Page 10 of Lady Macbeth

“I know I will be safe with you.”

It is crude flattery, but it works. Fléance’s face opens.

“Yet King Duncane says witchcraft is alive and well in Alba,” she presses on carefully. “Do you know of such acts? Have you seen them?”

In Breizh, they are called les Lavandières. They stand in the shallows and wash the clothes of dead souls. They have webbed feet and webbed fingers. Seeing them is a portent of doom. If you step between them and the water, you will die. If they ask you for help in their washing and you refuse, they will drown you.

“There are stories,” Fléance says. “Witches are women, but malformed. Likely they have some traits of animals—perhaps a naked tail, or scales on their bellies. Perhaps they cannot speak, but only yowl like a hound or squawk like a crow. A fish’s unblinking eyes, set on the sides of their faces, or wings that unfold from their backs. A feline’s sharp teeth. To cross one is death, or a curse upon your blood. Your grandson’s grandsons will know well a witch’s wickedness.”

He does not mention silver hair. Perhaps she is safer with him than she imagined.

“A curse,” Roscille repeats. “What sort of curse makes the king quiver under his crown?”

Torchlight spasms across the wall. The corridor they are in has no windows. Fléance’s eyes narrow to slivers.

“There is one story known across Alba,” he says. “Once, a nobleman offended such a virulent creature. The witch cast a curse, not upon the nobleman, but upon his infant son. Every night, when the boy slept, he would grow fur and fangs and become a vicious, killing thing. His blood ran with hunger in the moonlight. He ravened under the black sky. Only the rising sun restored him to his natural form.”

Roscille wants to ask why, but she already knows. A witch does not need a reason, only an opportunity.

Instead, she asks, “And what did the nobleman do to his blighted boy?”

She thinks she knows the answer to this, too.

“He put a blade through its black-furred chest,” Fléance says. “But the sword rusted and fell away, and the wound resolved itself. The boy could not be slain by mortal means. So he tied his son to his bed each night and closed his ears to the sound of the beast slavering and yowling and twisting under his binds.”

The world is rheumy from beneath the veil. Roscille blinks her death-touched eyes.

“So he was not dressed in bridal lace and married to a lord,” she says.

“No,” Fléance says.

“King Duncane must chafe at this union.” Macbeth may have the authority to silence his men’s voices, but he does not have the power to shape their thoughts; no man has such power. The rumors of her silver hair and maddening gaze will drift silently through these halls, like cold mist. The words may never be spoken aloud. Yet the mind itself can make the sea into a desert and a frozen waste into the greenest meadow.

“Macbeth is the king’s distant cousin,” says Fléance. “Duncane trusts him to keep his wife in check, even if such rumors abound.”

Of course. Roscille is chained, too, in her marriage bed.

And this is when she realizes, with the slick, sudden heat of a fever, that she has made a mistake. She is Macbeth’s wife now, his property, and if he dies in his fight, she will be part of the spoils claimed by his enemies. Macbeth values his alliance with the Duke, yet such vows are worth nothing to the Thane of Cawder. Macbeth may keep his witches in chains, but if the Thane of Cawder is anything like Duncane, he will put his blade through their hearts. She has not saved herself. She has only given herself a different death.

In this state of fever, her mind returns her to Naoned. She is deposited at the feet of her father, kneeling like a supplicant. When she looks up, she can see only the wily black twists of his beard.

“I am more than a draughts tile,” she says, her voice trembling. “I am the blood of the ermine, I am—”

“You are whatever creature I make you,” Wrybeard says. “All things in Naoned serve me.”

“But—” Her voice shrivels in her throat. She stares down, pitifully, at the floor. “Do you not love me?”

A stupid question. The Duke will not even deign to answer it. She might as well have asked if he loves his own hand or his own mouth.

Naoned fades, and the winding corridor of Glammis flowers up again before her. Here she is, believing herself a canny animal, believing she could cheat the fate her father so coldly imposed upon her, when in truth she has done nothing other than promise the spilling of a great ordeal of blood—between her legs and from the throats of so many nameless, faceless men. Roscille of the Veiled Eyes, Roscille of the Witless Plans, Roscille the Great Fool.

Roscille is fiercely glad that Fléance is too afraid to meet her gaze, so that he has not seen the water gathering along her lashes.

She cannot undo what she has done; her husband and his war party are already miles gone. Yet—she is not completely bereft. If Macbeth falls beneath Cawder’s blade, if Cawder’s men pound at Glammis’s gates, perhaps she may still survive, if she has but one friend inside these walls, one sword that might rise to defend her.

Roscille gulps down the castle’s stale air. Two quick inhales, and her nickering heartbeat begins to calm. She can still save herself, maybe. She can bind herself to Fléance with a secret. With a debt. And already she has seen his desires gleam out from him, those hard, sharp, angry pieces, whetted by bitterness, polished by his father’s cold rebuffs.

Very slowly, she lifts her gaze.