Fifteen
Darkness, layered upon darkness. At first, she sank into it like quicksand. The air and water seemed composed of the same substance, two miasmas of blackness, one merely denser than the other. She paddled through the water and swam through the air, reaching, stumbling. At last, she felt two hard, bony hands grasp her under the armpits. With surprising strength, she was hauled upward onto her feet.
"There you are," said the Left Witch.
"No, please," Roscille whispered. "I cannot be here."
"This is what we all said, at first," said the Right Witch. "Your eyes will adjust."
"But what will I do?"
"Laundry, of course."
"What will I eat?"
"You can break the bones of eels between your teeth. They are softer than you expect. And when you have been here in the dark long enough, you will lose your mortal vision. You will see only what is to come, not what is or has been. Your mouth will lose its shape and mold to the speaking of prophecy. Have you noticed we no longer have lips? Well, what do we need them for? There is no one to kiss. Ha! Imagine that."
"Please. I am not like you."
"Not now. Not yet," Gruoch said. "But you will be, if you stay. That is why you must go."
"Go?" The Left Witch's voice sharpened. "There is nowhere to go! He may not have put you in chains, but you are trapped here, the same as we are."
"Fool girl," said the Right Witch. "If we could leave, do you not think we all would have?"
"Silence, both of you," Gruoch commanded. "Were we not all this girl, once? A Lady Macbeth? Look at us now. Nameless. Trapped. We have sat rotting in the dark for too long. Finally, there is a chance—we can redeem ourselves in this."
"There is no redeeming this. I do not remember my own name."
"I can only see in the dark. My hands are made for washing and nothing more."
"Perhaps we are lost, fine. But she is not. There is still a chance. If she claims this name, Lady Macbeth, she claims it for us all. Our visions will be her visions. Our powers her powers. Our burdens her burdens. It is not a thing to claim lightly. Do you understand?"
"Why does she deserve this chance?" the Right Witch demanded. "I have been here a quarter of a century. And you half as long, and you twice as long."
Silence stretched between them.
"I do not deserve it," Roscille said softly. "I should stay here, after all."
"This is what we were all made to believe. Keep your mortal eyes open. Remember. Think."
Roscille squeezed her eyes shut, not that it made any difference in the dark. Yet when she did, her vision exploded in a riot of color. Memories she assumed she had jettisoned, abandoned like ballast to maintain the soundness of the ship, roared back to her now: the mornings spent embroidering with Hawise, reading bawdy poetry and smothering their whispers; the evenings turning wide and blue, when they were allowed to wander out of the castle on horseback, Hawise pointing out each animal they saw. The yellow-beaked starlings that blended so well with the bark, the busy red squirrels with their tufted ears, the cormorant perched in the canopy, curiously far from the sea. Hawise knew their names in Norse, and Roscille knew their names in Brezhoneg, Angevin, and Saxon. They smeared berry juice on their fingers to coax rabbits from their warrens.
All of these things, which had felt so far from her, were here now. There was the time one of the Duke's men struck Hawise across the face, for no reason, for any reason, and then grabbed at her breasts. Roscille had been filled with an uncorrectable rage, but she waited. She watched as the man came and went from the castle, always returning with small parcels of goat's milk, such as cannot be made in Naoned, for the Duke does not keep goats. Roscille pointed this out to her father, and it was discovered this man had dalliances with a bastardess from the House of Capet. Well, there was no place in Wrybeard's court for men who might be swayed to the enemy's side due to matters of the heart. He was gone the next day. To where, Roscille never found out. To hell, she hoped.
Even here, in Glammis: early days, when she sat at her husband's council table and spoke; when she sent him running to Cawder to stain his hands with blood; when she ensnared Fléance in her lie, reading his boyish longings like a cipher. When she came to Lisander's room with a knife and left with a swollen, sweet-kissed mouth. When she threw herself between his cell and Banquho's whip. When she took in Senga, taught her Latin, let her braid womanly wisdoms into her hair. All of these things she did as a girl, as a lady, as a flinching foreign bride, as a witch with death-touched eyes, as Roscille of Breizh. She had believed herself an animal, simple, sharp-toothed, slippery like an eel. But she was both guilty and innocent, both girlish and wise, both witch and woman. Even the dullest creatures in cages dream of freedom. Their desires stretch and flourish, like a tree growing clever branches around the bars of a fence.
She stood in the dark, furious, fearful, thinking, blooming.
"I will take it," Roscille said. "I will carry it all."
"That's a good girl," Gruoch said.
