Page 3 of The Pirate Queen

“Usually when our lives depend on it.”

Gráinne thinks about this 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 that 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.”

Some days later, Eóin returns from Galway. Routine trading mission. A good haul of smoked turbot and salmon, packed in wooden barrels. It is easy enough to get the cargo to Galway, and from there it will go on to Spain, mostly, though France has developed a taste for Atlantic fish of late. He’d also carried a hold full of tallow and skins: deer, sheep, rabbit, and pine marten. The European demand grows larger every year and he is happy to meet it. And since he was lucky enough to run across a poorly guarded English cog? Well, wasn’t it only fair to take a portion of the cloth and wine it carried? Safe passage and all. Sure, he has a wife and daughter to please.

He is glad to be home. The tower house is silent, nothing but the thick oak boards creaking beneath his boots as Eóin makes a quick survey of each floor on his way up. Cellars stocked. Dungeon empty. Now to the kitchen, where Cook sleeps on her pallet beside the hearth—snoring dreadfully—with an empty mug of mead by her limp outstretched hand. Eóin smells ashes in the banked fire and yeast where tomorrow’s loaves rise beneath a towel. Dishes scrubbed and floors swept, all is tidy in Cook’s domain, and he nods in approval until he sees the small bone-handled knife on the table. Remembers how it rested in Gráinne’s clenched fist.

Scowling, he ascends to the next floor. Straight instead of spiral, this staircase is the only one of his fortresses not built with the traditional Norman defensive feature. The tower house had gone up when Eóin was a child, and he’d asked his father about the choice in staircase. Your mother doesn’t like the spirals was all the old chieftain said. Eóin thought it odd at the time. He loved the circular stairs in every other family stronghold and had believed it silly that a woman should get any say at all. The thought makes him chuckle now as he passes through the Great Hall. It lies silent as well, the massive wooden table wiped clean and benches tucked beneath. One more flight of steps and here he is kicking off his boots in the privy chamber, moving closer to where Maeve sleeps in the next room.

He might be a fool, but damn, he missed his wife. She is the surprise he never saw coming. If Maeve didn’t like spiral staircases and asked him to build one made of feathers, he would kill a thousand seagulls with his bare hands and pluck their plumage until his fingers bled. Eóin was past twenty when his father arranged the marriage and was stunned when he saw her at their betrothal dinner. Stunned and pleased and more than a little flustered. And not only because of her beauty. Maeve was nothing like the village girls he’d known. And, yes, bedded. He regrets that now. Regrets that he came to his marriage with a son already. What he regrets most, however, is that no one—not even him—thought to tell Maeve about Donal until after they wed and she moved to Clare Island and into this tower as Bean an Tí—as Lady of the House. Aisling had taken that moment to claim her right of acknowledgment and brought the boy to him. Still a tachrán, barely able to walk.

Above them lies the garret, separated into two small rooms beneath the slate roof. One for Grace, and the other for Donal. But Eóin does not allow the boy to occupy his own room. That is the only amends he can make to his wife. Though Donal spends his waking hours here in the tower or at sea with Eóin, he is sent home every night into the village to be with his mother. It is cruel for all of them. He wishes now that someone had bothered to tell him that, though his marriage would be arranged, he might look at a girl one September day in Liscannor and fall in love on sight. He wishes that someone had bothered to tell him that he would come to regret bedding any woman before his wife.

Regret, it seems, is the burden of being Chief of the Name of the clan O’Malley. He is The O’Malley—a title that can only be held by a single man at any given time, a title that gives him the power to make treaties, declare war, and collect rents from those who live on his lands. A power he fought to earn and has killed to keep.

Eóin peels off more of his clothing, dropping it to the woven mats as he moves from privy chamber into bedchamber. Once at the door, he stands and watches his wife.

Maeve is a messy sleeper, sprawled out in the blankets, hair loose around her shoulders, arms akimbo. No matter, he’ll wrap them around himself soon enough. She wears only her leine and he wishes for more light so he might glimpse her form beneath the thin fabric. It was what he noticed immediately upon meeting her: face and form. Seven years later and he has still not recovered from either.

It is the midpoint of the night and there would be no light at all if not for the peat glowing softly in the fireplace. All the candles have long since burned out. Heavy clouds surround the island, rendering the narrow windows little more than dark slits in the stone wall. It will be raining by morning. He can feel it in his marrow.

Eóin throws the quilt back, climbs into the sliver of bed left unclaimed by his wife, leans back against the pillow, arm behind his head, and stares at Maeve.

“Will you just be lookin’, then? Or will you be doing somethin’ about it?” Her voice is heavy with sleep and insinuation.

“I didn’t think you were awake.”

“Hard not to be when you’re throwing boots against the wall.”

“I didn’t throw them.” He feigns offense, then bends low to press a kiss beneath her ear. “I set them down. Daintily.”

“Might as well have launched them from a catapult,” she mumbles. “Could have woken my granny and she’s been dead ten years.”

Eóin scoots closer to his wife and pulls her against him, until her back is pressed into his chest and his arm is looped across her waist. He buries his face in the crook of her neck. Inhales the scent of her skin. Salt and mint and lavender. It would be easy enough to let sleep take him now, let it roll over him like a wave. He would be happily smothered beneath its weight. Until she speaks.

“Why did you lie to her?”