The Pirate Queen

The girl lifts a knife and with one trembling swipe severs her braid. In all fairness, the steel is sharp. Cook put it to the whetstone just this morning. But still, it is a shock to see the limp, dead thing in her hand. Like some rock pipit with threadbare wings. Or a clump of wilted flowers. Yet she shakes it in her father’s face and hopes that her fear looks like anger instead.

‍

He lurches forward a step. Eyes round and horrified. A hand outstretched as though to stop her. “What have you done, bird?”

‍

“Now my hair won’t get caught in the ropes,” she says. “Now I’ll be going with you.”

‍

He shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant. That’s not what I— ”

‍

“’Tis what you said.”

‍

He lied. They both know it. But now she’s called him out— in front of his crew, no less— and she can see the storm building in his eyes. To plead with her father in private is one thing. She has done so every day for a year. But to challenge him here, while he has one foot onshore and the other on deck, is a mutinous sin.

‍

“Gráinne,” he warns, his voice now clipped and threatening.

‍

Grace shifts back and forth on bare feet. It is summer but the dock is cool and damp, the dark gray stone a balm against the jagged cut on the arch of her left foot— an injury from when she ran through the rock pools at low tide last week looking for anemones. Grace loves the soft red- hued creatures, how they glisten like bloody mushrooms when closed; then, once submerged again, bloom with a tentacled crown. Such a strange child, her mother says, always running barefoot, cursing the rocks. Grace feels the sting of salt water in the cut. Ignores it, afraid to break her father’s gaze. Knows that if she blinks, he will send her back to the tower house, to her mother.