She would take everything but this. Roscille reached up and removed the cloak, letting it slide off her shoulders to puddle in the water. The small waves sucked at the furs, drowning them. Then she unclasped the necklace. It made a small splash as it dropped into the water, but then the waves dragged it under, too. At last, the veil. She tore it off, shredding the lace between her fingernails. It was lost to the damp air and darkness. Her cheeks burned with the cold, but she was free.
The witches advanced. Gently, they guided Roscille toward the steps until she could find her own way. She climbed upward, water pouring from her clothes. She touched the door's handle and jiggled the lock. The strength of one woman was not enough to break it. Nor two, nor three. But the strength of four was enough.
The witches waited in their own seething silence. Silver dreams unfolded from their milky eyes and lipless mouths.
Roscille cracked the rusted metal under her hand. The door swung open. Light poured in. She looked back once at *les Lavandières*, to at last see their faces without the veil between them, and then she stepped into the torch-warmed corridor, into the glowing, waking world.
She heard it right away: the clanging of blades, arrows sliding into their notches, muscles twanging as bowstrings were pulled taut and then released. She heard it with four sets of ears now, as perceptive as a hare. When the arrows hit their marks, there was a fleshy sound, like fruit being cut, the sound of men's lives being stolen from them. Roscille broke into a run.
By the time she reached the parapet, she was breathing hard, but her legs did not ache—she had the strength of four, now. The archers stationed along the battlements did not pay her any mind, even though it was dangerous for a woman to be here, dangerous for anyone to be here. She found an empty arrow loop and crouched behind it.
There, she watched Æthelstan's army advance up the hill. They were more ragged than she expected: their clothes hanging off them, mud up to their knees. The rain had made the climb even more treacherous, each step risking a death-slide down the face of the cliff. They were so different from the Scottish warriors Roscille had known—no faces painted half blue, no tartans to show the intricate threading of clan loyalties—but the leather of their boots seemed tougher, and none of their sword-hilts were rusted.
Behind them, the trees of the copse were just trees. The bushes were bushes. The animals could smell the blood and fire and were hiding in their warrens and holes. Roscille felt a helplessness overtake her, one that made her knees tremble. The wood could not ascend the hill. The soldiers could barely ascend the hill. Most of the arrows landed with useless thuds in the grass, but when one did strike, it struck true. Through the heart, the man falling like a slain deer, twitching and then going still.
*No man of woman born.* It seemed no man at all would even reach the castle. Panic went through Roscille, sluggish, each beat passing like blood behind a bruise. Where would she go, what would she do, if Glammis did not fall? Forced back into the dark, or back into her husband's bed? The same fate as all women, which she had become an animal to escape—
No. She carried the weight of four now, all their stanched dreams and suppressed desires, and she must not fail.
Five women. Senga. Fear laced up her spine. Roscille would not allow her to share Hawise's fate; she would tear apart the stone walls of the castle with her bare hands. This was what propelled her back through the parapet, running, her hair coming loose from its braids and streaming out behind her. Her damp gown tangled around her legs, but she did not stumble. The sea pressed up from beneath the castle, straining toward the surface, and she seemed to roll forward, as if carried by an invisible, underground tide.
Her new strong legs took her to Senga's room. Roscille turned the knob, but it rattled and would not budge. Something was blocking the door from the other side. She pressed her face to the wood and said her handmaiden's name.
A moment passed. Then there was a scraping, wood against stone, and the door opened just a crack. Senga's face peered through. The lines on her forehead were deep, her eyes wet, and her voice thick when she said, "Lady—I thought you were dead and gone."
"No," Roscille said. "I am here."
Senga opened the door wide enough for her to step inside.
When she entered, she saw that Senga had barred the door by jamming a chair beneath the doorknob—clever, as if she had done such a thing before. She had also taken the poker from the fire and held it in her white-knuckled hand.
She saw Roscille looking and said, "The soldiers will come. But I will not make it easy for them."
"They will not have you," Roscille said. "Even if your village is gone—your home is by my side now, as it will always be. We will be free."
Senga's brow furrowed deeper. "How?"
Roscille took Senga's hand. It was warm, rough in places, soft in others, and through her skin, Roscille felt her pulse, throbbing and alive.
There was no time, even, to pack a bag. She ushered Senga out of the room and through the corridors, all while listening to arrows fly, blades clang, and men die like cut weeds. Her hope was this: that they would be distracted by the fumes of blood and would not notice as two women slipped away.
