Page 146 of The Pirate Queen

Gutty gives the signal: the light, sweet, warbling whistle of a skylark. Gráinne has stepped onto the beach, embraced her son. Were the O’Flaherty guards worth their salt, they would note that the call comes from low in the brush instead of high in the clouds, where it belongs.

He gives the tower house but a single disparaging glance before joining the twenty men crouched in the tall grass. He was born in this place, though he remembers no mother, no father. He remembers nothing but hunger and cold and filth. Memories as smudged as the fingers of a dirty boy tasked with keeping the fires. Then her. His Bean an Tí. A warm light and soft hand and the only home he’s ever known. Gutty would throw himself off a cliff if she asked. So it is no hardship to lead her crew into the village, swords drawn.

Grace has sent Gutty and the crew of Caoimhe into the village with firm instructions: Burn every structure. Seize the cattle. But hurt no one. Any displaced O’Flahertys are welcome to join her in Connaught. Otherwise, they can depose their chieftain or fend for themselves.

As for the Róisín Dubh, her crew disembarked an hour ago, and the Murray twins along with their twenty men will have the tower house surrounded by now.

So Grace thinks nothing of stepping into her son’s outstretched arms, of pulling him close and soaking up his warmth one last time. Merrick smells of leather and mead, of salt and steel. And yes, he is his father’s son. But once he was her boy.

“I did not expect you,” he says.

“You should have,” Grace tells him.

Then puts her dagger to his throat.

Merrick tries to shift away, but she moves with him.

“What the feck, Mam!” he shouts.

Ultan and the crew have drawn their swords now, and a call goes up from the ramparts along Bunowen Castle. Too late they have realized this is no maternal visit.

When Merrick was born and the midwife cut his cord, Grace thought it such an odd thing to be severed from the life she’d grown. But this is far worse. All her children have turned on her in their own way. A necessary separation. But this is a betrayal.

“You have given your loyalty to Bingham,” she says. “You have submitted to the English.”

“It’s not what you think. It’s not—”

“Do not call me a liar.”

“I am using him!” Merrick shrieks as the edge of her blade catches his chin. “Rory had to be defeated. I thought you’d be happy! I would have long since been chieftain, if not for him!”

Grace lowers her blade and takes a step back. She looks at him with pity. “The title would have never been yours.”

“Oh yes, let’s hear it again. Please tell me how it would have gone to my stupid, weak brother. I bet now you’ll say he wouldn’t be dead, that he’d still be—”

Alive.

Yes, Young Eóin would still be alive if not for Rory and the new O’Flaherty and that meddling from the English queen. But that word is knocked right out of Merrick’s mouth with the back of her hand.

“You will never speak of him again.”

“Mam—”

“No. You have lost the right to call me that.”

“You cannot mean that. Not over something so stupid.”

“Oh, do tell me what I mean, O’Flaherty. Explain it in great detail, since you seem to think I don’t understand my own words.”

“O’Flaherty?” he sneers. “You will not call your own son by his name?”

“I never called your father by his. And you are no longer my son.”

Merrick’s guards shift forward, trying to flank him. Late afternoon sunlight glints off their steel, and they shift nervously, foot to foot. Four of them to her five. Close enough odds that she doesn’t see any fear in their eyes.

Until the distant echo of shouting reaches them.

Merrick looks over his shoulder at the billowing black smoke that swirls above the hill.