Page 210 of The Pirate Queen

“What is it that you want from me?” Finn asks. “You know that I love her, so it’s not a confession you’re after.”

“I want you to keep them safe, Gráinne and Tibbot. After I am gone. I want you to promise that, no matter what happens, you will not leave my wife and son.”

“I do not want to do this,” Grace tells Bald Alec.

“It was you who insisted on a brehon wedding,” he says, “and you who divorced Richard after a year.”

“We are married in every real sense of the word!” she hisses.

“But not on paper, Gráinne. And that is all the law will consider in the coming months. If you want to keep any share of what you have built with Richard, it must be documented here.” He pats the sheaf of papers in front of him. “Tomorrow, when the clans arrive, he will put forth Hook to assume the mantle of MacWilliam. I think they will easily agree since Tibbot is only sixteen. So there is little fear that you will be turned from this castle, as you were with O’Flaherty. But there must never be any confusion as to what Richard is leaving you.”

“He leaves me heartbroken.”

“And wealthy. And powerful. And the matriarch of an influential clan. He leaves you in the crosshairs of the new Governor of Connaught. Some man by the name of Richard Bingham. I have never met him, but if the rumors are true, Gráinne, he is no friend to the Irish. And everything you have will be at risk. So we must do this whether you want to or not.”

For the next hour, Grace and Bald Alec record the details of her power. Castles at Clare, Rockfleet, and Achill. Doona. Lough Corrib. Plus the lands surrounding each. And what her mother has left to her in Liscannor—which she will, of course, leave to Margaret. Then there are one thousand head of cattle and just as many horses. A fleet of twenty-five ships. An army of two hundred fighting men. Followers in the many thousands.

“What would you have me do?” she asks.

“Muster all your holdings”—he pats the papers before him—“and bring them to Rockfleet. Concentrate your power in Clew Bay. Form an impenetrable wall between Clare, Rockfleet, and Kildavnet. It would take a mighty force, indeed, to threaten you here.”

Some days later, Tibbot is asleep on the floor. The fire has burned low. And Grace is in Richard’s arms once more. All day he has drifted in and out of sleep. He has not left the bed. He has not eaten. She measures time by the slowing beats of his heart.

“I can’t bear to see you so sad.” His words are thick and slow.

“You will find no joy in me today.”

“But have we not made joy together? Does our son not lie near us on the floor?” Richard coughs, and she shifts the weight of her head away from his chest. “We will exist in the world, together, long after we stop breathing. In him.”

“I do not understand how life can stretch so long, yet be so short in the end. I want more, Richard.”

“And you will have it. Only I won’t be there to share it with you.”

A quiet sob breaks from her chest and the tears come hot and fast, flooding her cheeks, dampening the sleeve of his leine. “I wish we had run away together that day. I wish my life had been spent with you instead.”

“I don’t,” he says, and his voice is quieter than she has ever heard it. “I would have loved you. But your life would have been small. Had that been our story, I would have stolen your birthright. The role you were born to play. When else in the history of Ireland has there ever been another pirate queen? I am only grateful that you returned to me in the end, Gráinne. And the promise I made then is the same one I make now.”

“No,” Grace sobs, “please don’t.”

He brushes the hair from her forehead, the tears from her cheeks. Richard Bourke bends down and places one last gentle kiss to her lips and his final words to her are the most familiar. The most comforting that he has ever spoken.

“Ego te expectabo.”

Matriarch, 1603

“The Pirate Queen”

Grace is seventy-three years old

They come, one by one, to pay their respects. To sit by her bed in the privy chamber at Rockfleet Castle. To hold her hand and to regale her with their favorite versions of her exploits. Grace relives the story of her own life through the eyes of others. She hears about a storm-born girl who could hear Manannán’s steed, who could sense a storm coming on the wind; of a woman who took two husbands and birthed four children; who was taken captive and who took lives; a pirate; a mother; a rebel; a sacker of castles and captain of ships, of battles and blades. It sounds ridiculous to her, though she lived every moment of it. A hard story to believe.

When she drifts away to that soft, quiet place between moments, she thinks of those she has lost.

Her father.

Her son.

Her mother.