Their brisk footsteps carried them into the courtyard, which was abandoned because every soldier was crouching in an arrow loop or cutting down his enemies on the hilltop. Roscille's mind turned and turned as they made their way toward the stable: *Take one horse, it will attract less attention. No, take a second, one will tire quickly of carrying two bodies. Fill the canteens in the saddlebags, we do not know when we will next find clean water. But then they will slap against the horse's flanks and make alerting sounds.*
She let out a breath. Senga was panting. When Roscille blinked, Hawise's face replaced Senga's, only it was the white, horrified face she had conjured in her dreams, the one that screamed silently as she was pushed into the black water.
No. No. This would not be like before. Roscille no longer shrank beneath her veil. She could enchant and ensorcell her way to safety, to freedom. Her freedom and Senga's and the freedom of three women chained in the dark.
They were halfway across the courtyard when a figure stepped out from the shadows. He raised a hand to shield his eyes, as if from the sun or the biting wind, but Roscille knew it was to hide himself from her gaze. She thought she was witnessing something impossible—a waking dream—until she saw the scar lacing out from beneath his jerkin and up his throat.
Roscille choked. "You are not dead."
"Nor are you." Fléance stepped closer. "Macbeth freed me, on the condition that I fight for him. He knew he would need every man at his side. And yet he swore he sent his harlot, demon-bearing wife to hell."
"Perhaps hell could not hold me." Her blood was hot. The scars burned on the backs of her thighs, the pain striking as if it were new again, the viper flashing its silver teeth.
But she was not now what she was then. Her flesh had thickened. She might look a fragile flower, white-petaled, but this merely concealed her; it did not bind her.
"You have again given me a good chance to prove my honor," Fléance said. "What titles and favors will Macbeth bestow upon me when I deliver him the corpse of this unworthy witch, this hagseed whore?"
Beside her, Senga flinched at the words. Roscille gripped her handmaiden's arm.
"Come closer, then," she taunted. "Or are you too much a coward to look into my unclothed eyes?"
"I am no coward," Fléance snarled. Even now, it was so easy to rile him, this boy playing at being a man.
He drew his sword, which cut the air. Roscille darted forward to catch him in the path of her gaze, but he was just half a heartbeat faster. She felt the heel of his hand crush her temple, and her vision sparked. When she managed to recover her sight, Fléance had his arm locked around her throat and his sword pressed flat against her belly.
Roscille writhed against him, spitting her fury. Senga fell to her knees.
"Please," she begged. "Please, my lord, do not do this."
"Your handmaiden pleads so nicely," Fléance rasped, breath in her ear. "When I am finished with you—"
That was when Roscille screamed: loud enough for four voices. So loud that the sound seemed to ripple out from around her, like water. Even Senga clapped her hands over her ears. Fléance winced, which gave Roscille a chance to bite down, hard, on the hand that constricted her. He shrieked. Blood spurted.
His sword dug a little bit into Roscille's side and the pain streaked through her. Everything was blurry and held at a distance, as if behind a translucent veil. *This will not be my death,* she thought, furious, *but if it is, I will fight until my last breath, and take every piece of him that I can with me.*
And then Senga cried out, not in horror, but in pure shock, her mouth rounding into an awestruck *oh*. She was staring up at the sky.
The dragon's long green body unfurled like a ribbon, knotting and then stretching. The sky was rough and choky with storm clouds, but what little light there was pooled within its scales, turning them iridescent. The suddenness of it, the impossibility, and the great creature's obvious strength made Fléance stammer out a wordless noise of fear.
The creature was the same—Roscille remembered the crushing might of its body around hers—but different, in ways that were not obvious to her until it drew closer.
Its thick tail was banded with thorns. Between its claws were weeds that it had ripped up from the earth. The underside of its enormous body was slicked with mud, lily pads and petals pasted on, and clinging to various scutes and appendages were tendrils of vines, sticky pine needles, and fragile ferns, as if it had just wrested itself free from a large thicket. Moss dripped from the peaks of its wings.
For weeks the creature had twisted in some distant forest, hiding itself among the oily shadows and the dark leaves. It had taken this dark matter with it, and as the dragon lowered itself into the courtyard, the words of the prophecy fell into place like a key in a lock: *The wood has come upon the hill.*
Roscille dove away from Fléance as the dragon descended upon him. She skidded on the dirt, palms burning. But she recovered herself quickly enough to turn around. And so she had the privilege and the pleasure to see this: a young man, dying in agony.
After its claws had ripped flesh and its teeth had snapped bone, the dragon vanished. It happened within the span of moments; if Roscille had blinked, she might have missed it. There was the creature's sinewy body, stretching across the dusty courtyard, and now there was only a man, curled in on himself, naked, vulnerable. Fléance's blood stained his sides; his arms were red up to the elbows. There were still weeds and thorns tangled in his hair, braceleting his wrists and ankles. He was breathing hard.
