Page 166 of The Pirate Queen

“What have you left?” He points at the tower house. “I have taken that pile of rocks.”

Niamh, I have Niamh, Grace thinks, and that is enough for now.

It takes everything within her not to run to Tibbot. Or to order Murray—crouched low on the rise above them—to fire at Bingham. She has so few men left, and she will need every one of them for what comes next.

She watches Bingham’s men shove her beautiful son into the back of a dingy gaoler’s wagon. She listens to the metallic scrape of the key turning its lock. She looks not at Bingham, but at Tibbot, trying to make him understand that she will find a way out of this. His fingers wrap around the closely spaced iron bars. He peers out at her, and she sees that he is willing her to find courage. He looks so like his father in this moment that her chest aches.

Her mind is a whirling, frantic explosion of schemes, her heart thumping heavily beneath her ribs.

Young Eóin is dead.

Margaret has been warned.

Merrick is lost to her forever.

Donal is in chains.

And now Tibbot, plucked from her side.

Rage, hot and holy, builds in her chest and grows with each breath, heavy and burning. She will kill Bingham. She will do it with her bare hands.

Bingham turns away from her without another glance, urging his horse back up the slick rocky slope toward the castle. Once he is near the steps, he dismounts and hands his horse off to one of his soldiers.

“Do not go after them, Grace,” Bingham shouts over his shoulder. “He will have an armed guard of fifty men all the way to Athlone. And I know your numbers are half that. It would be too easy to kill you now. And I have other plans for you.”

Grace O’Malley, unacknowledged Chief of the Name, witnesses the last of what she loves be taken from her. She stands and watches and doesn’t move. Not as the whicker and neigh and thump of horses fill the courtyard of Rockfleet Castle. Not as the man she hates most in the world turns her home into his garrison. Grace does not turn and walk into the hills until that door is shut against her.

“Are they gone?” she asks Gutty an hour later. He has met her, as instructed, in the marshland near Inishgowla.

“Three miles out from the castle.”

“And did they leave scouts?”

“None that I saw.”

“Good. Not that they can catch us anyway.” She puts a hand on his shoulder. Squeezes him in thanks. “Did you get the message to Hook in time?”

“Tá. He’s taken Margaret and their children into the hills. Would take a man smarter than Bingham to find them.”

“He has Tibbot and Donal,” she says.

“Both?”

“Arrested under fake charges. He’s taking them to Athlone.”

“That’s a stroke of luck,” Gutty says.

“I cannot see how.”

“At Athlone he’ll make a show of them before he metes out any punishment. He’ll want an audience. And he’ll need permission before sending them to the gallows. The last time he hanged a chieftain’s son there, he was removed as governor.”

“Not permanently,” she says. “And he still means to kill them.”

“Then you’ll need to get them out before he can.”

“Our help has run dry, Gutty. There is only one person left to whom I might appeal.” She laughs, though without humor. A mad, hopeless kind of chuckle. The last arrow in her quiver. A knife thrown with her eyes shut. But she can hear the question in Gutty’s silence, so she answers it.

“We must appeal to the English queen.”