Page 48 of Lady Macbeth

Roscille asked her father once, Perhaps it is better to have no name at all, so you cannot lose your power to another? And Lord Alan Varvek, Duke of Breizh, Wrybeard, vanquisher of the wretched Northmen from the narrow channel, replied, It is not for women to worry about these matters. You will take your husband’s name when you wed anyway.

“Gruoch,” Roscille says. “I am pleased to meet you.”

At the sound of her name, the witch’s eyes crackle with light. Gruoch. It is a name that demands a lot of Roscille’s Brezhon mouth, drawing low, harsh sounds from the back of her throat. A name Lisander had to school her tongue in speaking; repeating the word three times over until she could mimic it perfectly. This name is a weed that grows from the rocky soil of Glammis, a plant that, if it is torn up, will merely grow again, showing its vines even in the dry-cracked earth.

“So now you know me,” Gruoch says. “What will you ask? Counsel? Prophecy?”

Roscille looks at the other two witches, who have paused in their washing. Still like this, she can examine them: One is squint-eyed. The other has a mole on her cheek. They were wives, too. Ladies Macbeth.

She takes a breath.

“No,” she says. “I want to be like you.”

Gruoch’s white face grows whiter. She scoffs. “You do not want to be like us. Washing clothes for the length of how many mortal lifetimes.”

“You are doing his laundry, truly?”

Left Witch: What else are old women good for?

“Yet Macbeth seeks you out for advice, for your farseeing power. If you were truly powerless, surely you would be dead.”

Right Witch: What is power, Lady? It is a word that grows more distant from its meaning each time it is spoken. We tell the King what he wishes to hear. And if he does not wish to hear it, he molds it into whatever prophecy pleases him. Bad omens are good omens. The sea is a hellish desert. The desert is a heavenly spring.

Roscille falls silent. She sees the flimsiness of her previous schemes, falling like cut flowers around her. She sent her husband on a deadly mission only for him to come back more powerful than ever. She tried to yoke Fléance to her will, only to have the same ropes turned on her.

Perhaps her greatest mistake was trying to ape the power of mortal men. Now she knows there is another world, waiting beneath the one she knows. Here, in the darkness, she can walk without shielding her eyes.

Left Witch: I see the wounds on you, Lady.

Right Witch: I see the fury behind your silence.

Gruoch says, “I see the protest in your pain.”

The darkness around her seems to stretch and ripple. When Roscille looks down, she sees the silver of her reflection, murky and strange, more color than discernible shape. White is bleeding from her body and into the water. As it drains from her, it spills out in all directions, taking on its own forms. Like shadow puppets on a wall, they appear: A bloody dagger and a bloody hand. The crescent-shaped silhouette of a face. And at last, a crown, raised high over this head by a pair of disembodied arms.

When Roscille blinks, all of it vanishes, the dark water sucking the color away.

She lifts her gaze.

“I have a prophecy of my own,” she says. “Will you speak it for me?”

Twelve

It is lucky for Roscille, that time has passed so sluggishly, so unnaturally, that her husband does not notice her absence from their marriage bed. She takes off her cloak and slides back into the sheets beside him. Every muscle and bone protests this. It is like returning to a different body, one that exists in this permanent state of pain, the still-healing scabs on the backs of her thighs, the tear between her legs, Forget these little wounds, as if such a thing were possible. As much as she desires it, her mind cannot have total dominion over her body.

Macbeth wakes strangely, unlike other men. He does not roll over, nestling into the sheets, as protest against the rising sun. He turns onto his back and sits up straight, as though yanked upward by an invisible chain. His torso, perfectly erect, is statue-like in its stiffness. His eyes open without blinking away the bleariness of sleep. Roscille observes this in total silence, as her fear of him resurrects itself. But then a furrow appears between his brows and he lets out a huff of air between his gritted teeth, and Roscille remembers her husband’s little wound, which has stained the sheets with a new kind of blood. Black and oozing, dredged from somewhere deep within his body. It must hurt. She cannot see how it would not.

“Wife,” Macbeth says, turning to her.

“My lord husband.” Her voice is meek, but this is for the best. He will want to know he has broken her. A good punishment; this has been one which mixes pleasure for him with pain for her.

But Macbeth’s look of satisfaction is brief. Without preamble, he says, “You will join me in my chamber from this day on.”

Roscille watches herself nod, from some distant, disembodied place.

“Banquho told me you brought a handmaiden to the castle.”

“Yes.” Roscille lowers her gaze. “Senga.”