Chapter 40 Claret
‘Perhaps I can help with that.’
Queen Mother Gruoch melts out of the shadows, so close to our cell I scramble back, surprised.
The woman could have been a spectre if not for the softest jingle of keys on her skirt, the sound too similar to Shepherd’s draping necklace for my liking.
But when I try my knife again, thinking to threaten Gruoch to let us out, I find it’s still lost in the depths of my cloak, wrapped out of reach.
All I grasp is errant threads, loose strands of silk, like my cloak is breaking at the seams – a message from the Moirai if there ever was one.
Don’t fight this. Don’t cut any more threads. Wait.
So I wait, muzzled and powerless to pounce, as the same woman who ordered our capture mere hours ago now unlocks our prison door.
Even Shakespeare doesn’t get up from his corner, perhaps too worn out from his last encounter with a royal of this line to drum up any hope that this visit could go better. That Gruoch can listen.
‘Did you know that your son,’ Anassa hisses the word at her, ‘has us marked to burn as witches? Did you come to gloat, Queen Mother?’
Gruoch huffs. ‘I should strike you for your insolence; give you a matching scar on your other cheek. But Spirit won’t let me sleep, and I’m tired of its incessant whispering, its infernal knocking.
Night after night, it forces me to wander through this castle like a restless wraith, opening doors, searching for the source of its phantasmal discontent only to find it in the mirror. ’
‘… You are as mad as your son,’ Shakespeare whispers.
The man voices my own thoughts.
‘If this be madness, you should welcome it. Now get up. Time is our foe. Hurry.’
Nobody moves. None of us can tell whether Gruoch has come to free us, or see us to a swifter death.
But what choice do we have? If we anger her too much, she calls the guards – and we get some fresh bruises for our trouble.
At least this way we stand a chance to run away.
Decision made, I snap out of my daze, and rush to help Shakespeare to his feet.
He stumbles but does hold his own. Anassa and Gruoch are locked into a staring competition, four green eyes foraging each other’s forest for the truth.
Anassa breaks first, giving Gruoch the smallest bow, the smallest tilt of the head.
She must have reached the same conclusion as I have: to comply, for now.
Gruoch ushers us out and Anassa follows right behind her, a raven shadowing a shadow, while I take the rear with Shakespeare, making sure he won’t collapse.
Sad supplications from the other prisoners mark our path across this reeking dungeon, but Gruoch ignores their plight, and there’s no way for me to free them that won’t damn us.
These lives are not on me to save. But Shakespeare’s is.
Anassa’s is. So I focus on my people, as Gruoch brings us to the staircase that leads upward, to the ground floor.
My raven stops abruptly, gasping. I rush to her, and see what has her spooked: two guards, sprawled across the last few steps. Sleeping – or dead.
‘They’ll be fine,’ Gruoch tells us. ‘It’s just a little tonic in their tea, to calm them down. The doctor has me taking it at night, but when I do, the nightmares are worse than my nocturnal wandering.’
‘You poisoned them,’ translates Anassa. I can’t tell if she sounds impressed or disappointed.
‘Only a little bit. Come now, watch your step.’ Gruoch places one foot carefully between the arm and torso of a fallen guard, over the head of another.
The guards don’t move. I see no chests swelling up with breath, not even slightly.
Still, not my problem. Not my murders. I wait for Anassa to go up, then help Shakespeare navigate the stairs.
He looks at the guards, aghast. ‘The sleeping and the dead are but as pictures …’
‘What?’ This is not a good time for him to also lose his mind on me.
‘Oh, nothing. You know, I’ve often wondered if I wrote Lady Macbeth too cruel, too calculated.
If, in my pursuit of crafting an allegory for ambition, I strayed too far from what a human being could do or be.
’ He manages a shaky step, miscalculating, squishing part of a guard’s finger with his foot.
He flinches, freezing in place – but the guard remains as still as a corpse.
‘I see now that, if anything, I was restrained in my descriptions,’ Shakespeare concludes once we make it up, past the two fallen men who will most likely rise no more.
The smell of death and dread still lingers in my nostrils, even once we clear the staircase and find ourselves on the ground floor.
The outer door is within sight but out of reach; three metal men standing between us and escape.
Gruoch signals us to be quiet. She reaches towards one of the many black drapes on the wall, lifting it from the side to reveal an open panel, concealed behind the onyx curtain. Come on, her gestures say.
We step through it into a passage made of stone, the air immediately cleaner and cooler. Gruoch slides the panel shut behind us.
