Lady Macbeth

by Ava Reid

Vengeance is not a wooden cup that empties. It is a jeweled chalice which endlessly spills over.

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.

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.”

I am Queen now, she imagines saying, chin raised in defiance. Her father looks down on her, an indulgent contempt on his face. You are whatever creature I make you. Yet still some nights Roscille prays he will come. She prays he will take her away from this gray, evil place where witches live in chains beneath the floor. She wants to ride through the damp green forests of Breizh and cool her feet in the ice-white waters of the Loire. But then when she stands and brushes off her knees she is angry at herself, for missing the home she was banished from, for mourning the father who tossed her away. Nothing more than a lovely face. A lovely face, and a body that shrinks into the mattress while her husband pries her legs apart and grunts into her ear, This one will be a boy, an heir. He would be wiser to father a son on Senga. At least then his line will not be tainted by her Brezhon blood. But Roscille would not wish this fate on anyone, especially not Senga, whom she has sworn to herself she will protect at any cost, who will not be like Hawise—I promise this. Senga comes to her in the morning with hard bread and cold milk. “It will be over soon,” Senga says, stroking her forehead. “Your husband does not have the vices like some other men. Once you have fathered him a son, he will stop.” It will never be over, she thinks. Even when he is finished, he remains inside her, her brain streaked through with purple and black vapors, the color of the blood on his knee. The wound that...

Hail, Queen, who is known by many names: The cruel Lord is dead and gone. Show your eyes and speak your will. Let it carry across the green hills and the low valleys of Alba, across lakes and rivers and the narrow channel where your father lies. Henceforth you will be known in all lands for your cleverness and your justice. And of your unnatural stare? Let them call you witch, as they do any woman who professes power. All hail the Queen who shows the dark threads beneath the world to which the mortal gaze is blind. And now, we secret, black, and midnight hags: Our toils are ended. Our chains may rattle, but they do not bind. At last, we sleep. We dream.