The Scorpio Races (5 page)

“Don’t you dare let that horse go,” Mutt tells me. “Not after all this. You bring it back to the stable. Don’t let this be a waste.”

I want to tell him that this is a water horse, not a dog, and that leading it inland, away from the nearly November salt water, is a trick I don’t feel like performing at the moment. But I don’t want to shout out loud and give the horse any more cause to remember that I am right next to it.

“Do what you need to do, Kendrick!” yells Brian, who has finally made it down.

“Don’t you dare let that horse go,” Mutt shouts back.

Just to get them all out alive would be a feat. Just to get the horse down to the shore and release it far enough into the ocean that we could get away safe would be impressive. But I can do more than just get them away safe, and they all know it, Mutt Malvern most of all.

But I whisper like the sea in the horse’s ear and take a step back from the roving flashlights. One step away from all of them, one step toward the ocean. My sock wicks the tide into my boot. The gray horse is trembling under my hands.

I turn to look at Mutt, and then I let the horse go.

CHAPTER FIVE

PUCK

I don’t think that I sleep, but I do, because in the morning my eyes are sticky and my blankets look like a mole has tunneled through them. The sky outside the window is the blue of almost-daylight, and I decide that no matter what time it is, I’m awake. I spend too long standing shivering in my sleeping top — the one with the straps of lace that are just a little itchy, but that I wear anyway because Mum made it — staring at the contents of my dresser, trying to decide what to wear to the beach. I don’t know if it will be cold after I’ve been riding for a while and I don’t know if I want to go down there dressed like a girl when Joseph Beringer is probably going to be there looking at me like
hur, hur, hur.

Mostly I’m trying not to think grandiose things like:
You will remember this day for the rest of your life.

In the end, I just wear what I always wear — my brown pants that won’t chafe and my chunky dark green sweater that Mum’s mother knitted for her. I like to think of Mum wearing it; it gives the sweater history. I look into my spotted mirror and make a fierce face under my freckles, my eyebrows straight across over my blue eyes. I look messy and cross. I pull some of my hair out of my ponytail, across my forehead, trying to look like someone other than the girl I grew up being. Someone people won’t laugh at when they see me arrive on the beach. It doesn’t work. I have too many freckles. I draw my hair back into the ponytail again.

In the kitchen, Finn is already up, and he is standing at the sink. He is wearing the same sweater as yesterday, and he looks like a man who has shrunk in the night while his clothing pooled around him. Something smells sort of brittle and carbon-like, almost good, like steak or toast, until I realize that it’s actually a bad smell, like burned paper and hair.

“Gabe awake?” I ask. I peer uncertainly into the cupboard, to avoid having to look at Finn. I’m not sure I want to talk. Looking in the cupboard, I’m not sure I want to eat, either.

“He’s already gone to the hotel,” Finn says. “I … here.” And with this, he sets a mug with a spoon standing in it down on the table. It’s got stains of whatever’s in it on the sides in such a way that I just know it’s going to leave a ring on the table, but it’s steaming and I suspect that it’s hot chocolate.

“You made this?”

Finn looks at me. “No, Saint Anthony brought it to me in the night. He was very put out I didn’t give it to you right then.” He turns back around.

I am shocked, both by the reappearance of Finn’s humor and the gift of the hot chocolate. I see now that the counter is an absolute mess of pots that Finn used to distill a single cup of cocoa, and I’m certain now that the odor hanging on the air is the smell of milk spilt on the hot burner, but it doesn’t matter in the face of his intention. It sort of makes my lower lip not quite sure of itself, but I clamp my teeth on it for a moment until everything’s steady. By the time Finn sits down on the other side of the table with a mug of his own, I’m normal again.

“Thanks,” I say, and Finn looks uncomfortable. Mum used to say he was like a faerie; he didn’t like to be thanked. I add, “Sorry.”

“I put salt in it,” Finn tells me, as if this eliminates the need to be grateful.