I suppress a shudder. I know we haven’t stepped into some mystical realm, that it was a mere curtain, not the crossroads to the Underworld.
That this is but a secret artery, running across the palace, passageways probably leading to different parts.
We’re in a narrow hallway, similar to the pantry at the inn, only instead of food and bottles these walls are lined with open arches, their top parts lost to spiderwebs.
But something scratches up my skin, a sense that we’re this much closer to a reckoning.
These spiderwebs look hungry, glistening, the last inviting thing a fly would see.
A torch next to the panel flickers, as if echoing my fears.
‘You can breathe now,’ Gruoch says. ‘They can’t hear us in here. Every guard who knew about the existence of these passages died with my husband – and these brutish replacements my son employs are too dim-witted to consider defiling my decorations of bereavement to check.’
‘So that’s why you’ve drenched the place in black,’ Anassa mutters. ‘Not out of true grief for your husband’s passing, but to move around unseen.’ That tone again, dripping with praise and poison, tough to untangle.
Gruoch picks up the torch, points it ahead and starts walking.
For a second, I believe she’ll let Anassa’s words go, but then she turns around so fast the flames dance frenziedly, inches from my raven’s startled face.
‘I should have let Lulach burn you at the stake. Do not presume to know me, or my feelings. I loved my second husband well enough, despite his being my first husband’s killer.
He could have sent my son to exile, or worse, yet he chose to raise him as his own.
Macbethad was a fair man and a good king – better than most.’
Gruoch turns her back on Anassa, leaving her speechless. ‘Are you all right?’ I whisper, reaching out to take her hand.
She gives my fingers a light squeeze, but doesn’t say a word.
She doesn’t need to; I can hear her doubts as if she’s phrased them.
Is this the innocent we came to save? Is this the woman we need to convince to trust us, to leave her palace with us?
Gruoch’s intentions seem more mercurial than mist as she guides us to the third passage on the right, a serpentine thing snaking upward, narrow steps carved in stone turned slippery with time.
Twice I have to duck to avoid getting tangled in a web. Thrice we stop, alarmed, when eerie wailing breaks the silence, as if the stone itself is weeping, wheezing.
‘Merely the wind crossing the passageways,’ Gruoch mumbles.
Even she doesn’t sound entirely convinced.
And every time I reach inside my cloak, seeking the reassurance of my knife, I come up empty.
It gets harder and harder to unsnarl my fingers from the fabric with each try – as if the cloak is hungry and my hand is prey.
Shakespeare, next to me, notices. ‘All well, my friend?’
‘The magic cloak the Moirai wove for me, the one that’s saved my life more times than I can count, seems to be breaking apart and I fear what this may mean,’ would be too long an answer. So, I settle for a nod.
Up and up we go, Gruoch leading the way with her torch, Anassa’s shadow frantic on the walls, like flocks of blackbirds struggling to take flight.
We’re all unmoored, uncertain, though the tiniest hope seeps through.
Surely, if Gruoch wanted us dead, it would be wiser to have left us in that cell, to wait for our execution.
I’m turning this thought in my head, over and over, when she suddenly stops.
‘We’re here,’ Gruoch declares, and her relief is unmistakable. She pushes on a panel right in front of her, which opens with a creak, and climbs out, urging us to hurry.
One by one, we follow.
She’s brought us to a massive bedroom, dark but for the moonlight seeping through a window so tall it could be a door – and for the candles. A host of them, burning together in the middle of the bed, surrounded by dead flowers and small bones, artfully arranged.
‘What … is this?’ Anassa whispers, at the same time as Shakespeare gasps, ‘Witchcraft.’
I say nothing, because I understand. This bed is not a bed; it is an altar to her husband.
And every altar needs a sacrifice.
I try for my knife one last time in vain when Gruoch speaks up, loud enough to raise the dead. ‘I’ve brought them, Spirit, just as you instructed me, night after night. The witches three are here, unharmed. Now, take them as my offering, and reunite me with my husband!’
A long, curved blade flickers in the candlelight. Not mine – she must have hidden this in her black skirts all this time.
I grab Anassa’s wrist with one hand, Shakespeare’s with the other, and push them both back, towards the panel. Even those wailing stairs are better than being gutted, and I don’t trust Gruoch not to manage an injury on at least one of us before I overpower her.
The mad queen smiles, pressing her finger on the wall next to her.
The panel snaps shut. Smoke rises from the candles on the bed, taking a human form.