The Scorpio Races (13 page)

I look at him and smash my lips together. I want to be sure I don’t say something I will regret. I am struck, more than anything, by the sense of betrayal: that Gabe knew that we were living in a ticking time bomb and didn’t tell us. Finally, I manage, “And what is it that you see in my face right now? Is it what you came to see?”

It comes out like a challenge, but Malvern seems unflustered. He just nods a little. “Yes. Yes, I think so. Now tell me this: What are you and your brothers willing to do to save this house?”

There was a problem with dogfighting on the island a few years back. Bored, drunk fishermen raised island dogs to tear each other’s faces off. I feel like one of those dogs now. Malvern has thrown me into the pit and is now peering over the side to see what I will do. He wants to see if I will retreat or if there’s fight in me.

I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me give up. My future crystallizes suddenly.

“Give me three weeks,” I say.

Malvern doesn’t dance around the point. “After the races.”

I wonder if he’s thinking that it’s crazy that a girl like me is riding in the races and that there’s no point waiting until the end of the month because there will be no money because I will be dead last or just plain dead.

Keep your pony off this beach.

I just nod.

“You don’t stand a chance,” Malvern says, but without malice. “On that pony. Why her?”

Horse,
I think. “The
capaill uisce
killed my parents. I’m not going to dishonor them by riding one of the water horses.”

Malvern doesn’t smile, but his eyebrows lighten like he’s considering it. “That’s noble. It’s not because no one would give you a chance on one of the
capaill?
”

“I had a chance to be a fifth,” I shoot back. “I chose not to.”

Malvern considers all this. “There’s only real money if you win.”

“I know,” I say.

“And you really expect me to put this off on the idea that you and that island pony will cross that line before everyone else?”

I look at his silly teacup with his silly tea in it. Wasn’t regular tea interesting enough? Who drank their tea with butter and salt? Nobody but bored old men who ran their islands like a chess game. I say, “I think you’re interested to see what will happen. And you’ve already waited twelve months.”

Malvern pushes his chair back and stands up. From his pocket, he takes out a piece of paper, unfolds it, and lays it on the table. It’s an official document. I recognize his signature at the bottom. My father’s, too. He says, “I’m not a generous person, Kate Connolly.”

I don’t answer. We regard each other.

He pushes the document across the table with two fingers. “Show that to your older brother. I’ll be back to collect it when you’re dead.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

SEAN

They’re all afraid.

I sit in a boat, half-turned, watching my charge. The boat has the words
Black as the Sea
painted in white on its black hull. Behind it swims Fundamental, a bay colt full of promise and promises, a sport-horse colt poised to sell for hundreds on the mainland. One of the colts I’m sure Malvern means to tempt George Holly with. Fundamental’s coat is turned dark by the water. He snorts out water and breath every few strokes, but shows no sign of tiring. Boat and horse make their slow way across the sheltered cove. The cliffs here are slanted, like a child shoved them over, and they block most of the wind and all of the waves. The sound of the boat’s motor slaps back at me.

Normally, I would find this ordinary training a bitter drink during race month. But after the strange morning, I’m relieved to have a few moments to sit and let my mind work over events. I still cannot imagine what that girl was thinking.

I glance up to the mouth of the cove. One of the new men, Daly, stands watch. With the clatter of the boat’s motor and the ripple of Fundamental’s breaths, I’m unable to keep an eye out for hunting
capaill uisce.
This cove is easy to protect, however; its narrow mouth means that one can keep watch while the other trains. Swimming is such a low-impact way to build strength that it’s worth the risk. Daly has a shotgun, which won’t do much, but he also has a set of lungs, which should give me enough time to get Fundamental out of the water.

Daly is from the mainland, and he’s young and nervous. I prefer nervous to cocky. He needs to be my eyes, and my eyes would be fixed on that narrow passage into the cove.

Fundamental keeps swimming. I was there when he was born, just a collection of knobby joints and massive eyes. He doesn’t look at me as he swims. Behind the boat, swimming is his sole purpose. He has enough
capall uisce
blood in him to lend him a single-mindedness. I have to watch him as closely as Daly watches the entrance to the cove. Fundamental would swim until he sank.

