Page 47 of Lady Macbeth

Roscille’s mind, which has been so long asleep, trapped in the tight stricture of pain, smothered, silenced, begins to turn again.

“The morning of the trial two men went to bring her up from the dungeon. But they found the cell empty. Yet the door was not open—it was as though she had slipped through the bars. They sounded the castle’s bells, as if there were an enemy’s army on the horizon. The search was long and desperate. At last, some keen-eyed servant spotted a woman’s dress in the water below the cliffs, churning amid the foam like laundry. The gown was recovered, but Lady Macbeth’s body was not.”

“And there were no other search efforts? All were happy to believe that she drowned?”

“There was nothing else to believe. She had vanished, like a spirit vacating its vessel.”

Roscille stares into Lisander’s eyes, letting his green gaze throw her reflection back at her. She sees herself truly, at last. She sees the face that makes men cower and cringe. She sees the shades of her father, in small ways: The pertness of her chin. The high, jutting cheekbones. Wrybeard would never claim this resemblance; perhaps he would be blind to it entirely, as a nocturnal creature is unaccustomed to the light.

“You did not say anything about Macbeth’s mother.”

“I did not know her,” says Lisander. “She was dead, I believe, long before my birth. There were some rumors about strange fates befalling the women of Glammis, but—”

“Surely,” Roscille cuts in, “there is some record of her. Perhaps not of the mother. But the wife? At least a name.”

He nods slowly. “The name, I do know.”

The name rises from Lisander’s throat, drifts between his lips, and hangs in the air between them. And then it presses itself upon her, with the heat and heaviness of a brand, marking her naked skin. This pain, this other pain she has chosen, makes her blood run with a vitality she has not felt in so long, as if she is a corpse, revived.

Roscille’s limbs unfold. She rises, and with two hands, she pulls Lisander up with her.

“You must go,” she says. “Promise me you will stay safe. Far away from here. Free.”

“There is no freedom for me when I am absent from you.”

“Please.”

“What are you going to do, Roscille? Do not ask me to leave you again; I cannot. The longing is with me even when I am the beast; perhaps it is greater, even.”

The clearing’s natural sounds surround them. Birdsongs, cricket tunes, romping animals. The grass, beneath their feet, damp with the impressions of their bodies. So easily, she could slip back into the water, hold her head underneath until she became a part of the clearing, too, her bones lilting to the floor, silver fish darting through the empty cathedral of her rib cage. As easily as Lisander will slip out of his human skin when the exhaustion forces his eyes shut.

She considers running, too, of course. But the spear-tips of men would find them before they could make it far. The brightness of her cloak is like a beacon for arrows—there is a reason the weasel only sheds his sturdy brown camouflage at first snowfall.

“You will haunt me, too,” she says at last. “We can never be truly apart then, if we are each other’s ghosts.”

Lisander takes her face into his hands and kisses her. He does not release her until his scales begin to show.

Roscille picks up the heavy cloak and robes herself in it. Tucked cannily into one of the folds, right where the rabbit’s fur meets the feathers of the swan, the iron key hums with a mystic warmth.

If she cannot have safety, if she cannot have love, at least she can have this. Vengeance.

Macbeth must slumber still, because Roscille is able to slide back through the barbican and into the castle without being detected. The light is still the same rheumy gray, as if the sun has been constrained. Perhaps time slowed around the clearing, as river water freezes in winter, ice framing the arrangement of stones. Through the corridors, chasing the sound of the ocean. The key, the lock. The harsh sting of the salt on her skin, its hostile grit. The darkness that is like a wall of smoke. Now Roscille does not hesitate. She steps into the water.

The torch flickers to life. Stretching flames illuminate their white, crooked limbs, which fork the black air. Their wet clothes rise from the water, then descend, then rise again, with the torturous rhythm of the tide. Their feet shuffle against sand and stone. Their chains drag like shells on the seafloor. All the flesh and fabric clinging to their taut bones looks translucent, as the bellies of thin-skinned fish.

Until now Roscille has been stumbling with a mortal’s blindness. Now she strides toward les Lavandières without fear. They advance upon her. They circle her, until they are within the reach of one another’s arms. Roscille does not need the torchlight to see. In fact, when she closes her eyes, her vision breaks apart with color. Smoke and green and purple miasmas. Memories that are not her own.

She opens her eyes. “I know you.”

The center witch responds drily: “It has taken you long enough, to cut off your earthly sight. Roscille. Rosele. Rosalie. Roscilla. Lady Macbeth.”

Roscille fixes her eyes on this witch. “Lady Macbeth.”

The witch blinks slowly. Like a cat. A serpent. The other two witches continue with their washing. It is only now that Roscille sees the differences between them, where before they were all copies of the other. The right witch is the oldest, wrinkled like aged grapes. The left is second oldest. There are still youthful streaks of black in her hair, braided neatly among the white.

The center witch is waiting. Time slurries around them. The world grows older—or newer—but they do not.

In Breizh, to name a thing is to claim some power over it. They carve runes into the walls of their monasteries—false, un-Christian names, which will fool black-clad Ankou into passing without adding their corpses to his wagon. To banish a fairy, one must only speak their true name aloud. Then they will disappear with a peal of thunder, in a cloud of smoke.