Roscille rushed to his side and collapsed there, forehead resting against his shoulder, hands clutching at his beautiful, familiar face. Air rushed out of her and so did her words. She pressed herself to him and tried not to weep.
Slowly, Lisander raised his head to look at her. His green eyes were wavering, inhumanly bright. At first, she feared there was no recognition in them. Perhaps the dragon had at last consumed the man; perhaps he was now nothing more than the shell which held the monster within it. But then he exhaled, and his lips turned up faintly at the corners, and he said in a low, tired, loving voice, "Roscille."
"Lisander," she whispered. "I thought you had gone."
He shook his head. "All this time I writhed inside the monster's body, in the woods. But even the dragon knows your face. Your voice. If such a creature has any desire greater than blood, it is to protect you."
A dragon did not have many qualities to admire, but it could not be said that it did not want, and that it did not guard its treasures jealously. Roscille lifted one of Lisander's hands in her own. The blood was caulked deep beneath his nails. She thought of how they must look here, kneeling in this mess of mangled flesh, two unnatural creatures who were so natural in each other's company.
Senga was watching with wide eyes and a white face. Roscille rose, and she pulled Lisander up with her. He was still weak, unused to his human body. It had been so long since his feet had touched the earth.
"Don't be afraid," she told Senga.
But when she reached her handmaiden, Senga merely pulled Roscille into an embrace, pressing their faces close. She held Roscille for a long time, even while the sounds of war skid past them like rocks down a mountainside, and while the storm clouds gathered. At last, she let go. She said, "Not afraid of you, Lady, never."
Lisander, who was still holding her hand, said, "We must go. If any more of Macbeth's men spot us, we are dead or in chains."
"No," Roscille said. "This fight must end with Macbeth. There can be no other way."
"The men see this as a fight for Alba, not merely a fight for their Lord or for Glammis. It is the English who come to suppress them, again, to dilute their Scottish bloodlines. Even if Macbeth is dead, they will not stop."
"They will not stop for Æthelstan, true. But they will stop for Duncane's chosen heir, the son with the blood of Alba in him. If they see you are alive, they will know Æthelstan is not here to trample them, merely to depose the traitor and restore Duncane's line."
Lisander turned his face away from her. Shadows passed across it.
"You would ask them to kneel before a monster and place a crown upon its head," he murmured.
Roscille tipped his chin up, forcing him to meet her eyes. "You are more than the creature your father has made you. Perhaps you are not mortal, not entirely—but I have felt the tenderness of your flesh; I have seen the nobility of your nature; I have been blessed to know your selfless spirit. Still, you are a man."
"Kiss me, then," he said, "and prove it."
She grasped his face, without reluctance, without contrition—just as she did that first time, his hand tangled in her hair, his hips rolling against hers. His mouth opened to meet hers, the ask and the answer. He bit her lower lip, the faint surfacing of the monster, but his tongue was gentle, soft with mortality, and his arms were endlessly tender. When she broke the kiss at last, their hearts beat furiously in tandem.
Without letting his arms drop from her waist, with their foreheads still close, Lisander whispered, "I will show myself, then. I hope they will see what you do. I hope it will be enough."
Wind swept the courtyard, blowing in the storm from the sea, where lightning had already begun to crack the air and waves were rising in great heights. On the other side of the wall, men were falling like struck trees. And reluctantly, Roscille removed herself from Lisander's embrace.
"If you are to show yourself," Senga said drily, "perhaps it should not be all of yourself."
Lisander, as if he had only now remembered his nakedness, flushed.
To Senga, Roscille said, "Find him clothes. I will go after Macbeth."
"No," Lisander said at once, seizing her again by the arm. "He has no honor left in him; only ambition and rage. He will think nothing of striking you down. At least let me—"
"You cannot," Roscille said. "There is a prophecy. No man of woman born can slay him." She did not have to say the rest. The thoughts drifted out from her like silvery visions, like spirits escaping their vessels. *I am not a man. Not quite a woman, either. Roscille of Breizh, beautiful, witch-kissed, witch.*
Soldiers beyond the wall roared and choked on the blood in their mouths. Evander was among them. Perhaps slain already. For all the men who dropped to their knees when they saw Lisander alive, there would still be more who rallied behind their limping, diminished Lord.
It would not end, truly, until Macbeth was dead. Roscille released Lisander's hand, and she went into the depths of the castle.