Tomorrow, Malvern will want me to assign Mutt a horse. Every year on the third day, he asks me to decide, and every year I’m afraid he will ask me to put Mutt on Corr.

I cannot bear the thought of it.

Fundamental shakes his head, as if to unstick his wet mane from his neck. I lean to make certain that he’s not tiring. Exercising in the water is lower impact than on land, but I don’t want him exhausted; I was told buyers are coming to look at him tomorrow.

I feel disquieted. I’m not certain why. If it’s because of the girl, interrupting the routine I’ve followed for years. Or if it’s because of Mutt’s piss in my boots. Or if it’s because, as we make our way back across the cove, the water level against the cliffs appears slightly wrong to me. Too high, perhaps. The sky is bright and populated with fluffy clouds; if there’s to be a storm, it’s days away.

But I cannot settle.

“Kendrick! Kendrick!”

My name, a shout made thin by the boat motor.

I have seconds to see it:

Daly is standing on the small crescent beach by the boat slip, far from the cove’s entrance. I don’t have time to think about why he’s moved. The shout is his.

There’s a silhouette at the point of the cove where Daly had been. Mutt Malvern. Just watching me. No — watching a point in the water just before me.

A slight drop in the water only thirty feet from us.

I know that dip, that unnatural crevice into the sea. It looks like nothing, but it’s what happens to the salt water when there’s a massive body traveling very fast just under the surface.

There’s no time to make it to shore.

Fundamental kicks his hind legs, his head thrown back.

Then he goes under.

Mutt Malvern stands motionless at the point of the cove.

I dive into the water.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

SEAN

I’m not swimming through water. I’m swimming through blood. It billows around me in great underwater thunderheads as one of my hands finds Fundamental’s spine. In my other hand I have a fistful of the holly berries. I’ve gone years without using them to kill one of the water horses, and now I have them in my palm twice in one day.

Fundamental’s spine writhes. I feel a strange sucking sensation beneath me as one of his legs cuts through the water under my feet, the current dragging at me. I feel forward along his mane. My lungs feel pressed small in my chest.

I can’t see, and then I can.

Fundamental’s eye is wide open, white all around it, but he can’t see me. A slick, dark
capall uisce
holds Fundamental’s throatlatch in its jaws. Blood floats from a ragged tear like steam. The
uisce
horse’s legs slice through the salt water, smooth and purposeful. It spares no attention for me. The
capall uisce
has the colt in a steel grasp and I, a small, vulnerable stranger in this world, am no threat.

I need a breath. I need more than a breath. I need a long gasp and another one and another one. But in front of me I see the
capall’s
nostrils, long and thin. The berries are hard and deadly in my hand. I could watch it drown.

But next to their two heads, I see the edge of Fundamental’s wound. The colt’s great, brave heart pumps his life out in time with my hammering pulse.

There’s no saving him from this.

I watched him being born. Fundamental, rare colt, so close to the water horses that he loves the ocean like I do.

Colors without any name flicker at the corner of my vision.

I have to leave him behind.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

PUCK

Finn and I both wait up for Gabe that night. I boil beans — infernal beans, it feels like that’s all we eat — and simmer inside my skin, planning what I will say to him when he gets here. Finn messes over the windows while I cook, and when I ask him what he’s doing, he says something about a storm. Outside the window, the night-darkening sky is clear except for some high, wispy clouds thin enough to see through, far out at the horizon. There’s no sign of foul weather. Who knows why Finn does any of the things he does. I don’t even try to talk him out of his fiddling.

We wait and wait for Gabe, my sense of betrayal simmering and then boiling and then simmering again. It’s impossible to be angry for so long. I wish I could tell Finn what it is that’s eating me, but I can’t tell him about Malvern. It’ll just make him start picking at his arms and obsessing over his morning rituals even longer than usual.

