Page 1 of The Pirate Queen

Maiden, 1535

“Storm Born”

Grace is five years old

The girl lifts a knife and with one trembling swipe severs her braid. In all fairness, the steel is sharp. Cook put it to the whetstone just this morning. But still, it is a shock to see the limp, dead thing in her hand. Like some rock pipit with threadbare wings. Or a clump of wilted flowers. Yet she shakes it in her father’s face and hopes that her fear looks like anger instead.

He lurches forward a step. Eyes round and horrified. A hand outstretched as though to stop her. “What have you done, bird?”

“Now my hair won’t get caught in the ropes,” she says. “Now I’ll be going with you.”

He shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I—”

“ ’Tis what you said.”

He lied. They both know it. But now she’s called him out—in front of his crew, no less—and she can see the storm building in his eyes. To plead with her father in private is one thing. She has done so every day for a year. But to challenge him here, while he has one foot onshore and the other on deck, is a mutinous sin.

“Gráinne,” he warns, his voice now clipped and threatening.

Grace shifts back and forth on bare feet. It is summer but the dock is cool and damp, the dark gray stone a balm against the jagged cut on the arch of her left foot—an injury from when she ran through the rock pools at low tide last week looking for anemones. Grace loves the soft red-hued creatures, how they glisten like bloody mushrooms when closed; then, once submerged again, bloom with a tentacled crown. Such a strange child, her mother says, always running barefoot, cursing the rocks. Grace feels the sting of salt water in the cut. Ignores it, afraid to break her father’s gaze. Knows that if she blinks, he will send her back to the tower house, to her mother.

The galley bobs beside the quay, sails furled tight against the masts. It looks antsy, like a child bouncing on the balls of its feet, ready to leave. There are ninety men at oars, looking elsewhere, suddenly curious about the sky and the cliffs and the dirt beneath their fingernails. But their ears are tuned to the chieftain and his daughter. Telltale signs. Those bent heads and furrowed brows. The only one who dares to watch the spectacle is a boy of nine. Donal. He is four years older than Grace and dark, like their father. Grace has heard her mother complain that the boy should look more like Aisling, like his own mother, that Eóin O’Malley shouldn’t have re-created himself quite so well in the bastard he made with that village girl. Her mother thinks it would be easier to look at Donal if he didn’t wear her husband’s face. But all Grace sees when she looks at her half brother is a boy who would happily trade places with her. She knows the sea is no friend to Donal, that he returns from every voyage green around the gills. And yet, Eóin tries. With Donal, he tries.

“Take me with you.” It’s a tiny whisper, nearly lost in the wind and spray rushing into the harbor.

“No,” Eóin says, and he is angry now. Or perhaps ashamed. Quite often, there is little difference between the two.

But Grace is angry as well, and her chin wobbles, letting him know.

“You’ll be staying with your mother. As is right.”

“You said—”

“I made no promises.”

She shakes her head. “Isn’t fair.”

“Fair or not, that’s how it’s done. The sea is no place for a girl.”

Grace has been on Niamh—her father’s galley—more times than she can count. The name is carved there on the prow, and she knows what each letter feels like beneath the pad of her fingers though she cannot yet read any of them. The girl loves nothing more than to tuck herself into the prow, her slender arms resting on the gunwale as she traces her hand across those deep, dark grooves. She thinks Niamh is a beautiful name. Wishes it were hers.

Grace knows every island in Clew Bay by name and by sight. Nishoo. Collan Moore. All the Inish: Turlin, Daff, Loy, Muck, Gowla, each with its own rolling hills and beaches and cliffs. Some no bigger than a field, others stretching for miles. But she has never gone far enough into the Atlantic to lose sight of them. Has never been allowed on a trading voyage. Has never been so far from home that the fat, square tower house that looms above them on the cliff fades from view. Home. Where her mother is and where she has been told to stay. Where a girl belongs because the sea is no place for her.

“Please.” Begging now. It sounds pathetic even to her small ears. Grace has never heard her mother beg, is ashamed to hear herself do so now.

She waits so long for her father to answer that her feet grow cold and her eyes burn. The braid feels heavy in her hand. This moment, at the age of five—standing in the wind, shorn curls whipping her eyes, cheeks reddening in humiliation—is the first time Grace O’Malley feels hatred. Her father has lied to her, and she hates him for it. It burns worse than the cut on her foot.

“Take me,” she demands.

“No.”

“You said it was my hair.”

He rubs his face. Curses. “Isn’t your hair, bird. ’Tis you. Do not ask again.”

Decision made, Eóin O’Malley unwinds the mooring lines from the iron crossbar and tosses the sodden rope onto the galley. Then he lifts his foot from the stone and sets it onto the smooth wooden planks of Niamh’s polished deck, the boards nearly black, gleaming in the sun.

“Prepare to shove off!”