Page 64 of Lady Macbeth

Slowly Lisander raises his head to look at her. His green eyes are wavering, inhumanly bright. At first she fears there is no recognition in them. Perhaps the dragon has at last consumed the man; perhaps he is now nothing more than the shell which holds the monster within it. But then he exhales and his lips turn up faintly at the corners and he says in a low, tired, loving voice, “Roscille.”

“Lisander,” she whispers. “I thought you had gone.”

He shakes his head. “All this time I writhed inside the monster’s body, in the woods. But even the dragon knows your face. Your voice. If such a creature has any desire greater than blood, it is to protect you.”

A dragon does not have many qualities to admire, but it cannot be said that it does not want, and that it does not guard its treasures jealously. Roscille lifts one of Lisander’s hands in her own. The blood is caulked deep beneath his nails. She thinks of how they must look here, kneeling in this mess of mangled flesh, two unnatural creatures who are so natural in each other’s company.

Senga is watching with wide eyes and a white face. Roscille rises, and she pulls Lisander up with her. He is still weak, unused to his human body. It has been so long since his feet have touched the earth.

“Don’t be afraid,” she tells Senga.

But when she reaches her handmaiden, Senga merely pulls Roscille into an embrace, pressing their faces close. She holds Roscille for a long time, even while the sounds of war skid past them like rocks down a mountainside, and while the storm clouds gather. At last, she lets go. She says, “Not afraid of you, Lady, never.”

Lisander, who is still holding her hand, says, “We must go. If any more of Macbeth’s men spot us, we are dead or in chains.”

“No,” Roscille says. “This fight must end with Macbeth. There can be no other way.”

“The men see this as a fight for Alba, not merely a fight for their Lord or for Glammis. It is the English who come to suppress them, again, to dilute their Scottish bloodlines. Even if Macbeth is dead, they will not stop.”

“They will not stop for Æthelstan, true. But they will stop for Duncane’s chosen heir, the son with the blood of Alba in him. If they see you are alive, they will know Æthelstan is not here to trample them, merely to depose the traitor and restore Duncane’s line.”

Lisander turns his face away from her. Shadows pass across it.

“You would ask them to kneel before a monster and place a crown upon its head,” he murmurs.

Roscille tips his chin up, forcing him to meet her eyes. “You are more than the creature your father has made you. Perhaps you are not mortal, not entirely—but I have felt the tenderness of your flesh; I have seen the nobility of your nature; I have been blessed to know your selfless spirit. Still you are a man.”

“Kiss me, then,” he says, “and prove it.”

She grasps his face, without reluctance, without contrition—just as she did that first time, his hand tangled in her hair, his hips rolling against her. His mouth opens to meet hers, the ask and the answer. He bites her lower lip, the faint surfacing of the monster, but his tongue is gentle, soft with mortality, and his arms are endlessly tender. When she breaks the kiss at last, their hearts beat furiously in tandem.

Without letting his arms drop from her waist, with their foreheads still close, Lisander whispers, “I will show myself, then. I hope they will see what you do. I hope it will be enough.”

Wind sweeps the courtyard, blowing in the storm from the sea, where lightning has already begun to crack the air and waves are rising in great heights. On the other side of the wall, men are falling like struck trees. And reluctantly, Roscille removes herself from Lisander’s embrace.

“If you are to show yourself,” Senga says drily, “perhaps it should not be all of yourself.”

Lisander, as if he has only now remembered his nakedness, flushes.

To Senga, Roscille says, “Find him clothes. I will go after Macbeth.”

“No,” Lisander says at once, seizing her again by the arm. “He has no honor left in him; only ambition and rage. He will think nothing of striking you down. At least let me—”

“You cannot,” says Roscille. “There is a prophecy. No man of woman born can slay him.” She does not have to say the rest. The thoughts drift out from her like silvery visions, like spirits escaping their vessels. I am not a man. Not quite a woman, either. Roscille of Breizh, beautiful, witch-kissed, witch.

Soldiers beyond the wall roar and choke on the blood in their mouths. Evander is among them. Perhaps slain already. For all the men who drop to their knees when they see Lisander alive, there will still be more who rally behind their limping, diminished Lord.

It will not end, truly, until Macbeth is dead. Roscille releases Lisander’s hand, and she goes into the depths of the castle.

Roscille knows where to wait for him. When Æthelstan’s men are bashing in the barbican, when Evander’s head is brandished on a pike, when the battle is either lost or won, Macbeth will come here. The iron door is behind her, cold air slipping through the cracks in the wood. The torches gutter against the wall. Beneath her feet, the ocean roils in its endless rhythm.

She hears him coming before she sees him: that shuffling gait, the hot breath exhaled through his flared nostrils. As he grows closer, around the last bend in the corridor, she sees a hand shoot out and grip the wall. It is streaked with blood both old and new, bright red and rust-hued, announcing all the deaths he has made. And then he comes, his enormous body penetrating the narrow hall, his shoulders so broad he can barely fit through.

He towers like a giant. This was Roscille’s fearful first impression of him, his preternatural largeness. Yet she is not afraid like she was then, kneeling before the Druide, letting him yoke them together with his bristly rope. All her chains have been slashed, all her vows broken.

Macbeth’s eyebrows leap up his face when he sees her—a brief moment of shock, and then his lips pull back in a snarl.

“You should not be here. You should be growing ancient and blind in the dark.”