The Third Witch

by Rebecca Reisert

  I let him hold on. To my disgust, I find I am not as willing to dieas I had thought. My father would be ashamed of me. I must be an arrow, not a reed.

  And yet I long to see this boy grow into a man. And I long to feel wind and the icy sting of water washing away the grime and to taste wheaten bread and to sit with Nettle, playing the Revenge game with her and Lisette and Pod, and to see that beautiful young prince again. What kind of unnatural monster am I? After all that I have witnessed—all that I have done—how can I still want to live in this foul and soiled world? In this world that can be so carelessly cruel?

  Only now—now that I know that I cannot live—do I feel life screaming in me.

  But I am good at closing my ears to things I do not wish to hear. I am skilled in smothering thoughts half born.

  I give Pod a swift kiss on the top of his head. “Find Lisette,” I say. “Find Nettle. Take food and strike out on the road before Malcolm’s army gets here.” I give him a little push. “Go, little brother. Go.”

  To my relief, he clatters obediently down the steps. I watch him go. At the bottom he turns back to wave to me, but I shoo him on.

  “Nettle!” he calls out as if he is giving a battle cry, and he thrusts one small arm up into the air.

  I raise my hand as if in triumph. He smiles that smile that is like a slash of sunshine and then disappears from my sight.

  Something blurs my vision, but it is not tears. I will not cry. I take a deep breath. I straighten my shoulders.

  It is time to find the king.

  My only weapon is my broken dagger, but God has given the omens to show that it is my calling to kill the king, so I trust God to provide the weapon as well.

  Resolutely I head to the Great Hall . . . and come face to face with my mother.

  F O R T Y - F I V E

  SHE HAS NOT CHANGED. So many years have passed, and yet my mother looks just the same.

  But then I see she doesn’t. Her hair is dirty and hangs in rats’ tails down her back. She wears an undergown that is soiled and ripped like a sheet half torn for bandages. Her feet are grimy and bare. Up close I see her skin has grown a little soft and slack like a stocking pulled out of shape. Her bottom lip is gnawed and chapped.

  Yet she is beautiful still.

  “Come,” she says, grabbing my hand.

  She pulls me up the stairs to a fine bedchamber, hung with tapestries and banners of silk. I follow her in stunned silence. It is the most wondrous room I’ve ever seen—a fantasy kingdom of pale colors and sweet smells. A small, carved ivory table stands across from the bed, which is draped in heavy, embroidered, rose-silk coverings. The tabletop is a hand’s-width deep in spilled jewels that glow like dyed fires: rubies, emeralds, sapphires, topazes, and others that I cannot name.

  She pulls me to the center of the room and then lets go of myhand. She smiles at me and strokes my cheek. “You came back!” She gives a little laugh like a child on its name day. “You have come back to me. I knew you would come back,” she whispers. “I knew you were not gone for good, that you were somewhere safe, waiting. I prayed to be released, and it seems that the good Lord has answered my prayers.”

  How can she recognize me after all these years? I had thought there was nothing left in me of the child I once was. Do I still resemble that child so closely? I open my mouth to answer, but she covers it with the palm of her hand.

  “Hush,” she says. “When I asked to be unsexed, I did not mean it. We must turn you back again.” She lets go of me and hurries over to a chest and begins rooting through it, like a hound digging out a badger.

  Turn me back? Her words make no sense. I was the one who unsexed, not her. What does she mean? Does she think she is some sort of witch indeed who can shrink me back to my baby form? She tosses out fine gown after gown until they are piled knee-deep on the floor, a witch’s broth of jewel colors in velvets and silks. How I would like to kill her now. I want her blood to flood out and soak these fine clothes that she wore while I was ragged and shivering all those years in the wood. And to my shame, deep inside me, a little child’s voice is bleating, Hold me, Mama. Hold me tight. Don’t let me go again.

  Finally she gives a little cry and triumphantly plucks out a gown.

  “This is the one I seek!”

  She holds up an elegant gown of gold cloth, slashed with pine green velvet and embroidered with silver threads.

