She was born on the coast of Mayo in 1530, and no ship that carried her father's name was ever lost. The whole of Connacht took it for a boast. It was a receipt.
Gráinne Ní Mháille kept the sea the way other people keep the hours. She cut off her hair to get aboard a galley, took the ships that would not pay her tolls, held a castle with molten lead, bore a son in the middle of the Atlantic and fought a battle the morning after, and dismissed a husband from an upper window. The English could not spell her name and could not hang her, and in the end she sailed up the Thames to ask Elizabeth Tudor for her last living son.
What nobody knew, on either coast, was that twice a month for fifty years she went down to the water in the dark and refused the one thing the sea had come to collect. A price had been agreed at a door before she could speak, and paid, and never delivered, and the sea does not forget a debt.
*From the world of The Falcon's Binding: a novel of the pirate queen of Connacht and the bargain that bought her family's luck.*
