Page 45 of Lady Macbeth

She takes one more thing from the table beside the bed and then slips silently through the door.

Down the winding corridors, the sea rising and falling beneath her feet. Out into the salt-pricked air of the courtyard. Her eyes sting. No one is there to stop her. Not even the horses whinny in the stables, breathing pale smoke from their nostrils. She remembers how cold she was the first time she stood in this courtyard; she does not even shiver now.

The barbican is shut, naturally, so she has to squeeze through its bars. This is easy enough, for no one designs a castle’s defenses with a woman’s body in mind. Bare-footed onto the rough grass of the hill. Dew makes her exposed skin damp. Behind her is the insistent rush of the ocean, but Roscille does not want its hardness and grit, its crushing, snarling tide. It makes her sick to even imagine. Instead she treads on down the hill, the arches of her feet burning as the ground slopes beneath her.

She stops at the small copse of trees. They are bright and impossibly green, as if fed by a recent rainstorm, though it has not rained for weeks in Glammis.

The clearing is how she remembers it, only Fléance’s blood no longer slicks the grass. Last time she was here, she was Lady Roscille, still chafing against her new kingdom, new language, new name. Now it all sloughs off her, like a snake’s shed.

The tightly knitted branches protect the glade from the wind, so there is no sound, save her own footsteps, as she approaches the pool. The water is clear, showing her rippling reflection. Roscille watches herself disappear into it. First her ankles, then her legs, her hips, her breasts, until she is drowned up to the throat. Her hair floats out in strands of silver-white.

She feels the blood vanishing from her, but curiously it does not taint the water. The pool remains clear, like a gemstone refracting light. Her legs are slick, and when she reaches down, the ugly texture of the scars is gone. The water holds her in perfect suspension. She does not need to kick to stay afloat.

This moment, too, hangs in timeless suspension. No birdsongs, no early-risen crickets, no scurrying in the underbrush. This is a fairy place, made alive only by unnatural magic. Or so she thinks. Suddenly, the sounds return: birds tittering in the branches, crickets humming, animals blinking their yellow eyes from among the roots. The relief she feels is like a breath finally released. She touches herself. The pain is here again, too. But it is moving away from her with each passing moment, as she sinks deeper and deeper into the water. At last it closes over her head.

So long she has resisted this death by water, struggled and writhed against the fate of Hawise and the First Wife. Now it seems the only power she has left. Perhaps the First Wife thought so, too.

From underwater, there is a muffled sound—large and heavy, and Roscille breaks the surface in a panic. Branches part and twigs snap. She turns around, paddles backward to where she can stand. She is still half drowned, only her head and torso showing, as the serpent winds its way into the clearing.

It looks both greater and less than when she saw it first, in the murk and darkness of the dungeon. Its long body flutters with muscle, stippled with gleaming scales. Its head is enormous, more than half the span of her arms. Its tail cuts the grass as it moves. The scutes that rise from its back make it look more a creature of water than fire, though she smells the smoke that tinges the air a hazy gray color. Among the stone and rusted iron of the castle, this creature was an abomination, an affront to nature, impossible to comprehend. The green hue of its scales was more vivid than anything she could name.

Here, it is the color of leaves that have been nourished by rain, the grass that has been protected from the coarse, stripping winds. It pulls the light of the clearing to it, gathering it and holding it in the long vessel of its body. It fits here, like the arrangement of stones in a streambed.

And Roscille is not afraid.

The dragon approaches her: slow, viperous creature it is. Its huge head tilts, as if to examine her from all angles. Serpents, she knows, see only by movement. Staying still will turn her invisible. So Roscille takes a trembling step forward, moving farther out of the water, until she is only drowned up to her knees, the rest of her body bared, waiting. Flesh and muscle, thick, a meal of milk and honey for this creature, if that is what it desires. She looks into its lidless eyes. Tries to find Lisander there.

But then the dragon is on her, its claws shearing the water. Its muscular body wraps her, constricts it. This is how serpents eat; Roscille has seen it, the adder with its unfortunate mouse. Yet the pressure is not quite tight enough to be painful. It is merely that, pressure, and where its belly scrapes her breasts she feels a throbbing somewhere quite far away from her breast, these two places connected as if by a taut string.

Consume me, she thinks. Have me, as you will.

Then, a slipping. The scales turning smooth. The musculature of the creature’s body withers, until she feels the tenderness of flesh and the jutting of bones beneath it. The metamorphosis is quicker than nymph to tree, fish to flower. No claws, no teeth, nothing but Lisander’s bare skin, his hand fisting her damp hair, and his breath hot against her throat. His chest heaves.

She grasps him by the shoulders, pulling him against her until their bodies seem to bleed together. She gasps out, “You.”

He whispers into her neck, “Why did you not run?”

“I choose this death, over any other.”

A swallow ticks in Lisander’s throat. “I do not think the creature—my creature—would have harmed you. I have…some sense, still. I am changed, not vanished.” He draws a breath. “But it is a viler curse than you know, Roscille. My desires are not stolen from me. Rather it is my own basest impulses, transfigured, made monstrous. I am myself, perhaps more truly than any mortal man could ever be.”

Lisander leans forward. His head rests against her shoulder. It is a pose of penitence.

“I think I am much the same,” she whispers back. “If I have a witch to thank for my curse, she did not change me. She only revealed me.”

With a sudden urgency, he takes her face in his hands. His eyes blaze.

“Perhaps you will flee after I confess this,” he says, hoarse, tormented. “I did not leave you alone in that dungeon because I wished to abandon you in your suffering. I feared that the creature might inflict upon you a worse fate than what you already had endured. It wanted— I wanted you in the manner a man desires a woman, yet cloaked within the dangerous glamour of claws and teeth.”

“Then the beast is more humane than any mortal man,” she says bitterly. “To resist such an urge—to flee rather than to feast.”

She takes his hand from her face and guides it, slowly, between her legs. He must feel the newer blood there, wounds from the torture he did not have the misfortune to witness. All of a sudden he turns cold, like stone.

But she guides him farther, working his fingers inside her.

“Roscille—” he starts.

“No,” she says, her voice breaking. “Please. Let me have this pleasure of my own choosing.”