  “Oh, my soul,” she laughs, “throw off that guise and take your rightful place.”

  Rightful place? What does she mean? Does she wish to acknowledge me as her lost daughter, to proclaim me to all the court?

  When I do not move, her face grows hard. “Now!” she screams, and her voice is that of a dying gull. She stamps her foot and gives an ugly, wordless scream that startles me. She begins plucking at mytunic. “I said, take off that silly garb and put on your dress. I will not have you looking like a ragpicker or a fishwife.”

  Dazed, I pull off the short, golden brown woolen tunic that Nettle made for me. My mother tosses her sumptuous gown over my head and pulls it down over my hips, twitching it into place. Her eyes then light up like those of a saint at her first sight of Jesus, and she claps her hands with pleasure. “Oh, thank you for returning. I knew you were not dead.” She pulls a spangled scarf over my head. “That is more suitable as a headpiece till your hair grows out.” With trembling fingers she smooths the spangled silk flat on my hair. She is madder than Helga ever was. Then she grabs a looking glass that lies on the table under the jewels, knocking them out of the way. They clatter to the floor like frozen tears. She thrusts the looking glass in front of my face. “Look!” she commands.

  I look into the glass, and my knees grow weak.

  I have disappeared.

  Instead, two faces stare out at me. One is my mother years older, her hair and face as wild as a witch.

  Then there is the other face, the face where mine ought to be.

  This second face is also the face of my mother, her face from my very earliest childhood memories, peering out from under a spangled scarf.

  No!

  I throw the looking glass to the ground. I hear the glass break. I tear the spangled scarf from my head.

  “I do not look like you!” I say. “I am not you. I will not be you. I will never be you!”

  “What madness is this?” She laughs. “Not look like me? You are me.”

  I grab her thin wrists although I want to strike her. “Tell the truth! Who am I?” I demand.

  “Who are you?” She stops and looks at me with wide eyes. “Do you not know yourself? You are the queen. You are Macbeth’s lady.”

  “No!” I toss her wrists away. “ You are His lady—His whore.”

  “Have you forgotten who you are?” she asks. “Do you need to look in the mirror again?” She kneels and scoops up one jagged shard of broken glass and holds it up before me. “See yourself as you truly are.”

  “ ’Tis you who have forgotten yourself,” I tell her. “You are the queen. I am—”

  “No!” She throws the shard of glass to the floor and I hear it shatter against the wooden floor. “After I married him, I went away for a while, but I knew I would come back someday. Now I have come back. And I have only been dreaming this nightmare of a life. Now I can truly start to live.”

  “ ’Tis no surprise, lady, that marriage to the king is a nightmare—”

  “Not marriage to Macbeth, fool! Marriage to that other man— that villain who was my first husband.”

  “Villain! He was a good man, a loyal soldier, a noble—”

  “Why do you lie?” she screeches. She looks furious. She raises her sleeve to her mouth and bites into the fabric. With her teeth she rips off a strip. She spits it out of her mouth. “I was but twelve when I came to him, innocent as the moon. Don’t you remember? That first night I thought I would die of the pain. When he was angry or his wars did not go well, he would take out his pain on me.” Then she laughs again and begins to dance around the
room. “So I began to go away until a time would come in which ’twould be safe to come back again.” She stretches her hands out to me. “Now I have finally come home.” She stops dancing and whispers, “Had it not been for Lord Macbeth, I would have died forever.” Then she flings her arms wide and begins to dance again. “Now my self has come back to me, young and beautiful again.”

  The memory of my father in the burning castle flashes into my head. I will not feel even a drop of sorrow for her. “You let your lover kill your husband,” I said.

  She stops twirling. She nods solemnly as a child. “I did. Had I not done so, my husband would have killed me someday.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “My first husband died so I could survive,” she chants jubilantly. “Once he was gone, then could I thrive.” Then she stops, and her face grows sad. “But now my second husband has gone away and someone else lives in his eyes. I do not recognize the stranger who has taken his place.” She leans to me and whispers, “He killed my first husband, you know, and I can see in his eyes that soon he will kill me. He has killed everyone else. I am the last person left for him to kill.”

