Page 2 of Lady Macbeth

It is only when all the nobles and courtiers are gone and she is alone with her father that Roscille, not quite thirteen, risks a question.

Why did the witch curse me?

Wrybeard has his favorite draughts board before him, its latticework of black and white made dull with use. He arranges the tiles as he speaks. Dames, the pieces are called, women.

A witch needs no invitation, he says, only a way of slipping through the lock.

No one knows exactly what a witch looks like (so in fact everyone knows what a witch looks like), yet they can all agree, it sounds like the sort of curse a witch would give: the shiny apple with the rotted core. Your daughter will be the most beautiful maiden, Lord Varvek, but one look into her eyes will drive mortal men to madness. Roscille understands that this explanation offers her better prospects than the alternative. Better to be witch-cursed than witch; better hagseed than hag.

But—

“What, are you Roscille of the Thousand Questions?” Wrybeard waves his hand. “Go now, and count yourself lucky it was only le Tricheur who shook like a dog’s leg at the sight of you, and not that Parisian imbecile with all his warmongering vassals whom he cannot keep to heel.”

The Parisian imbecile goes on to start wars with half the other duchies and is then excommunicated twice over. This is how Roscille learns that any man may style himself the Great even if the only achievement of his life is spilling a dramatic ordeal of blood.

Her father teaches her to abandon the habit of asking questions, because a question may be answered dishonestly. Even the dullest stable hand can tell a convincing lie if it is the difference between the end of a whip and not. The truth is found in whispers, in sidelong glances, in twitching jaws and clenching fists. What is the need for a lie when no one is listening? And no one in Wrybeard’s court suspects that Roscille is capable of listening, of noticing, especially with the veil that hides her eyes.

Roscille of the Veiled Eyes. They call her this in Breizh and beyond. It is a far kinder epithet than she has any right to expect, being a witch-marked girl. Yet she does not wear the thin veil now, not with Hawise. It has been pronounced that women are not afflicted by the madness that her stare induces in men.

Thus the marriage has been arranged on the condition that Roscille arrive by single carriage, with only her handmaiden as company. The carriage driver is a woman who handles the reins clumsily, as she has been taught to drive only for this specific purpose. Even the horses are mares, silver-white.

Roscille realizes it has been a long time since Hawise spoke and that the handmaiden is still waiting for a reply. She says, “You may write and tell the Duke whatever will be most pleasing for him to hear.”

Once she would have written the letter in her own hand, and paced the room considering how best to relay all the details of the Thane’s desires, the treasures that he left unguarded, ripe for Roscille’s senses to plunder. Here is how he speaks when he believes no one is listening. Here is where his gaze cuts when he thinks no one is watching.

But that letter is to a man who no longer exists. The Wrybeard who sent her away is a man Roscille does not know. Still, she knows the things that will please this other man, as they are the same things that will please any man. The Duke will want to know that his strange cursed bastard daughter is an obedient broodmare and a docile pleasure slave. She understands that these are the two fundamental aspects of wifehood: Open your legs to your lord husband and bear a child that will mingle the blood of Alba with the blood of Breizh. A marriage alliance is only a temporary bond, thinly woven, but if Roscille is good enough it will hold until a son comes along and yokes the unicorn to the ermine.

The unicorn is the proud emblem of Skos, all its brutish clans finally and grudgingly united beneath one banner. And it is said that Lord Varvek is as canny as a weasel, so, not one to let an advantageous epithet go unremarked, the Duke put the barb-toothed creature on his coat of arms.

Before, Roscille would have claimed her father’s epithet for herself, too, a trait seeped from his blood into hers (is the daughter of an ermine not an ermine, too?). Now she wonders—is the weasel truly clever, or are its teeth merely sharp?

The carriage clatters and strains around a series of narrow turns, up the cliffside, the horses panting hard. The wind is flat and smooth and uninterrupted, as if it is being piped in through a pair of bellows. And then, shocking and sudden, Roscille hears the dragging pulse of the sea.

Naoned, the city of her birth, sits inland on the Loire; until traveling to Bretaigne, she had never seen the ocean. But this is not like that snarling gray channel. The water is black and muscular, and where the moonlight catches the small crests of the waves, it shows a pattern like a serpent’s belly. And the water has a steadiness that the wind does not: The surf crashes the rock over and over and over again with the rhythm of a beating heart.

The graces of civilization spiral outward from the papal seat in Rome, that bright jewel in the center of everything. But the light of the Holy See dims with distance: Far from Rome, here is the world’s naked, primitive darkness. The castle of Glammis hulks over the cliffside, vulgar and bleak. There is a single long parapet, running parallel to the edge of the cliff, so that the whole wall is a straight, sheer drop to the water below. What Roscille at first thinks are crosses are only arrow slits. There are no carvings along the barbican or the battlements, no etchings to protect against pale Ankou, the spirit of Death, who drives his creaking wagon of corpses—every parish and house in Breizh must have such ornaments, or he will come—but perhaps something else keeps Death at bay in Glammis.

Stop, Roscille thinks. The word falls in her mind like a stone. Please, no farther. Turn around and let me be gone.

The carriage rattles on.

The barbican grinds open to the courtyard. There is a man standing within it, just one. He wears a gray square cloak and a short tunic, tall leather boots, and a kilt. Roscille has never seen a man wear a skirt before. Wool stockings keep his knees from the cold.

At first she thinks it is her lord husband come to greet her, but as the carriage draws closer and then halts, she sees immediately that it is not. One thing she knows about the Thane of Glammis is that he is large, as large as a mortal man can reasonably be. This man in the courtyard is by no means small, but he does not have the mountainous stature reported of the Thane: He is ordinary. He has hair the color of a roof’s thatching, sun-stripped yellow.

Hawise dismounts the carriage first, then Roscille. The man does not offer his hand to help her, which is terribly impolite by the standards of Wrybeard’s court, and Greymantle’s, and every duchy or county ruled by the House of Capet. Roscille stumbles a little bit, and she hasn’t even donned her bridal gown.

“Lady Roscilla,” says the man. “You are warmly received.”

The walls of the courtyard might as well be made of paper, for how well they prohibit the wind. She has never been so cold in her life. Even Hawise, with her hardy Norse blood, shivers beneath the veil.

“Thank you,” she says, in Scots. “This is my handmaiden, Hawise.”

The man frowns. At least, she thinks he does. There are so many furrows on his face—the marks of battle or the marks of age, Roscille cannot tell—that she can barely read his expression. His eyes dart to Hawise for a moment, and then back to Roscille, though he does not meet her gaze. He knows the stories.

“I am Lord Banquho, Thane of Lochquhaber and your husband’s right hand,” he says. “Come. I will show you to your chamber.”

He directs the driver to the stables and then directs Roscille and Hawise to the castle. They go up through twisting, half-lit halls. Many of the torches are gone, and there are only black scorch-marks to indicate where they had once been. The abrupt absences of light make their shadows warp and judder against the walls. Now the wind’s howling is hushed, yet from the floors there is a strange rasping sound, like the scrape of a ship’s hull against the pebbled beach.