Then the sleepwalking began.
You think you know me. You have heard the story—the whisper of a woman who traded her milk for gall, who called upon the spirits to unsex her, who dashed the brains of her own smiling babe rather than break an oath. You imagine me striding through Inverness like a queen carved from winter, my heart as hollow and cold as a crypt. But you are wrong. I was never cold. I was burning .
For a while, we were invincible. A second murder, then a third. Banquo’s blood spilled in a ditch, and Fleance running like a rabbit through the dark. I watched my husband grow giddy with violence, each killing making him more a king, less a man. And I? I smiled. I poured wine. I held his hand when the ghost of Banquo sat in his chair—a ghost only he could see, mind you. The lords watched him scream at empty air, and I saved him. I always saved him. “Are you a man?” I asked, because shame was the only leash that still worked on him. Lady Macbeth
My husband is away now, hiding in Dunsinane, building walls of wood and bone and paranoia. The thanes are deserting him. The forest, they say, is moving . How fitting. Everything I touched to make us safe has become a cage. Every lie I told has grown teeth. And I am left with this—this terrible, absolute clarity. I wanted power for him, for us, for the burning thing inside me that could not be named. But power is not a crown. It is a mirror. And I have looked into it for too long.
Duncan’s blood. Not a river. Not an ocean. Just one old man’s quiet, astonished bleeding. And it has filled the world. Then the sleepwalking began
They will remember me as the villain. The witch-queen. The dark mother of murder. But I will tell you the truth: I was afraid. I was so afraid of being small, of being powerless, of being the woman who watches her husband fail and says nothing. So I became the storm. And the storm has swallowed me whole.
But somewhere in those long nights, something inside me began to… change. It started as a scent. Blood. Not on my hands—we had washed them a thousand times—but behind my skin. Under my fingernails. In the back of my throat. I would wake at three in the morning, certain I could taste copper and iron and old, rusted regret. I stopped sleeping. Or rather, I stopped dreaming . My dreams had become a locked room, and I had thrown away the key. You imagine me striding through Inverness like a
“What do you mean?” I said. “A little water clears us of this deed.”
What do I see? Not a queen. Not a monster. Just a woman who loved her husband so much she unlearned every soft thing she was born with. And for what? He is a tyrant now, and he does not even look at me. He sends for the doctor, not for his wife. He plans his battles, not our future. I have become a footnote in my own catastrophe.
