and know from its shape whether the child inside is boy or girl. And then, the blankness on the would-be father's face, the few long seconds before his body can display his mind's relief or fury, before he either embraces his wife or yanks her roughly out of the room. She will weep, and he will not care. If he is kind, he will merely force the foul-tasting herb mix down her throat, until the girl-child leaks out from her legs like monthly blood. If he is not kind, he will shove her belly-first down the stairs, an easy dive, a descent smoothed by the thousands of women who have made this same fall. If her teeth or nose break, this is an acceptable casualty. She will wear these wounds shamefully, and the husband will keep his head down, until the memory of this episode fades, until there is another belly, swollen with the hope of a son.
Roscille said, "I understand."
Her husband was not a kind man.
"Good," said Macbeth.
His large hand curled around the back of her skull. He pulled her into him, and then placed a kiss on her forehead. Roscille waited there, silent, her skin turning to bark, her arms to branches, her hair to leaves. *Please please please, leave me alone, let me go, I am just a dead thing—living, but dead—and can foster no new life inside of me.* The pain no longer felt like a protest. It was merely pain. She felt as alive as a tree and as dead as a stone.
Her mind was escaping her.
At last, Macbeth let go. Roscille watched as he limped down the hall, the blue-black stain behind his knee spreading, growing, blooming.
Roscille went to her chamber—well. Not her chamber, anymore. She was her husband's bedmate now. The bear-rug was not her bear-rug. The small narrow bed was where Senga slept alone. She found her handmaiden there now, sitting in the room's single chair, embroidering a bolt of gray fabric.
When she saw Roscille, she rose, dipped her head, and said, "Lady."
How quickly she had learned to be deferent, to be a slave. Roscille felt the bile rising from her empty stomach to her throat.
"Please," she said. "Call me Roscille."
Senga's brow furrowed as her Scottish mouth formed the Brezhoneg sounds. "Roscille." She paused. "But you are still my Lady."
"I hoped to be your friend."
What a foolish hope. Roscille had never had a friend who was not tied by duty to her side. The other women in Wrybeard's court cringed from her, as though witchery were catching. Men, of course, do not make friends of women. They make wives or whores or servants, and since Roscille was a noble lady, the Duke's daughter, she could be none of those. And after the stable hand, the boys were wise to stay away. Hawise, her only friend, yoked to her with a long chain of fear that began with Hastein and flowed through the Duke.
Senga regarded her curiously. She stood, laying the unfinished embroidery over the arms of the chair, then sat down on the bed. She patted the mattress beside her. "Sit, then. Friend."
Roscille approached her. She sat down on the bed that was once her bed, her smallest comfort. Its softness against her skin now felt like a punishment—undeserving skin, still gruesome with scar tissue, black pits of dried blood like a scattering of leeches. She drew in a breath and moved her hand to lift her veil.
"Do not be afraid," she said. "My gaze does not induce madness in women."
"I am not afraid."
Cool air on her cheeks. Relief, like a parched mouth sipping sweet water. She knew she was still trapped, but even horses run in spirited circles around their pens, imagining freedom.
Senga watched her with narrowed eyes, and Roscille watched her back. She was older; Roscille could not tell by how much. Her hips had the width and laxity of past childbirth. How long ago? Roscille wondered. How many children? She was old enough to have had five or six or even seven children. Roscille, at seventeen, was late to it; she could have filled a lord's castle with sons by now.
Yet this was as foreign to her as the Northman tongue. Her mother died when Roscille slipped, blood-glazed, from between her legs. There was the blind midwife who nursed her, a name Roscille had now forgotten. Hawise was still a girl and virginal.
She thought of the rumors of Senga, the reason she was cast out of her village, threatened with a shaved head and a wimple and a scapular and ceaseless repentance to God. What did she seek in these couplings—pleasure? What man has ever been punished for that? Love? Is that a sin? Roscille pressed her hands flat against her thighs. There was a humming from somewhere deep inside her, the memory of the dragon's strength and muscle as it bore over her body—this was all she had now; the memory.
"Is it possible," she blurted out, "in Alba—a marriage for love? A child born not out of mere obligation?"
Senga's eyes softened, then hardened, then softened again. "You are seventeen, yes? Barely more than a child yourself. Your life… Well, you are a noble lady, so you know this. Your husband's whims will shape all your years to come. That is the way. I cannot imagine it is so different in your country. But you have a choice. You may pretend love is the reason you submit to him, why you bear his son, and even if it is not true at first, it will be true someday; you have the strength of mind to fashion it so."
"Was it love you sought, when you lay with those men?" Roscille flushed at the boldness of her own question.
Senga's eyebrows darted up her face. A moment passed, then anger. "Have you ever met, Lady, a woman with three children or more?"
*Met,* Roscille thought, *never.* But she had seen them, from a distance. Peasant women, their eyes cast on the muddy ground, ushering their dirty-faced broods. If there is a father, he stands at a distance, observing grimly, then turning to slouch toward the fields for labor. Sometimes Roscille could not find the father, and the children clambered up their mother, clinging to her hips like growing vines. And there was always the curled lip, the scoffing, *why did she not keep her legs closed, she has more children than she can afford, she may as well go peddle herself, now.*
"I have not," Roscille admitted.
"Well," said Senga, "now you have. There are four, and thank God all are old enough to work, so they do not miss me much. Perhaps they are better for it—their mother, the village slattern. They love me but I shame them. And they shame me, too. You want to know why, but there is no reason that would absolve me. I thought you would have sent me to a nunnery."
