Page 111 of The Pirate Queen

One lunge forward with her blade and she has nicked him on the cheek. Just enough to shut his mouth. “And how would you know anything, unless you’d sent him yourself? Hugh de Lacy?” she asks. “Was a poor name for a spy, MacMahon. I’d thought you more clever than that. Wasn’t an ounce of Wexford in him. What secrets did you pay him to find?”

“A nice story you’ve told yourself. Does it assuage your guilt? If he’s dead, it’s because of you.”

“He is dead because you sent three men to Achill Island. Now turn them out.”

MacMahon wisely keeps his mouth shut.

“Come out and answer for your crimes,” Grace calls. “Or I kill your chieftain.”

Nothing.

Not a word from anyone in the church.

Grace waits a moment. Then two.

“I had not thought the MacMahons such children. What a mistake to think I’d come here to face men.”

A rustling then. Furious murmurs and their leader is shoved aside. Three men emerge from the church and step into the bright afternoon sun, blinking hard.

“So. It was you?”

None of them move.

None of them speak.

The first one out the door is younger than the others. He is antsy. Has something to prove. His eyes are wild and his fists are clenched. He looks at her with such hatred that she knows he was involved.

MacMahon stands to the side near the church door.

“Why did you send de Lacy?” she asks him.

When he doesn’t answer, Grace looks to Finn and Murray. “Bind their wrists.”

There is shouting from within the church. The other MacMahons are displeased that their fellows have surrendered so easily.

“G’wan!” Grace shouts. “Nose the air. That smoke is the remains of three Galway hookers with red sails. They’re little but cinder by now. Ye are outnumbered and stranded. Ye can be dead as well, if ye like. Or ye can shut your fecking mouths and let me have my answers.”

Shifting then.

Uncertainty.

Soon, three men stand before her, arms behind them, wrists tied.

“Why?” she asks again.

Silence.

She kicks the first man directly in the bollocks and he drops to his knees with a grunt. His eyes water. He curses everyone from his own mam to St. Padraigh.

“Who sent you to Achill?”

“The MacMahon.”

“Why?”

Again, silence.

Grace grabs the hair at the back of his head. Tilts it backward. She uses the knife that Richard Bourke gave her in Moycullen to slit his throat. A single deep cut through the jugular.