Read Online Celestial Land and Sea by Amy McLean - Free Book Online Page A

ship. Boots which she had now learned belonged to somebody named Gráinne.
    Grace had often heard about weird mystery trails around the world. Not the fun kind like hunting for Easter eggs in the garden, but scavenger hunts conducted by anonymous communities online. It wasn't territory she particularly wished to involve herself in as she knew how nasty it could get, but there was a possibility that somebody on the Internet had concocted this riddle. It wouldn't help her understand how she'd apparently managed to be transported back a few centuries, but maybe it would at least help her solve the problem that lay directly in front of her.
    She typed in the words into a search bar and hit the enter key. The screen flashed as it brought up pages of results. After a few seconds though, Grace realised that none of them seemed to be what she was looking for. They were all concerned with selling self-help books or offering cheap hiking trips up and down the country. There were no matches for the words of the letter.
    Grace folded it up neatly and placed it into the pouch in her bag, out of sight. She tried to replay the entire event in her mind, searching for things that might give her clues. But it was hopeless. She wasn't getting anywhere.
    But then she remembered something. Didn't the ship have something written on its side? A name of some sort? She thought for a moment, rubbing the tips of her fingers against the sides of her head as if trying to help the information come forth.
    "The Pirate Queen!" She flung a hand to her mouth, worried she'd said it too loudly. She glanced around. Nobody was looking at her.
    Grace searched for the name and waited for the results to load. She clicked on the first link and started reading.
    She had hoped to find photographs of the ship so she could confirm that it was the same one, but she soon realised why she wasn't finding anything. According to the website, The Pirate Queen was associated with the sixteenth century—or more accurately, sixteenth-century Ireland.
    "So I was in Ireland?" Grace said to herself, a little more quietly this time.
    "Wait... She was a person?"
    It hadn't been quite what she had expected to read, but something inside her told her that this was exactly what she was looking for. She continued down the page, muttering to herself as she read out loud to help her take in the information.
    "So, The Pirate Queen is the name given to an Irish pirate," she confirmed to herself: "Grace O'Malley, better known to those in Ireland as Gráinne, or Granuaile." She stumbled over the last word, butchering the pronunciation. It took a few seconds for the information to register before Grace realised exactly what it was that she had discovered.
    " Grace O'Malley!" she gasped as she finally took it in. Why hadn't it occurred to her immediately that her own name was the Anglicisation of Gráinne? She was starting to think she hadn't spent nearly enough time researching her heritage.
    Her head was starting to spin. "The girl, Cathleen, what was it she'd called me?' She tried to think back, but her mind was racing so fast that she was struggling to digest the information. She looked at the screen again and as she read the words and it all started coming back to her. "Miss something , wasn't it? Miss...Granuaile? That's it! Miss Granuaile!" She absorbed the word on the screen as she rejoiced in remembering the name, pronouncing it more accurately this time. "Cathleen must have thought that I was Grace O'Malley!"
    This new information was a welcomed relief, but still little of it made sense to Grace. How could she find herself in sixteenth-century Ireland, being mistaken for a pirate she had never heard of before and with whom she shared a first name?
    Okay, so she'd established that the boots in the ship—the boots in which she'd first discovered her letter—belonged to Gráinne O'Malley. Perhaps the clothes Grace had somehow found herself wearing had been Gráinne's