Page 42 of Lady Macbeth

“The bars are flimsy,” he whispers. “They will not hold me. I do not know what it will do. What I will do.”

Roscille turns up her hand, palm to palm, and laces their fingers together. She says, “Stay. Stay here until you cannot any longer. Please.”

“I will.” His voice is hoarse. Dim.

Roscille thinks she can prepare herself for what she will see, but her mind has not fully returned to her. It is trapped in the animal of her body, still feeling the sting of every lash. And there is no preparing, anyway. In the half-light, she sees Lisander’s clothes rip. His bones press up through his skin. There is the wet sound of tearing flesh—she knows this sound well now—and where he was once pale, unblemished, his chest now ripples with scales. They are the same green color of his eyes, iridescent in the glow of the torch.

It is horrible, beautiful, horrible, then perversely beautiful again. She sees how even his mortal form was made for this, a chrysalis that holds the monster lovingly within it. His face vanishes from the light, and when it emerges again, it is the head of the dragon—she has examined its poor reproduction a thousand times on tapestries, on the proud pennants of the kingdom of Wales, and now it lives and breathes before her. Scales and crescent-shaped teeth, each as long as a dagger.

Its body coils like the serpent it is, and then stretches outward, wings unfolding from its back. They seem papery, oddly frail, as if hesitant about flight. The last to change is his hand, still gripped in hers. His fingers tear open with the same violence, showing the claws beneath.

Lisander was right: The cell cannot hold him. The dragon’s teeth easily rend the metal apart, breaking the bars like twigs. And then he is free, long body unwinding, scales shimmering. She is amazed by the strength of its body, the thick muscularity of it as it curls over her, almost protective. Perhaps possessive. Dragons are jealous creatures, devoted to their hoards.

Roscille lifts a hand and runs it across the dragon’s chest, down the long line of its belly. The scales are rough and smooth at once, like stones in the riverbed, and she is not afraid. If this is her different death, she will beg for it. She would sooner be consumed than taken apart, piece by fragile piece.

She has been turned on her back and the dragon is upon her. Her thighs burn. Despite being a cold-blooded creature, the nearness of its body, the pressure, fills her with warmth. She opens her mouth to speak, but all she can do is moan, half pained, half something more.

And then the dragon lifts off her, and with the beat of wings, it is up the stairs and crashing through the door. There are screams that echo all the way down into the dungeon, the clanging of steel. The smell of fire and ash. It feels as if these sounds pass within seconds, but they must go on for longer, and when it is all quiet, and she knows the creature is gone, Roscille closes her eyes and lets her cheeks run with stinging water.

The irony that would madden her, if she let it: Banquho sends Senga to treat her wounds. So he has decided that this is women’s work, that it is a good thing there is a woman here after all.

First Senga lifts her off the floor and drags her up the stairs, to her bedchamber. The pain has become a familiar friend. Roscille does not make a sound until she is dropped with little ceremony onto the bed, and then it is only a huff of air, part relief, part expulsion of this overloyal agony.

“Was this because of me?” Senga asks. “Or because of the prince who escaped?”

Roscille presses her face into the mattress. She cannot think of a reply. The question is simple, why, but the answer is depthless. For the first time since arriving in Glammis, her mind does not twist inside a narrowing chasm, trying slowly to release itself. Now she is just meat, wrapped in twine. That is what it feels like, as Senga’s tough hands rub cold water and peasant healing salves on her thighs.

They have not sent a Druide or a doctor to do this work because they do not want her to speak with a man whom she might enchant. Women cannot be ensorcelled; Wrybeard declared so long ago, and she has never covered her face in the presence of Hawise. But never mind that Roscille can barely concentrate on not becoming a corpse. Her breasts ache from being pressed first against the floor, and now against the mattress.