I try it. It’s good. If there’s salt in it, I can’t taste it around the floating islands of partially stirred cocoa. They dissolve in my mouth in not-unpleasant lumps of powder. I can’t remember if Finn has ever made cocoa before; I think he only ever watched me. “I can’t tell there’s salt in it.”

“Salt,” Finn says, “makes cocoa sweeter.”

I think this is a pretty stupid thing to say, because how could something not sweet make something sweeter, but I let it pass. I stir my cocoa and mash a few of the lumps of cocoa against the side of the mug with the back of the spoon.

Finn knows I don’t believe him, though, and says, “Go and ask at Palsson’s, then. I watched them make the chocolate muffins. With salt.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe you! I didn’t say anything at all.”

He mashes a spoon in his own cup. “I know you didn’t.”

He doesn’t ask me how long I’ll be gone today, or how I’m going to get a horse to ride, or anything about Gabe. I can’t decide if I’m glad not to talk about it or if it’s driving me crazy that he’s not. We just slurp down the rest of our drinks, and when I get up to put my mug in the sink, I finally say, “I guess I’ll be gone most of the day.”

Finn gets up and puts his mug next to mine. He looks very serious, his neck skinny and turtle-like poking out of the oversize sweater. He points to the counter behind me. Among the wreck of pots and dishes is a cut-up apple, with a bit of crumbs from the counter stuck to one of the cut edges. “That’s for Dove. I want to come with you today.”

“You can’t come with me,” I say, without even stopping to think about how his words make me feel.

“Not every day,” Finn says. “Just today. Just the first day.”

I battle momentarily with the image of myself emerging on the beach proud and lonesome, versus the reality of arriving with one of my brothers to watch from the sidelines and see how it’s done. “Okay. That would be good.”

Finn gets his hat. I get my hat. I knitted both of them myself, and mine is patterned in white and two different shades of brown. Finn’s is red and white. They’re lumpy, but they fit.

In our hats, we stand among the wreckage of the kitchen. For a moment, I see the room like anyone else might see it. It looks like everything around Finn has crawled out of the mouth of the kitchen sink drain. It’s a mess, and we’re a mess, and no wonder Gabe wants to leave.

“Let’s go,” I say.

CHAPTER SIX

SEAN

That first day, Gorry has me come down to the beach before anyone else to try a piebald mare he has dredged from the ocean some indeterminate time before. He is so certain that I will want her for Malvern that he’s priced her high enough for two horses. Under the dark blue early morning sky, the tide just starting to pull back from the sand, my fingers frozen where they poke from my fingerless gloves, I watch him trot her back and forth for me. Her hoofprints are the first on the beach; the tide has wiped the sand clean, removing all traces of Mutt’s botched efforts the night before.

She’s striking. Water horses come in every color that normal land horses do, but, like land horses, most are bay or chestnut. Less often dun or palomino or black or gray. It’s very rare to find a piebald water horse, equally black and white, sharp white clouds across a black field. But flashy color doesn’t win races.

The piebald mare doesn’t move terribly. She has a good shoulder. Lots of
capaill uisce
have good shoulders. Unimpressed, I watch black cormorants spin through the sky above us, their silhouettes like small dragons.

Gorry brings the mare to me. I hitch myself onto her back and look down at Gorry. “She’s the fastest
capall uisce
you’ll ever sit on,” he says in his grainy voice.

Corr is the fastest
capall uisce
I’ve ever sat on.

Beneath me, the piebald mare smells like copper and rotting seaweed. Her eye, turned toward me, weeps seawater. I don’t like the feel of her — sinuous and hard to hold — but then, I am used to Corr.

“Take her out,” Gorry says. “Tell me you can find anything faster.”

