The Pirate Queen

1535
“Storm Born”
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—”

“It’s 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 on shore 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. She 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. It’s 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!”

The call comes from on board, near the prow, and the voice sounds like rocks grinding together. It belongs to Sivney, her father’s first mate. He’s always been kind to Grace, but he
doesn’t look at her now.

Donal collects the mooring lines and loops them into a pile on the deck. Steps back. Glances at Grace. Take my place, his eyes implore, but his lips are pressed tight.

“Shove off!” her father gives the order, and fifteen oars on the port side reach out and rest against the dock. “Push!”

Niamh groans and moves away from the rocky outcropping.

“Again!”

The oarsmen lean to the left, shoving the long wooden blades against the dock, then repeat the process. Now Niamh bobs far enough away for them to row.

“Da.” It is no longer a plea but an accusation, and Grace takes a step forward, reaching for him.

Eóin shakes his head. “I’m sorry, bird.”

Furious, Grace throws the braid at his head. The sight seems to startle him, and he reaches for it, on instinct, but her hair is caught by the wind and whisked away, a red sail flapping in the sun for a moment before it drops to the brackish water, tendrils spreading, soaking, then sinking.

*

Maeve. Wife and mother and now . . . untangler of knots. She winces as the comb catches in what is left of her daughter’s once-beautiful hair.

“Why?” Maeve asks.

Riled by the wind and her furious march up the hill, Gráinne’s curls must be wetted down before they can be tamed. Maeve dips the ivory tines into a pitcher, then runs them through the now-short red strands. She combs, then lifts to see what can be salvaged and what must be trimmed. Finding a jagged section, she holds it aloft with one hand, then snips with her scissors, watches bits of copper drift to the floor and disappear into the woven rush mat. The longest parts now fall to her daughter’s chin. But the hair at her nape is little more than stubble. Gráinne is too pretty to look like a boy, but now, for the first time, she resembles Donal. An angry coil forms in Maeve’s belly at the realization.

Again, she asks, “Why?”

Gráinne slumps on the stool, then looks up at the cracked looking glass. She glares at her own reflection. “Da said I could go to Galway if I cut my hair.”

Maeve breathes out the curse she’s so often heard her husband mutter. Fecking Galway.

“There is a difference between what’s said and what you wish to hear. Tell me what your father said.”

“He said I can’t go with him because my hair will get caught in the ropes.”

“And you thought he’d take you if you cut it?”

A nod.

“Look at me.” Maeve turns her so they are eye to eye. She leans closer. Speaks a harsh truth. “No one did this to you.”

Gráinne opens her mouth to argue.

“No.” Maeve gives her a gentle shake. “You did this to yourself.”

“He lied.”

“He’s a man, isn’t he? Won’t be the last time.”

“Fathers shouldn’t lie.”

Maeve looks to the window where Niamh’s white sails bob at the far edge of the horizon. She sighs. “Neither should husbands. But they do. Do you understand me? Men. Lie. Sometimes
with words. Sometimes without them.”

“Do women lie?”

Maeve doesn’t catch her smile in time, and it flashes wide across her face. Her daughter has unwittingly trapped her. To answer as she’d like, to tell her daughter no, would itself be a
lie.

“Tá.”

“When?”

“Usually when our lives depend on it.”

Gráinne thinks about his for a moment. Puckers her lips. Makes a face in the mirror. And Maeve laughs at that, at the crossed eyes and little pink tongue poking out.

“Why can’t girls go to sea?”

“Why would you want to?”

Gráinne points to the narrow window in the stone wall where two blue lines—one dark, one light—meet on the horizon. “Because everything fun is out there. I don’t want to stay. I want to go.”

Maeve is startled by what she sees in the gray eyes that look back at her. Something lovely and wild and spirited lives within those stormy depths. She would expect nothing less from the
daughter she made with Eóin O’Malley. But there is something even deeper that pleads with her. A wildness Maeve has never encountered before. She blinks first, then looks away from her
daughter, unnerved.

Some women are built for birthing. Broad-hipped and fertile. Maeve is not one of them. She has been pregnant a single time since she wed Eóin. The delivery was fraught, and her body tells her in whispers—that knowing every woman has—that there will never be another child. Once she had a life as Margaret McConaughey, but now this house, this child, is her life. Now all she has is Eóin and Gráinne. Both of them wild and unruly and in need of constant management. Her daughter, it seems, will require a great deal more than her husband.

Maeve pulls the girl close so Gráinne’s cheek rests against the nubby weave of her apron, then brushes the hair away from her little face. Kisses the top of her head. Lifts a shorn curl and twists it around her index finger. It is an effort not to cry. Her hair had truly been beautiful.

“Promise me you will never do this again.”

“Why?”

“Because men will never respect you if you try to be like them.”

Gráinne lifts her head and meets her mother’s gaze. “Then how will they respect me?”

“They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.”