Page 58 of The Pirate Queen

The O’Flaherty soldiers look at her, startled, then look skyward. They laugh. Shake their heads.

“And I want peat stacked on the lawn—enough to keep them bright and hot through the night. You’ll cover it with oiled pelts, so it stays dry. We need the approach to the castle illuminated.”

The man they call Pig seems particularly incensed at the order. “Might as well paint us red,” he says. “Draw ’em right to us.”

“Yes,” she explains. “That is exactly what I intend.”

“Leathcheann soith,” he curses, then spits directly at her feet.

Finn is a dark blur at her side, his dagger at the man’s throat before she can stop him. Not that she means to. Finn won’t kill without her permission. Not unless Pig moves to hurt her. But she has their attention, which is what she wants.

“How else do you expect to see those men in the storm?”

“What fecking storm!” Pig shouts.

Grace ignores him. “They’re coming and we know it, so why be blind? Can you tell an O’Flaherty from a Joyce in the dark?”

He glares at her.

“I didn’t think so. Now build the fecking fires.”

The rain begins just after midnight. And the first small boat approaches the island half an hour after that. It’s a currach, holding eight men at oars with another manning the tiller. Ten more currachs approach behind it, each heavily laden with soldiers. They sit low and dark on the water, hunched forms trying to stay hidden. Grace cannot hear the slap of oars, nor can she make out a single face, but occasionally, when the lightning forks overhead, she sees the glint of sword and shield.

“Scian Catha is our biggest weakness,” she tells Finn. “If she’s burned, we’re stranded. If we have to swim for shore, they can pick us off one by one. And if it turns to siege, our provisions will only last a fortnight.”

“She’s guarded,” he says, answering only her first concern.

“Not by much. I could only spare four archers.”

“We have more on the ramparts. She’ll be fine. They want the castle, not the boat.”

Murray nods in agreement and a wet clump of hair falls into his eyes. He shoves it away with the back of his hand. “Three minutes,” he says, “before they make landfall.”

Though the rain comes down hard and heavy on top of them, it’s as warm as rain can be, with little wind. Again she is grateful it is July and not December, and rain instead of snow.

Grace plaited her hair hours ago and, though drenched, it doesn’t bother her. She watches the small boat creep closer. She counts her own inhales, exhales.

“There,” Finn says. “The first one is at the rocks.”

The currach comes in along the northern edge, and as soon as it nudges the steep rocky slope, a man leaps from the bow, rope in hand. He scrambles low and fast over a series of waist-high boulders into a knobby thatch of trees and ties off the boat. One by one, the others leap after him, careful not to tip the currach. Twenty seconds and it’s done.

“Ease back,” Grace says, and the three of them step away from the stone rail until they stand beneath the eaves of the roof, spines pressed to the cold limestone tower. A trickle of water slides down her neck and into her shirt, dripping over the knobs of her spine to the cleft of her buttocks. Grace shudders at the sensation but doesn’t leave her position. Instead, she lifts a hand and runs her finger through the gnarled gap in the eaves where lead flashing has been hacked away. Similar gaps run the length of the entire roofline.

Finn catches her eye and shrugs.

“Archers ready,” she orders, loud enough to be heard by those on the battlement but not on the ground.

Ten soldiers move forward in a crouch and kneel before the defensive slits in the wall. They nock their arrows as gracefully as setting a bow to strings.

The other currachs land near the first in quick succession and their men disembark, but none of them rush the castle. Instead, they spread outward in a fan along the rocky edge.

“They’ve brought a beam,” Finn says as several men lift a long heavy battering ram from an empty boat that has been drawn behind the last.

“We’ll be letting them close enough to use it,” she says. “ ’Tis the only way for this to work.”

He grunts.

Seán Joyce creeps across the flat expanse of land leading his men. His sword drawn and lifted; his scowling face turned up toward the tower. Even from here, she can see the greed in his eyes.