Page 54 of The Pirate Queen

“I amn’t dead, then?” he asks. “I dreamed I was dead.”

Grace laughs. “No. Not yet, at any rate.” She nods at his bloody thigh. “Though Murray tells me you made a good attempt, riding hard for six hours with that wound.”

The messenger sets a hand to the bandage wrapped around his leg. He probes lightly with one finger and a dark pool of fresh blood blooms against the linen.

She glares at Murray. “Haven’t you seen to that?”

“Got twelve stitches into him, didn’t I? But the bastard won’t stop moving. Keeps trying to leave,” he says.

Every inch of the messenger is built like an O’Flaherty. Quick and wiry. Pugnacious. Punchy. “I’ve a wife!” he argues. “And two bábs.”

“And I’ve a cock and two balls. What’s that to do with anything?” Murray snaps. “The Bean an Tí needs a word, and you’ll not go anywhere until you’ve given it.”

The twins are like two sides of a pence. One a taciturn face, the other a brash cross and shield. One stoic, the other reactive. Grace has learned over the years that she can put them to separate uses. Flip the coin and get a different man. She needs Finn now, so she sets a hand on Murray’s bloody forearm to quiet him.

The messenger sees the casual touch and his eyes tighten with disgust. “Last I heard, you called her Taoiseach,” he spits.

“What my men call me is none of your concern,” Grace says.

“Your men? They belong to O’Flaherty.”

There, the opening she needs.

“Have you changed your story, then?” she asks. “Do you mean to tell me that my husband is not dead? If that’s the case, then say as much now, so I can be quick about cutting your throat. I have made choices in the hours you’ve slept that will endanger the lives of everyone in this castle. And I did so because of the message you brought. Was it the truth?”

The messenger scoots back on his straw pallet and appraises her carefully, his eyes drifting over her clean dress and wild hair. The soft face and hard words. The twins haven’t moved, but his gaze shifts over them as well, calculating the risk. Three on one, and him wounded. His expression tells Grace that he has decided she is a very different woman than the one described to him: just a chieftain’s wife, some girl banished to the wilds of Bunowen to breed children and be kept out of the way.

When he speaks again, it is with great care. “Tá. Donal O’Flaherty is dead. I telt the truth. Saw Seán Joyce run him through with my own eyes. Got him at the shoulder, then took his head when he fell.”

It has been nineteen years since Grace was married off against her will. Eleven since she held a knife to her husband’s throat in Moycullen. Ten since she requested—and was denied—a divorce. Three since she set eyes on the man himself. His actions in Moycullen—and fears of retribution—reduced him to chieftain in name only. It is Grace who has led his people. O’Flaherty has been in hiding, or off fighting, ever since. So this is no sad news. Yet there is a kind of numbness that washes over her. A finality she finds unsettling.

Grace lowers herself to a stool beside the hay when the relief hits. She cares not whether the messenger interprets it as grief. He’ll be gone in the morning and she will have him removed from the O’Flaherty fian after that. She will do the same with every man who stayed loyal to her husband.

“Tell me what happened,” she says.

The messenger sinks back into the straw. Winces. He lays his head against the wall and blinks at the damp ceiling.

“The Joyces came for Cock’s Castle three days ago. Was an ambush, wasn’t it? They never come at you straight on, those fecking Joyces. Forty men in the night. They thought to take us in a rush and they would have, if not for your husband. He fought like a banshee until morning. Killed more of ’em than the rest of us by half. Was only fifteen Joyces left when he fell, and more’n twenty of us. I was sent with the news when they fled.”

Grace looks to the twins. Still as stone and quiet as death, they return her gaze. “And those twenty? Do they remain?”

“Tá. Though not for long. The Joyces will return in greater numbers than before.” The messenger looks at his lap and frowns. “Seán Joyce took your husband’s head with him. Can’t fathom why.”

“So I cannot prove that he is dead,” Grace says, then lets the air out of her lungs in a long exhale. Even in death, O’Flaherty has thwarted her.

Finn loves Gráinne most when she is silent, when her dark eyes narrow and stubbornness tightens her mouth. He can see her mind work then, can see the savagery in her that most people don’t recognize. Yes, she is pretty to look at. Well-bred and beautiful. But neither face nor form earned the loyalty of her husband’s men all these years. It is her shrewdness, and ability to make hard choices when others won’t.

Gráinne is a dangerous woman. He first noticed this quality in their new Bean an Tí when she arrived at Bunowen almost twenty years ago. He and Murray were ordered to escort her to the beach that second day, but she’d put a knife to the steward’s throat and made it clear that she was not to be babysat. Finn is not a man given to laughter, but that made him chuckle. She never saw him on the stairs, of course, never knew that he’d witnessed the act. Gráinne has grown only more dangerous—and therefore more interesting—in the years since.

His brother is covered in blood tonight. It is dried beneath his fingernails and on his shirt. Smeared across arms, nose, and cheek. Murray must have wrestled the messenger down to sew those stitches. Must have followed Gráinne’s orders not to leave the man—not even long enough to wash.

“What time is it?” Gráinne asks.

“Midpoint of the night,” Finn tells her. “Hours until dawn.”

“We have time, then.”

“For what?”