Page 5 of The Pirate Queen

“How?” he asks, thinking of Donal. Would she have him reject the boy? Though he does not love Aisling—has never loved her—he does love his son.

“Take Gráinne with you.”

“What?” He lifts onto his elbow and peers at her in the dim light.

“Take her to sea. ’Tis all she wants.”

The idea is so foreign to him, she might as well have asked him to grow a pair of antlers. Eóin O’Malley has never been to sea with a woman. He takes his family through the bay on Niamh often enough. But open water? It is the worst kind of luck. He would tell his wife that such a thing is an abomination if he did not fear that she would turn him from bed.

Eóin is silent for so long that Maeve laughs.

“Are you a coward as well, then?” she asks.

He might be besotted with his wife, yet he’ll not tolerate such disrespect. His chest fills with righteous indignation. But his voice catches when she speaks again.

“Do you remember the night she was born?”

His lungs deflate like sails in a lull. “Of course I do.”

“When my pains started, you said that our child would be storm born, that it was a good omen.”

“You didn’t think so at the time.”

“Well, I thought I was going to die, didn’t I? I’ve been told it’s a normal reaction.”

“By who? The midwife?” Eóin hears the bitterness in his own words.

There is a single midwife on Clare Island and she happens to be Aisling’s mother. Eóin had insisted on being in the room with Maeve as she labored. He would not trust the life of his wife and unborn child into the hands of a woman who had every interest in seeing them die in childbed. The old bitch had sulked from sunset to sunrise, but Grace was born alive and Maeve was breathing too and that was all he could possibly hope for after such a long night.

“Sure, was my own mam who told me that,” Maeve says, though he hears the humor in her voice and is grateful for it. “Said no woman ever despairs more than in the hours before pushing a child into the world.”

God, he needs sleep. Every word he says pours salt into an open wound.

“I’ve never seen a worse storm than the one our daughter was born into. Hours of pelting rain and shattering thunder.” Maeve sits up and leans over him, her eyes almost black in the dim light. “After all that, did you really think the sea wouldn’t call to her?”

He hasn’t once thought about the circumstances of her birth since the moment Gráinne was put into his arms.

Finally, to his relief, Maeve reaches out and lays a hand against his cheek. “What color are her eyes?”

He hears the surrender in his own voice. “Gray.”

“Gray like what?”

“Like the sea.”

She smiles at him.

“And you think her eyes are gray because she belongs to the sea?” he asks.

“No,” Maeve answers, lowering herself so that her head rests upon his chest. “I think they are gray because the sea belongs to her.”

It does not occur to either of them that the girl might not be in bed. In fact, Grace sits at the base of the stairs leading into the privy chamber, her soft round cheek pressed against the cool stone wall, listening to the story of her birth. Is that a storm building in the harbor now? Or only her imagination? She shivers with anticipation even as the skin prickles along the back of her neck.

For three days, she has been pushing hair out of her eyes and mouth. She cannot tie it back or stop it from whipping in the wind. Even if her mother hadn’t made her promise, she would have determined never to cut it again. But now, after listening to her father explain his lie, she is grateful for her rash behavior. It got his attention. She thinks maybe it is a stroke of luck. And that knives are not such dangerous toys after all. Maybe she should keep one with her always?

There is silence in the bedchamber, so she assumes they have fallen asleep. Though she yawns, Grace does not return to bed. Not yet. Instead, she glides down the stairs on the balls of her feet. One floor. Two. She is swift and quiet, like the byre cat she sneaks into her room every night, bound up in her shawl.

She comes to a stop in the middle of the kitchen. Checks that Cook is asleep.