So much time passes before the pain withers into something bearable. In aching increments, her mind returns to her. Roscille considers what has gone wrong. She has overestimated her own cleverness. Underestimated the anger of men when their power is taken from them. She has let her heart move her. If she had said nothing while Lisander was on the wheel—if she had held the whip herself—she would be a porcelain-marble queen still, no cracks in her face, no lampreys mouthing her bare ankles and feet. But her greatest failure, perhaps, was believing she might be more: more than her father’s ermine, with its pitiless teeth, more than Lady Macbeth, tugged along by her husband’s will like a dog on its leash. The arrogance of hope.

She sleeps at strange hours, each sleep threaded through with strange dreams. At first Roscille fears the pain will appear in these dreams, but no—they are mostly scales and teeth. The warmth and strength of the dragon’s body over her own. She does not tell Senga, or anyone, this. She does not even articulate the images into words. Does not know how.

In the meantime, Senga brings her food and news from the castle. The food: hard bread, Scottish mutton. She would commit sin for a piece of fruit, fresh with juice, soft enough to split down its center with her thumb. But nothing grows in Glammis. The news: Banquho has taken over the daily affairs of the keep. He has stopped sending the Druides to the villages, but he has let Senga stay, for now.

Macbeth is returning soon.

Fléance comes to visit her, once. He wears a scarf over his own eyes; he is taking no chances. The part of her that is still a seventeen-year-old girl, an animal licking its wounds, wants to insult him—to tell him he looks a foolish woman, shrinking and cringing from her. It is almost worth the promise of more pain, imagining the way his face would curdle with these words.

In the end, she merely says, “What is the state of your honor now?”

He draws a breath, puffing his chest. “You have no leave to speak to me of honor.”

“Why not?” Roscille sits up, wincing. The pain still waits inside her like a coiled snake, ready at any moment to strike. “So you have beaten me, like a thousand women have been beaten before. There is no honor in that. And you will tell my husband I begged for it? To be flagellated for my failure? He will not blame me, for to blame me will dishonor him—he is the one who left Glammis in my hands. My failures are his failures. So stick stalwartly to your lies, but they will not save you. If you say I have no honor, I have no honor left to lose.”

Fléance is silent. The wound on his neck and shoulder looks glossy, well healed, unobtrusive. It must embarrass him as much as the older wound on his ear. A child’s scar. A boy playing at being a man. That is all he is, all he will ever be. Even Roscille could not make him into something more.

“You are a witch,” he says at last.

“And yet you played so nicely with me, witch that I am. Eagerly succoring my schemes. That shame will not fade, Fléance, son of Banquho. Whatever lies you tell in this life, poison seeps through the generations. Get out. Let me see no more of you.”

Soon Macbeth does return. Roscille does not go out to greet him in the courtyard, but she hears the barbican grind open, and hundreds of hooves beat against the dirt. Her room is windowless so she cannot see him, cannot see whether or not he comes back grinning, proudly waving the flag of his clan, dust-caulked and bloodstained but joyous with violent triumph. This is the best she can hope for.

She has had a long time to consider what she will say to him. But the correct answer is: nothing. This is what men want most of all to hear from women. He will arrange his world, and she will slide wordlessly into the place he has made for her. She feels new to Glammis again, a wide-eyed foreign bride, halting in her Scottish and cowering under her veil. Her thighs are still so raw she cannot bear to sleep on her back. She lies on her belly, gown drawn up over her hips, holding the pain at a slender distance.

Rough bootsteps on the floor jolt her from the bed. They are her husband’s footsteps, the treading of a warrior, uncompromising and unfaltering. Softer, more hesitant footsteps follow his.

Macbeth pushes through the door, two attendants at his heels. She raises her gaze slowly, beneath the veil, taking in all of him. There is no blood in his beard, but he is dewed with the sweat of a long journey, his face red and wind-chapped. There are lines etched on his brow that Roscille does not remember being there when he left. As he walks toward her, Roscille realizes, astonishingly, that those arrogant footsteps were not his at all. Her husband is limping.