Page 209 of The Pirate Queen

Grace shakes her head. “I will not allow it.”

“Even you are not so powerful,” he says, and his laughter rumbles in her ear. He pats her shoulder. “We must get up.”

“Not yet. Let us stay a while longer.”

The great window of Rockfleet Castle is thrown open. The sun streams in, the breeze rolls over them gently, like a wave, like a kiss. There, on the sill, a goldfinch perches, watching them, its head tilted to the side. It ruffles, then begins to sing a melodic chirping trill. It, too, has come to say goodbye.

Richard lifts a curl from her shoulder and wraps it around his finger. A quarter of the strands are silver now. He smiles. “Fire and rain,” he whispers.

Richard runs the calloused fingers of his other hand up and down her bare arm. Back and forth. Over and over. He is trying to comfort her, to instill her with courage. But all Grace wants is the one thing she cannot have: she wants to keep him.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

“ ’Tis hard to raise a child without his father,” Grace tells him. “I do not have the heart to do it again.”

“What makes you think I will not be with you?” Richard asks.

“Don’t. That isn’t fair.”

His voice is quiet, his breath soft against her ear. “I like to think that I stayed with you during those years when we could not be together. It will be no different now. And besides, you will have Tibbot’s face to remember me by.”

Richard’s illness came on suddenly, over the winter. A weight in his lungs. Some boulder he couldn’t lodge by coughing or clearing his throat. And for all the speed of its arrival, the sickness lingers long, grows deeper, and every day his breath becomes more shallow. He is harder to wake in the mornings. He drifts off sooner in the evenings. It is so strange to Grace to see him like this, for he has always been an anchor. An emblem of strength and security. Now, just rising from the bed leaves him breathless.

“I wasn’t sure that you were real,” he says, “that first day when you came to Rockfleet and stood on the castle steps. I thought you must be some trick of the light, a fairy come to tempt me. Never had I seen anything so beautiful. But you were looking back over your shoulder, desperate to get away. The game was already set—and I not even a player. I loved you then. And I love you now. And I will love you long after I am gone, Gráinne. Not even death can change that.”

It is afternoon when Finn walks into the privy chamber. The MacWilliam has called for him—though he cannot imagine why. They have spoken so rarely in all the years that he has lived at Rockfleet. Finn expected Gráinne to come with him, but she remains in the Great Hall with that brehon, Bald Alec, bent over some book.

He feels uneasy stepping into this private place where Gráinne lives with her husband and Tibbot. It feels like an invasion of privacy, like it did on Niamh the day Tibbot was born, when he helped the boy to his mother’s breast.

“You called for me, MacWilliam?”

Richard Bourke is up today, dressed and by the fire, though clearly weak. He no longer wears his chainmail.

“You are in love with my wife,” The MacWilliam says.

Finn goes utterly still, mouth slightly open. It’s an observation, not a question.

“I would say that you have been in love with her for a very long time,” he adds.

Finn turns to the door, sees that it’s still open. He takes a step and pushes it shut, then goes to where Richard sits by the fire. Finn. Ugly, taciturn Finn says, “She cannot know.”

“Why?”

“Because I have never had a choice in the matter,” he says.

“Nor have I,” The MacWilliam responds.

“I do not think my affection is so uncommon,” Finn tells him. “Men either fear or love her. There is no third option.”

“And you will do nothing about your affections, even after I am gone.” Another observation.

Finn looks at his hands, twisted together on his lap. Old and gnarled, like jerky. “I have known that woman from the time she was sixteen. Almost forty years. And I have been with her most every day of that. She has only loved one man, and ’tis not me. I am smart enough to know that.”

“And that is why I have not long since killed you, Finn.” Richard smiles.

“Never a threat, was I?” He sighs. “She won’t settle down, you know, not when you’re gone. Not ever.”

Richard tries to laugh, but his own lungs steal it away, drown it in fluid. “I would be saddened if she did.”