‘Ssh, stay still. I swear, you two are so alike. Children, the both of you.’ Claret spares a smile for me before continuing her ministrations.
The scene would be adorable, under different circumstances. As things stand now, I’m too preoccupied with pacing up and down the cell, trying to measure the exact degree of our misfortune – and failing.
What crime sent us to prison, really? I didn’t even have the chance to speak to Gruoch, to explain. My reaction to Macbethad’s painting, and to the news of his demise, was all she needed to condemn us … as if the moment we set foot inside the castle our fate was already decided, and shemerely indulged us for a second. But why? And did they make us wait so long so they could incapacitate Will first? It would be easier to think without that stench, those wails from the adjoining cells.
‘That’s all I can do without clean water,’ Claret proclaims, handing the cloth to Will to keep next to his mouth, where a nasty cut runs deep. ‘You people really need a lesson on the virtues of fresh water, if we make it out of this. Now,’ she turns to me, ‘if you start screaming, really loud, do you think it will lure the guards back? They’re wrapped in metal, but their necks are flesh, and I would like to see what my knife can make of it.’
‘It won’t work.’ Will coughs.
‘How do you know?’ Claret asks at the same time as I ask, ‘Why are you here?’
He tries to sigh his usual, oh-woe-is-me sigh, but it comes off more like wheezing. ‘A story, then. For all I know it could be my last.’
Clarettssks, but I urge him to go on.
‘We were done for at the gate, ever since I asked for King Macbethad. My calculations were a year off. This is the February of 1058, it seems, and the current King of Scotland is Lulach, Gruoch’s son from her first marriage.’
I blink.Queen Mother Gruoch …
‘Fine, so you got the king’s name wrong.’ Claret huffs. ‘It can happen. News often takes a long time to reach us. In Mycenae, with the war raging so far away for a decade, we had to rely on an elaborate system of bonfires –’
‘My dear, magnificent Claret,’ Will interrupts her, ‘on any other day I would sit rapt, listening to stories from your world. Oh, the plays I could concoct … But this world is different. King Lulach is young and paranoid; he’s givenorders to arrest on sight anyone who seems suspicious, or mentions his father’s name, as if unaware of his passing. I don’t know if it is grief or ambition, or a sorry snake of both, that have turned his mind so. But he’s marching to war next month, to Rhynie, where he will die, mind you, according to Holinshed’s chronicles, and until then he thinks everyone a spy … or a witch.’
His words chill me. This is beginning to make sense now, but not quite. ‘Did the guards tell you all this?’
‘Oh no, no – ow!’ Will tries to shake his head but regrets it, the pain clearly overwhelming. ‘All the guards did was throw me in here, the good lads. His Majesty himself paid me a visit. He wears such fine, hefty rings on his hand.’
I look at him, assessing his injuries. A signet ring could do that damage on a face, it’s true. But a king hitting a prisoner … What kind of a monster has Gruoch given birth to?
‘Lulach hit you,’ I say. I resume my pacing, trying to fit this new information into a picture as coherent as –
And then I see the pages. Holinshed’s tome, torn to shreds on the cell’s floor, already soaking up grime and dark fluids. ‘He saw the book? The one that chronicles his whole life’s story?’ A dormant fury rises in me. If Lulach had felt what I felt when Shepherd showed me that folio … ‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ I whisper.
‘Funny you should mention that. See, I thought I could help, even in the eleventh hour. I told him I had a book that prophesied how events would unfold. That if he read it, he could choose another path; stay alive.’
‘For such a clever man, you are a moron,’ Claret says, and I wholeheartedly agree. ‘People have always tried to fight their fate, they always will try. Give a man aprophecy and you have handed him his undoing. Every step we take against the path pre-weaved for us by the Moirai is a step backward. It only ties us up in knots, like struggling flies, bringing us closer to the spider’s mouth.’
Her words hang between the three of us, heavy, foreboding.
‘Yes, well, it doesn’t matter now, does it? Lulach called the bookwitchcraft. He tried to burn it but I stopped him, saying how nothing good ever comes from burning books, from silencing words of wisdom. He thought I was casting a spell on him.’ Will chuckles, but it’s all bitterness, not mirth. ‘We are to burn tomorrow, my dears. The three of us, as witches. I’m so very sorry.’
I could scream, like Claret suggested earlier. I could protest this nonsensical declaration. Instead I slump to the cell’s hideous ground, not caring about all the kinds of filth that greet me there. The iron bars cut into my back and I am forced to accept there’s nothing more to do; we’re out of moves. Night falls slowly outside, the silver moonlight from the skylight giving us a ghostlike countenance – such fitting foreshadowing of what’s to come. The guards do come, without me screaming. And Claret, strangely, keeps her hands on her cloak instead of attacking them, her features twisted furiously. The guards laugh at us, and make obscene jokes, and bring us weak ale and stale bread that we nevertheless devour; a last, shared supper for the two crownless queens and the scribbler trapped before his time. We are nothing, in this Scotland of yore. Nobodies. Will regales us with tales about how England gets a Scottish king in his time, and how he’s friends with him – then even he falls silent, perhaps thinking of all the people hewill never see again, all the characters he won’t get to bring to life.
All because he came along, to keep me safe, out of some misplaced sense of responsibility. And look how quickly, how seamlessly, I’ve brought us all to ruin. I bang my head on the bars, the repetitive movement soothing. I ran out of strength to pace a while ago.
A hand cushions my head instead of cold iron. Clarets sits down beside me. ‘Don’t do that,’ she admonishes. ‘Our fight is never lost until it is. No need to give yourself a split skull, do our enemies’ job for them.’
‘Yet when the guards were here, that knife of yours remained well sheathed.’ I don’t mean to accuse her. She must be tired too.
‘I know,’ Claret mumbles, as if surprised by herself. ‘I was going to. Imeantto. But when I tried to grab it from my cloak, I couldn’t. It was as if it was embedded in the fabric, wrapped tight. As if I wasn’t allowed access to it.’
I narrow my eyes. This feels important, somehow, but my mind is too exhausted to unravel it. And what does it matter, anyway? Knife or no knife, we’ll still burn. All I did fighting off that torch Thom threw at me was give us an extra day. A few blessed hours, my heart reminds me as Claret huddles closer. Hours filled with a whole new vocabulary for feelings, a new constellation of sensations. Maybe that’s not so bad. I kiss her head. Her hair smells like walnuts and war. ‘It’s all right. We both did our best. And it was still worth it, to go up in flames with you.’ My voice is low, yet the cell is small. I know Will can hear us, but he pretends to slumber, to give us this last privacy.
Good man.
I am determined not to waste a single second.
‘You know,’ I whisper, bending my head to look at Claret’s copper eyes, ‘when Ophelia brought me to you, she was repeating something, a phrase. It didn’t make sense to me then, but it does now. I think that phrase was meant for your sister.’
