Page 12 of Lady Macbeth

Every strong man has his enemies. Even if it is just the kitchen boy whipped for spilling soup. Even if it is a farmer forced to foster soldiers who ate all his food and then took his wife to bed. Perhaps it is a nephew or a cousin, passed over when honors were given. An ally left without his apportioned spoils. A beggared miller chafing under the Lord’s exorbitant tithe. Someone. Anyone.

Fléance narrows his eyes in thought. “There is a man—”

“Good,” she says. “That is enough.”

Most men do not need a reason, either. Only an opportunity.

Fléance leads her to a copse of trees, warped by the wind, scraggly and strange. Yet there is a small hidden place among them, where the grass is soft, as if the weather-beaten trees have protected it. A pool—curiously bright and clear, though fed from no source that Roscille can see.

She catches her reflection in the water, a quicksilver flash. Long, loose pale hair, more white than gold. A sharp chin whittling down an otherwise round face. Her eyes are as black as a swan’s, wide-set, pupil and iris barely distinct from each other. Unsettling eyes, she cannot deny it. Superstitions have been built on less. She looks away.

“Tell the Lord I begged you to show me my new home,” Roscille says, sliding down from her horse. “But we were not even out of sight of the castle when the masked men came.”

“How many?” Fléance dismounts his own horse with a heavy thud.

Roscille thinks. “Three,” she says at last. Three is not so many that it taxes belief, but it is enough that Fléance’s courage and skill will be commended. Three is also a propitious number, a Christian fetish, whatever that is worth here in Glammis.

The memory of les Lavandières leaps up at her, the white shock of their emaciated bodies in the dark. Roscille’s stomach clenches.

“Will the Lord not ask to see their corpses? Proof of blood?”

“No, you need not have killed them,” Roscille says slowly. This is the trickiest part of her plan. “We will say you sent them running—if we have our own blood to prove the labor of battle. The nearness of death.”

Fléance’s brow furrows as he begins to understand. “I will have to strike my own near-death blow.”

Roscille thinks of Macbeth’s wound, the long, ropy band of scar tissue that adorns his throat. She does not know how he survived it. To another man it would be certain death.

She thinks of les Lavandières again. My lust for blood will be rewarded. They anointed this mission to Cawder, armored him in favorable prophecy. Could they have done the same before? Is their magic more than mere augury—is it protection in battle? An aegis that covers these lands like new-fallen snow? Are these unholy creatures what keeps Death at bay in Glammis?

“Yes,” Roscille says at last. “Or—I will do it for you.”

Fléance says nothing, and Roscille’s chest tightens, fearing he will refuse. He does not. He only asks, “Why? Why will you aid me in this?”

“I am the Lady of Glammis,” Roscille says. “Is it not for my benefit that the strength of its men is recognized, and allocated and awarded?”

Her face is hot, but her cheeks—bloodless—will not show it. Fléance looks at her for a long time without blinking. Then, wordlessly, with only the hushing sound of metal against hide, he removes his sword from its sheath.

He will want to have a scar that shows proudly. Nothing as stark as her husband’s—he cannot outdo his own Lord, of course—and nothing that will truly risk death. Nothing that will not heal in time, or that will leave him less able on the battlefield. Roscille is pondering where, and how, when Fléance puts the sword in her hands.

And then he tugs down his jerkin, straining the fabric to expose his collarbone. Roscille sees the small hollow, just below his throat, where she is meant to aim. The skin is pulled taut, thin over muscle, with little fat to slow the progression of the blade. It will hurt. Badly.

“Here,” Fléance says.

Roscille feels the blood turn to ice in her body.

“You will have to press harder than you think.”

Her gorge rises. She does not want to do this. Always she has prized herself on her strategy, the coldly removed arranging of tiles on a draughts board, never a butcher. But she needs this secret, the alliance it will spin. The lampreys are writhing, hungry. She will not deny them their feast.

“Wait,” she says suddenly. “My— I must show proof of this skirmish as well.”

Fléance frowns. “How do you mean?”

There is a spear in one of his horse’s saddlebags. She takes it. It is light, the wood smooth as a rosary bead. The tip flashes silver in the muted light. But she does not hand it to him tip-first. Instead, she offers Fléance the shaft.

She points at her own temple, right at the corner of her eyebrow. One thrust of the spear-shaft and it will show a perfect circle, a single bruise that proves Fléance’s courage and Roscille’s worth (for what else do men value if not the things other men wish to take from them?) and the silent union which will, however fragilely, protect her. Perhaps Fléance is not the lamprey at all. Perhaps he is the nobleman, puffing with pride in his little power, only to be degraded by the emperor’s preeminent scorn.

“Together,” Roscille says.