Page 148 of The Pirate Queen

Grace repeats the question he asked only a few moments ago. “What have you done?”

“What have you done, Merrick? Say my name, Mam. You gave it to me, after all.” He balls his fists. “Say my fucking name!”

“Bind him,” she tells Ultan.

Merrick turns quickly on his heel, but doesn’t make it a full stride before he sees the Murray twins standing behind his men on the beach. They loose arrows into two of his guards before the warning shout dies on Merrick’s lips. The third guard gets three good swings in at Ultan before Finn runs him through from behind. The man drops to his knees and coughs blood onto the wet sand. Three gurgling, miserable breaths. Four.

Men don’t want to die. Their deaths never come easy and are never gentle. They fight it tooth and nail. The only person she has ever known to slip away on a gentle breath was her own mother. Grace, however, has lived by the sword. Same as this man. She nods at Ultan, who runs his blade across the guard’s neck, offering the only mercy he can: a quick death.

“Call off your dogs!” Merrick shrieks around a mouthful of sand as the Murray twins bind his arms behind his back.

“Take him to the tethering post,” she tells them. “I’ll get my answers one way or another.”

It is a short, sad walk for her son, hauled up the beach by Finn and Murray, cursing and spluttering all the way. A dozen of her men surround the tower house, arrows nocked and trained on the ramparts, lest the guards try to attack from above.

A few tight knots and her son is bound, from shoulders to wrists, to the old splintered post near the front steps of Bunowen Castle where visitors tie their horses. Grace allows herself one glance to the upper windows and the room where she used to live.

“What have you done?” Grace demands again.

This boy that she carried against her heart for nine long months only laughs. She has been taking blows for Merrick since she was pregnant. But none hit harder than his next words.

“Why don’t you go home and see?”

Sir Richard Bingham approaches Rockfleet Castle at the head of one thousand men. Eight hundred infantry—mostly English, though there are a few Irish kerne thrown in for good measure—and two hundred cavalry. They come in from the east, from Castlebar, leaving a torn muddy track in their wake.

He sits astride a great black mare and looks to where O’Malley’s stone fortress squats at the head of a narrow inlet, a gray block without an ounce of artistic adornment. Spare and savage, like the woman herself.

It is low tide, and the channel is filled with rocks and seagrass, small yellow flowers that bow and shudder in the breeze all along the petrous shore. What a strange place to live. He has never understood her fierce devotion to this pile of rock at the edge of the world. Shouts come from the garrison and from the guards atop the ramparts. Not much in the way of resistance, he thinks. They’ll be dealt with soon enough.

“She’s gone,” his scout says, edging closer on his own horse. “Just as her son promised. Took her ships with her.”

“I have eyes,” Bingham tells the man. He’ll not praise this churl for stating the obvious.

He tugs at the reins and circles his horse so that he faces the sea of men.

“Every hut is to be burned,” he tells them. “All livestock confiscated. Every man, woman, and child who resists, killed. If they flee, let them. If they stand, run them through with the sword.”

Grace left her son tied to the hitching post. Merrick’s betrayal cost the lives of four men today. The rest of his people can mete out whatever punishment they see fit. She paused as they retreated to the beach, turned to see him one last time. Hope is a splinter, a painful intruder, hard to dislodge. Grace hoped to see regret in his eyes, but found only hatred instead. She forgets what he looked like as a boy, before anger consumed him.

They are an hour into the Atlantic now, rounding Slyne Head and making for home. Or what’s left of it. Grace stands on the cabin deck, salt in her nose, spray in her eyes, and squints into the sinking sun.

When she looks to Ultan, she finds him watching her. He nods once.

“Sure, then,” she says. “Take us home.”

Down the ladder. Into the cabin. Grace closes the door with a soft click and goes to sit on the bed. She lets her body soften into the rolling waves, lets the call-and-response on deck become a kind of distant chanted liturgy.

Grace lays her head in her hands and weeps.

Maiden, 1544

“Training”

Grace is fourteen years old

Seasons are strange things. It once felt as though a trip to Galway took half her life. A day in Clew Bay could have been months or years. Grace would grow two inches overnight and then time would slow to such a crawl that a decade passed before breakfast. But now? A year has been swept away so quickly she feels that Rockfleet has always been her home, that her life before was nothing but a dream. She arrived here at thirteen and now she is fourteen and everyone treats her like a woman, not a girl. Finola, in particular, has exacting standards.

No more running barefoot or leaving her hair loose about her shoulders. She is to dress properly, every day, with her bodice drawn so tight that she can hardly breathe. Her mass of wild curls braided and pinned atop her head. No more going off with the men. No sailing. No long hikes through field or forest. Grace has not bothered to look at her compass in six months. Every day her world grows smaller, managed entirely by Finola Bourke.