  What do I care about her marriage. “And what of your daughter?” I ask.

  She stares at me with haunted eyes. She sinks to her knees and begins to rock back and forth, singing in a thin voice, “I once had a babe, but she went to her grave.” She flutters her thin forefinger at me, beckoning me to bend down beside her. When I do so, she grabs hold of my sleeve and puts her lips close to my ears to whisper, “She burns, you know. We all burn. Either here or in hell. She burned in her father’s castle for the space of an afternoon, but I am burning through all eternity. Burning in flames the color of blood. Poor tiny babe. I had thought her a child, but she was just a twig, you know. Just kindling for the fire of my hatred.”

  She stares at her hand clutching my sleeve and then she lets go. She begins rubbing her hand, harder and harder, scratching it with her bitten nails, until it begins to bleed. She holds it out to me. “See? Her blood is the color of flames.”

  “ ’Tis your own blood, Mother,” I say.

  “No! ’Tis the blood of the king—one of the kings. I have married two princes, but I have only been one queen until now.”

  She looks around as if she fears the presence of spies. Then she whispers, “I said I would kill the king, you know. Leave it all to me, I said. I thought I could kill the king all by myself.” She lowers her head, and I see a few threads of silver laced among her dark hair.

  “You were going to kill your husband?”

  Her face tightens like a clenched fist. “Do not play the fool with me. Not my husband. The other king—Duncan—the king that was. I told my husband that I would be the one to kill him, and that my husbandneed do nothing. But at the last minute, I could not do it.” She rubs a ragged, soiled sleeve across her forehead. “He had too much blood, you see. Who would have thought that such a milky man could have so much blood?” She peeks up at me sideways from under her lashes. She looks sly. “I drown in blood, you know. Every night I drown in blood. First the knocking comes, and then the drowning.” Her skinny fingers clutch my sleeve again. “I killed my father, you know.”

  “No!” I grab her shoulders and shake her. “You killed my father.”

  “ ’Tis just what I said. You and I are one. We are the same—”

  “We are not the same! I am not you!” I pull free and stumble to my feet. “There is nothing of you in me.”

  For a moment she stares at me with the bewildered eyes of a child. Then she sniffs her hand. “Blood still.” She begins to lick it.

  “Don’t,” I say.

  She turns her head like a raven and peeks up at me. “He spoke true. Blood will have blood. I pray God to turn me into a stone, but not one of the stones that speak.”

  In the ravaged body in front of me I see the ghost of the proud woman who faced all the warriors after Duncan’s death and convinced them to name her husband king. I see the ghost of the beautiful mother I once loved. I am so tired of this mad world stuffed with ghosts. I stand to go, but she springs up and grabs my hand.

  “You are my soul. I am the body so you must be my soul. I knew my soul had left my body long ago, and I did not think to see you again. But through God’s grace, you have returned. So stay with me. Do not leave me again.”

  “I am your daughter!” I cry out.

  Her face twists with anger. She draws herself up like a queen. “Do not lie to me, my soul. My daughter is dead.”

  “I am not dead. I did not die.”

  She tosses her hair back and gives a laugh like a saw blade scraped across stone. “Do not mock me. You and I are the same person—”

  “We are not! I am your daughter.”

  She laughs again, this time triumphantly as if she caught me in a lie. “ ’Tis all the same. Mother and daughter are one flesh, so no matter what you call yourself, you are still me. We share one flesh, one soul, one name. I gave my daughter my very own name so she would have nothing of her father in her. So even if she were alive, she would be all me.”

  I dig my thumb into her hand, wanting to hurt her. “Tell me— did you ever love my father?”

  “Did I love my father? How could I? He sold me to the highest bidder. I begged him on my knees to let me marry Lord Macbeth, the man I had loved since childhood, but my father told me I was his property, his cattle, lower than cattle, because cattle never cried and screamed when they were sent to the slaughter.”

  “Answer me! Did you ever love your first husband?”