Roscille knew where to wait for him. When Æthelstan's men were bashing in the barbican, when Evander's head was brandished on a pike, when the battle was either lost or won, Macbeth would come here. The iron door was behind her, cold air slipping through the cracks in the wood. The torches guttered against the wall. Beneath her feet, the ocean roiled in its endless rhythm.
She heard him coming before she saw him: that shuffling gait, the hot breath exhaled through his flared nostrils. As he grew closer, around the last bend in the corridor, she saw a hand shoot out and grip the wall. It was streaked with blood both old and new, bright red and rust-hued, announcing all the deaths he had made. And then he came, his enormous body penetrating the narrow hall, his shoulders so broad he could barely fit through.
He towered like a giant. This was Roscille's fearful first impression of him, his preternatural largeness. Yet she was not afraid like she was then, kneeling before the Druide, letting him yoke them together with his bristly rope. All her chains had been slashed, all her vows broken.
Macbeth's eyebrows leaped up his face when he saw her—a brief moment of shock, and then his lips pulled back in a snarl.
"You should not be here. You should be growing ancient and blind in the dark."
"And what prophecy would you hope I speak?" Roscille drew herself up. He was not quite close enough to meet her eyes. "Your doom is written already, and it is close. The wood has come high upon the hill."
"Liar," he said. "It is impossible."
"You yourself have witnessed many impossible things come true."
"Impossible for ordinary men," he said. "I am not so constrained. No mortal means can fell me. The only impossible thing is my death."
"If you are so certain," Roscille said, "then look into my eyes."
Macbeth smiled cruelly. Blood was so wet on his face that it glistened still.
"You have always thought yourself too clever," he said. "Roscille of Breizh. You have never kept to your place. I should have tied you to my bed the moment you stepped upon Scottish soil. You have worked in the shadows, fooling all with your innocent face, hiding your secrets beneath your veil. Well, it is off now. And I can see you truly. Your father is writ all over you. He has crafted this tale, that you have been cursed, that you hold this power of compulsion. And perhaps for those who believe such superstitions, it is real enough. But had he not spread this story in Breizh and beyond, you would have no power at all. The only real power you have ever had is the dagger I placed in your hand."
Roscille stood marble-still. Indeed, her father was the first to speak the words aloud—*perhaps you were cursed by a witch.* Before, it was no more than whispers and rumors; her beauty was strange enough to make men shiver, but she never compelled, enchanted, ensorcelled. It was just the stable boy, and could his own lust not have moved him? Then there were Duncane's guards—but there she had acted only at Macbeth's direction. Her magic, blooming only at the cultivation of men. Could it be so, truly?
A coldness crept into her bones. Doubt, boring like a trephine.
Macbeth saw this doubt and his smile deepened. "So come then, Roscille. Roscilla. My dear wife. Lady Macbeth. Other men may have cringed from you, but I never have. Look into my eyes. I will look back and I will not tremble."
He slouched toward her, lumbering like an unwieldy creature half turned to stone. Roscille took a stumbling step backward. The animal fear returned to her. Her own ghost inhabited her body—that girl, cowering in her bridal lace, was here again now. And Macbeth, Bellona's bridegroom, Thane of Glammis, Thane of Cawder, King Hereafter, was reaching for her with his blood-slicked hands.
Her back hit the door and the salt air wound around her ankles. *Chains,* she thought, *there are always more chains.* But then she thought of the three women on the other side, seething in the dark. They broke the lock, the four of them, together.
Her chest swelled. And then she rose to meet Macbeth's eyes.
She had never looked into them before—the irony; she never dared. They were blue, and clear enough that she saw herself reflected back, like a fish darting through a small pool of water. At first nothing shifted in their surface. There was only the same fierceness and fury and preening victory, the certainty that she would fail. But Roscille kept staring.
Slowly, a cloudiness overtook him: The whites of his eyes seeped into the irises, then the pupils, until his gaze was milky and matte, and she saw nothing reflected back. Macbeth gave a throaty cry and tried to turn away, but Roscille grasped his face in both of her hands and forced his gaze back to hers.
He fell to his knees. She stood over him. His veins bulged, and their color changed to a dense, tarry black. His skin, by contrast, grew paler and paler; it was the bone beginning to show through, his flesh wasting away, until there was only the meat and muscle of him, and a naked skull. His scream dried up in his throat.
And then there was no sound but that skull striking the stone floor. Roscille stepped away, hands dropping to her sides.
Voices behind her, breaching the door. Three of them braiding together, like a tangle of weeds showing their shy heads in the soil, breaking apart the hard, cold earth, and straining upward into the light.