Two Pieces
by Nistelle
nistelle (at) gmail (dot) com
At first the world almost seems the same. In the days afterward there are the walks through the gardens, the rides through the heath, supper in the main hall with her, talks by candlelight. It almost seems the same. Only his constant trips to Duncan's old castle, subdued meetings with thanes, condolences and anger, promises of retribution—only those things remind him of what he's done. The world has skewed dangerously. It has turned on its end, and he is the cause of it.
He cannot forget that, but he has been surprisingly successful trying.
"Malcolm and Donalbain are gone," he whispers to her one morning. They are curled up in bed, warm, their breaths faint white trails that, in the cold air, look like smoke. His hand plays lazily with her soft dark hair. "They are frightened. As they should be."
She is quiet, but she burrows more deeply against him. Approvingly, he thinks.
"I have heard the thanes talk about who shall be king next," he continues.
She lifts her head to look at him.
"I know it will be me." There is a fierceness to his voice, an aggression. It is almost as though he is daring someone to disagree with him. "I know it."
He looks into her eyes; there is amazement there. Reverence. She breaks into a radiant smile. Her face is flawless, tender. There is no remainder there of the frightful strength that had etched her features into a stone mask, that night so long ago. Perhaps she was another person then—as he was.
"The king," she breathes, and traces his mouth with one fingertip.
"The king," he says, and then the pride wells up too high in him and spills over. He crushes her against him, hard, as if to say, there, look. See how strong I am. The king.
In the final weeks the world seems to have warped beyond all shape and recognition, a nightmarish corruption of what it once was. They walk aimlessly through the castle, weaving through the rooms, lying down only to rise a moment later, pacing, restless. Unendurably aware.
"Someday they will find us," she hisses to him one evening in the darkened expanse of a corridor. "They suspect. Surely you know that."
"If you think such things you shall make them so," he replies, harshly. He runs a hand through his hair, looks up and down the corridor; he feels nervous, fidgety. He hates himself for it. "If they learn, it will be because of a mistake on your part. Or mine. Not because they know anything. They don't know anything."
"But they do, you fool, you fool, you must realize..." Her voice trails off; she begins to pace, rubbing her eyes. She is not as brutal as she is trying to be. Somewhere she has lost that, that gift of inhumanity; and then she seemed to have lost everything else. Everything but memories and fear.
She wrings her hands, covers her mouth, then turns to him. Her eyes are red-rimmed and feverish.
"I cannot sleep," she whispers hoarsely. "I feel—I forever feel that they will soon discover. I have dreams that they will. Waking dreams, that they discover and find us and take everything that we have. I think on it all the time, every moment. I don't feel I can... keep it in me much longer—"
"Listen to me." He grabs her by the shoulders roughly and shakes her. "You will keep it as long as you must. If our fall comes because of you... if it comes because of you!"
She is sobbing now, in his grip, dry sobs. Fruitless.
"And stop your crying. You knew what this would mean. How we would pay. You knew and you will pay, or God help me I'll make you." He throws her against the wall and she stumbles, shocked, to the floor. She remains there, shoulders shuddering, still weeping dry. The sight of her like that, collapsed and weak, fills him with sudden loathing.
He turns from her and walks away, her broken voice following him.
"I have nothing left in me but the secret... I have nothing at all but the truth... And I want it gone, God help me, I want it gone. Someone take it from me. I want to be empty, someone, please..."
He is remembering a day in the spring, in the first year of their marriage. He had gone out hunting in the morning, determined to find something fresh and indulgent after the long winter months of black bread and thawed venison from the smokehouse. He returned at dusk, empty-handed and shamefaced; there had been sheep grazing on the copse near Skara Brae, but when he went to slaughter one he saw the lamb by its side and felt something so profound and ancient he could not bring himself to kill it, nor its mother. Nor any of the sheep there.
She had laughed, not derisively. She said she would not have wanted him to kill such a lovely child, or any of those sheep either, at least not on a spring day as warm and wonderful as this one had been.
He said he was sorry that he had missed it with her. He said he was sorry that he could not have sent a servant to hunt. He said he was sorry she had married someone who had nothing.
She smiled softly, and took his hand, leading him out of the castle into the cool night air and he followed, without asking why. After a minute she broke into a run, laughing breathlessly, and he pursued, not really trying to catch her, content to go wherever she led.
They ended in a panting and giggling heap at the meadow near the road. When he lifted his head, he saw what she had brought him to: an endless, breathtaking field of spring crocuses, dark purple—royal purple—in the dusky moonlight. A regal carpet.
You have this, she'd said, murmuring against his ear, her hands on his chest. And you have me.
It is the last time he will see the Sisters. They tell him, as they always do, that everything is going as planned, that he is safe. Still, they must see that he is troubled.
"You worry for your wife, do you not?" one asks abruptly as she rolls a piece of thread between her fingers. She is blind, her scarred eye sockets staring eerily at his face. "That she will—hyeh—weaken?"
"And send your destiny to ruin," her skeletal sister says.
"Yes," he says.
The blind witch chuckles and pulls from the shelf a curved, rusted dagger. "She will not."
"Wait a fortnight," rasps the third, taking the thread from her blind sister and pulling it taut from end to end. "Let her pace. Let her suffer. Soon her suffering will end—as will yours."
He is almost unbearably relieved. He feels he is about to grin. "It will. It will. I was worried. I felt we were... falling apart, the both of us. With neither there to hold the other."
"You love her," snickers the skeletal witch.
He says nothing to that, only, after a moment: "We will be together, then? After a fortnight, we will be together again?"
The blind Sister presses the knife up against the thread and smiles widely at him, showing all gums. "Till death do you part."
The knife splits cleanly. The thread falls to the ground in two pieces.