"A man would not have to answer for it." Roscille paused. "He would never imagine being asked why."
"So what does it matter? Love, greed, need, appetite—they are not the purview of men alone."
"Love is not as easy to smother as the rest."
Roscille stared into the middle distance for a long time in silence. She imagined herself lying on that soft grass again, nose-to-nose with Lisander, like an amulet unclasped, two matching halves facing each other.
"I am sorry," she managed. "I do not want this for myself, these stupid girlish hopes."
Astonishingly, Senga took her hand and brushed the hair back from Roscille's face. So tenderly; she had practiced this gesture many times upon her own children.
"Do men not hope?" Her voice was soft. "They imagine themselves mighty and clever and virile and powerful. This hope of yours is quite small by comparison."
Small, yes. But it only takes a crack in the foundation of the world to bring careful architecture, strong with centuries, crumbling down. A small blade cuts the water and ripples outward like an echo. And then the world beneath shows itself, first as green shoots in the dirt. And then comes a woman, a witch, tearing her way through the green matter with her teeth.
Macbeth came into the room and Roscille immediately dried her tears and put on her veil. Her husband's face was nothing. The ghostly smudge of a thumbprint on a windowpane. He held a length of white fabric in his hands.
"Come, Roscille," he said, in this hollow nothing of a voice. "There will be a council meeting."
She rose and approached him without a word. The mattress crumpled as Senga moved, as if to reach out for Roscille and keep her from leaving. But Macbeth's presence crushed them both into silence. Roscille looked down and waited for her husband to open the door, to turn into the corridor, so she could follow.
Instead, he said, "Wait."
Her mind was a smooth channel through which such brusque directives flowed easily. She had to keep it empty so she did not think of what awaited her tonight, and the next night, and the next. Macbeth swept her hair back from her neck.
Before she could speak, or even think, Macbeth knotted the white fabric over her eyes. Blinding her entirely. When she blinked her crumpled lashes, she saw only a fuzzy blackness.
Panic overtook her, curdling the words in her throat. When she could still her racing heart, quiet the pounding of blood in her ears, Roscille only managed one word: "Why?"
"I should have done it sooner," Macbeth said, though there was no cruelty in his tone, only the flatness of reason. "My men will not cringe from you so much, or question whether my dominion over my wife is total. And you do not need to see. When you are to leave this room, I will guide you."
And then, true to his word, Roscille was maneuvered through the door, even as Senga made some inarticulate noise of protest, and into the corridor, all in the rough grip of her husband's hands.
The floor was cold through the soles of her slippers, and there was the ocean underneath it, surging up as it always did, against the stone barrier which seemed thinner with every passing moment. She could sense how far they had gone based on how much their footsteps echoed. This was a long corridor, empty. The sound of Macbeth's limping gait filled the silent hallway.
Roscille knew, *Now we are turning a corner, now another one, seven paces and then one more, and then down the longest, narrowest hallway.* See, she thought with some relief, my mind has not been lost entirely. The salt air, as they approached, lifted the skin on the back of her neck. The key slid into the lock. She inhaled sharply.
It was the first time she had been here without seeing. Well—perhaps it was merely the blindest she had ever been. In the beginning, she came only with her paltry mortal vision. She began to suspect, as Macbeth guided her through the door, that he had not blindfolded her for the sake of his men. She thought he had some preternatural sense of his own, that he could sniff out the affinity that grew between his wife and the witches. Perhaps he merely thought she visited them in his absence. Perhaps that was enough to make him take such precautions, to ensure that she was always bound to him first, that she could never look into the milky eyes of *les Lavandières* and see herself reflected back.
Any light Roscille could glimpse from behind the cloth had now vanished. The blackness was solid and cold. She felt as if she could put a hand to it and leave the impression of her palm.
Macbeth splashed into the water. She heard a low grunt of pain as he did—that wound on his leg. Had he even allowed a doctor or a Druide to see it? He trusted nothing and no one, now. An herbal poultice might be poison. Roscille had stolen this from him, she realized. Safety. Or perhaps it could be said she had transformed him. A slow metamorphosis, unfolding in stages, like a night-blooming flower. Macbeth, the righteous man. Now he was Macbeth, King of Alba, but bereft of his right hand and unsteady on his left leg.
"Æthelstan and his army come for my head," Macbeth said into the blackness. "Tell me—do I have to fear my demise?"
Slow, dragging footsteps. The chain clattering. The water forced and churned. Once, Roscille would not have been able to tell apart their voices. But now she knew who spoke and when.
Left Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Glammis. Thane of Cawder. King Hereafter. No man of woman born shall harm Macbeth.
Right Witch: Macbeth, Thane of Glammis. Thane of Cawder. King Hereafter. He shall never be vanquished until the wood comes high upon the hill.
Gruoch says: nothing.
Macbeth turned in the water, and Roscille could see it, even without sight: the torchlight freckling the cave ceiling, the deep rise and fall of her husband's chest, the resplendent smile drawing wide across his face, the burning triumph in his eyes.
"I will never fail," her husband said. Awestruck, almost childlike. "These prophecies ensure me. King Hereafter, indeed." A raucous laugh that was too loud, that broke like surf upon the rocks.
Roscille could see three pairs of hands outstretched, palms turned up to the heavens. And then three voices rose, mingling in the pitch-dark air, curling wickedly as smoke: "All hail Macbeth! All hail Macbeth! All hail Macbeth!"