“What do you think,” I ask casually, turning the little butter bowl around and around again, so that the owl painted on the side looks at me and then Finn and then me again, “about selling the Morris — why are you laughing?”

He rattles at one of the windowpanes experimentally. “It’s not even running.”

“If it
was
running?”

“I might fix it tomorrow,” Finn says vaguely. I think, now, that he is using the windows as an excuse to stare outside for signs of Gabe. “I don’t want it to be out there when the storm gets bad.”

“Rain, yes, sure,” I say. “Selling it. What do you think?”

“Well, I guess that depends on why we’re selling it.”

“To get Dove better food during training.”

There is an agonizingly long pause before Finn responds. During the pause, he taps his finger all along the edge of a pane of glass before leaning in to peer at the join between glass and wood from an inch away. He seems quite content to finish experimenting with his weatherproofing before continuing the conversation.

Finally, he says, “Is better food that expensive?”

“Do you see alfalfa growing on this island?”

“It depends,” Finn says. “I don’t know what alfalfa looks like.”

“Like the inside of your dusty head. Yes, it’s expensive. It comes from the mainland.” I feel slightly bad about snapping at him. It’s not his fault that I’m cross — it’s Gabe’s. I can’t believe that I might not get to confront him tonight about Malvern’s appearance at the house. I can’t stay up for him. I have to be up early tomorrow if I’m going back to the beach again.

Finn looks mournful. I feel terrible. Maybe there’s something else we can sell, like the useless chickens that spend most of their time dying before we can kill them for dinner. The whole lot of them would buy one bale of hay and not a bite of good grain.

“Will it make her faster?” Finn asks.

“Racehorses should eat racehorse food.”

Finn casts a glance toward our dinner, beans with a lump of bacon donated by Dory Maud. “If that’s what it takes.”

He sounds like I’ve asked him to saw off his left leg. But I know how he feels. He loves the Morris like I love Dove, and what will he have left if he doesn’t have the car to putter over? Just the windows, and we only have five of them in the house.

“If I win,” I tell him, “we’ll have enough money to buy it back.” He still looks glum, so I go on. “We’ll have enough to buy two of them. A car to pull the other car when the engine stops on the first one.”

Now he has the ghost of a smile. We sit down and eat our beans with the lump of bacon. Without saying anything about it, we eat the rest of the apple cake, not leaving any for Gabe. Two people at a table meant for five. I don’t see how I’ll be able to sleep with this knot of anger inside me. Where is he?

I think about that decapitated sheep that Finn and I found on the way to Skarmouth. How are we supposed to know if Gabe’s working late or if he’s dead by the side of the road? How is he supposed to know if we’re home safely or dead by the side of the road, for that matter?

Finn is the one who says it finally. “It’s like he’s already gone.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

SEAN

That night, instead of dreaming, I lie in my bed and stare at the small square of black sky that I can see out the window of my flat. Though I’m dry now, I feel cold to my bones, as if I’ve swallowed the sea and it lives inside me. My arms ache. I’m holding up the cliffs.

I think of Fundamental swimming so purposefully behind the boat. No, that’s not what I think of. I think of Fundamental’s head thrown back, the whites of his eyes, the vanishing beneath the water churned to mist around me.

Again and again I dive into the water. Again and again it is too dark, too cold, too fast, too late.

Again and again I see Mutt Malvern standing on the point of the cove, watching.

I haven’t heard from Benjamin Malvern yet, but I will. It’s just a matter of time.

Kendrick!
Daly’s voice, warning me, too late.

I can’t stay in bed any longer. I roll to my feet. My jacket is still wet and gritty where I hung it over the iron curl of the radiator. Without turning on the light, I find my pants and my wool sweater and make my way down the narrow stairs to the stables.

The three lightbulbs that have been installed in the main aisle illuminate circles just below them. Everything else is in shadow; the way the sound of my breath disappears makes the darkness feel vast. As the thoroughbreds and the draft horses hear my footsteps down the aisle, they nicker hopefully. After what happened this afternoon, I can’t look at them. I watched them all being born, just as I watched Fundamental being born.