  “How could I? I was twelve. ’Twas on my wedding night when he tore me in two. ’Twas on that night my soul left my body. On that night, for the first time, I understood that I had become two people— the girl crying on the bed and the girl who floated above the room, watching everything that went on. But always I looked through the eyes of the floating girl—but you never let me see you until now. Why have you become flesh today, my floating self? Have I finally endured enough? Is it my time to be the one who floats and is it your time to look through my eyes? Are you a walking looking glass, or have I indeed been torn in two?” She brushes her arm across her forehead as if she is waving away a pesky bee. “Am I the ghost, or are you?”

  I cannot believe how small she has become. Now I am much taller and stronger. I have hated her so long, but she had always been tall and strong, big enough to contain my hate. I say softly, “You are the ghost, Mother.”

  For a moment she is silent, and then she whispers, “The wife of Macbeth must go to her death.”

  My heart cries out for Mad Helga.

  “You killed your first husband,” I say in a voice cold as a January stone. “You left your daughter to die. She did survive that fire, butshe has lived as an outcast in the world, poor, lonely, snatching crumbs where she could find them. This was your doing, Mother.”

  As if I’d cast a spell on her, her face changes. All of a sudden she looks old, older than Mad Helga. Her bones fold in till she looks little more than a bundle of rags and twigs. All the wildness drains from her eyes. Her hand shakes as she reaches it up and strokes my cheek. “I have done you much wrong, Roah!” Her voice is low and sounds drugged.

  To my dismay, I feel a splinter of pity. But before I can speak, she jerks away. She blinks, and her mad self is back in her eyes. She leans toward me as if she wishes to embrace me, but instead she snatches my dagger. “Do you want me to kill myself? If ’twill drain off some of your pain, I will.”

  She holds out the dagger above her chest.

  The Lord knows, it is what she deserves. If I say ‘Kill yourself, Mother,’ will she do it? Perhaps God has sent me to — But it is clear my mother is mad. I feel cheated by her madness. I would like to make her suffer, but there is no satisfaction in causing more suffering to the mad. There can be no joy in driving a lackwit to her death. I hold out my hand.

  “Give me the dagger, Mama.”

  She pulls it to her chest like a baby she is p
rotecting from assassins. She backs away from me. “You and I are just the same.” She begins to laugh. “Since we are the same soul and flesh, then this is my dagger.”

  “I am not you,” I tell her. “I am not Roah.”

  She clutches my dagger close to her thin chest. Her laughter swells like a flood tide. As her laughter grows, I back from the room.

  “Run, Roah!” she shrieks, her laughter rising as wild as a tempest-tossed sea. “Flee the castle now, Roah, or die! Try to outrun your fate, Roah! ’Twill catch you in the end.” She begins to twirl in a frantic circle, chanting, “Run, Roah! Run! Run!”

  I do not know if she calls to me or herself.

  F O R T Y - S I X

  I RUN DOWN THE STAIRS, fleeing that laughter that now sounds like something small and delicate being shattered over and over. When I can no longer hear the laughter, I lean against the wall of the castle, gasping for air.

  A serving man, lugging a heavy woven sack that bangs and clatters as if he is hauling a load of silver plates, comes around the corner. His mouth falls open when he sees me. “Beg pardon, my lady,” he wheezes, and he falls to his knees. Then he tilts his head up toward me. He frowns. “Wait a moment! You are not the queen! Who—”

  But I take off running before he can finish his sentence.

  In the Great Hall I hide behind the tapestry in the same place I overheard Him arranging Lord Banquo’s death. I squat there, panting. The castle has grown unnaturally quiet. I must figure out what to do. Where I can find a weapon. Where I can find Him. But my encounter with my mother has unsettled me. I glance down at the gown I am wearing. It is not safe to race about dressed like a fine lady. I curse myself for letting that fiend trade my short gown for this fancy dress. I could cut off the bottom of the gown, but even should I do so,this fancy garb would never look like the tunic of a manservant. Then I remember that my mother still has my dagger. Think, think of a new plan. But my meeting with my mother has turned my brain to sludge.