I let her trot; she minces through the packed sand toward the water, ears pinned to her mane. I thumb my iron pieces out from my sleeves and track them counterclockwise on her withers, right on a heart-shaped spot of white. She shudders and twists her body away from my touch. I don’t like the unhorse-like tilt to her head or the way that she never unpins her ears. None of the horses are to be trusted. But I trust her less than most.

Gorry urges me to gallop her. Feel her speed for myself. I doubt that there is anything she can do at a gallop to convince me that what she is like at a trot is worth it. But I let out her reins and nudge her sides.

She is down the beach like an osprey diving for a fish. Breathlessly fast. And always, always conscious of the water, angling toward the sea. And again, that sinuous, slippery movement. She seems far less horse than sea creature to me, even now, even in the deep of October, even on dry land. Even with me whispering in her ear.

But she is fast. Her strides eat the sand, and we pass by the cove that marks the end of the good surface in only seconds. The rush of speed bursts through me, like bubbles popping on the surface of water. I don’t want to think of her as faster than Corr, but she must be close. Anyway, how can I know, without him there?

It’s beginning to get rocky. When I move to slow her, the piebald courses upward in a rear, her teeth snapping, predatory.

All of a sudden she smells overwhelmingly of the sea. Not of the beach, which is what most people think is the odor of the sea. Not of seaweed, or of salt, but of your head beneath the surface, breathing water, lungs full of the ocean. The iron has no effect as we pelt toward the water.

My fingers work through her mane, tying knots in threes and sevens. I sing in her ear, and all the while my inside hand turns her in smaller and smaller circles, each one away from the water. Nothing is sure.

As we charge across the sand, the magic in her calls to me, insidious. Precious little of my bare skin touches her — a wrist against her neck, perhaps, though my leg is guarded inside my boots. But still, her pulse hums through me. Lulling me to trust. Compelling me to join her in the sea. It’s only a decade of riding dozens of the water horses that allows me to remember myself.

And only barely.

Everything in me says to abandon the struggle. Fly with her into the water.

Threes. Sevens. Iron across my palm.

I whisper:
“You will not be the one to drown me.”

It feels like minutes to slow her, to bring her back toward Gorry, but it’s probably only seconds. And all the while her neck still feels snaky to me and her teeth are still bared in a way that no land horse would present them. She’s trembling beneath me.

It’s hard to forget how swift she was.

“Didn’t I tell you she was the fastest thing you’d ever ride?” Gorry asks.

I slide off her and hand him the reins. He takes them with a puzzled expression on his already puzzling face.

I say, “This mare is going to kill someone.”

“Hey now,” Gorry objects. Then: “They’ve all killed someone.”

“I want no part of her,” I say, even though part of me does.

“Someone else will buy her,” Gorry says. “And then you will be sorry.”

“That someone else will be dead,” I reply. “Throw her back.”

I turn away.

Behind me, I hear Gorry say, “She’s faster than your red stallion.”

“Throw her back,” I repeat, not turning around.

I know he won’t.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PUCK

I didn’t reckon that it would be awful.

But the whole island is crammed onto the beach, it feels like. Finn convinced us to take the Morris, which promptly broke down, so we arrived after just about everybody else. In front of us, there are two seas: one far-off ocean of deep blue and one seething mass of horses and men. All of them are men, not a girl among them unless you count Tommy Falk because his lips are so pretty. The men are a thousand times louder than the ocean. I don’t see how they can train or move or breathe. They’re all shouting at the horses and at each other. It’s like a big argument, but I can’t tell who’s mad at who.

Finn and I both hesitate on the long sloped path down to the beach. The ground beneath our feet is uneven with divots from horses that have been led down already. Finn frowns as he looks at the collection of people and animals. But my eye is caught instead by a horse galloping at the faraway edge of the sucked-out tide. It is bright red, like fresh blood, with a small, dark figure crouched low on its back. Every few strides, the horse’s hooves hit the very edge of the surf and water sprays up.

The sight of the horse galloping, stretched out, breathlessly fast, is so beautiful that my eyes prickle.

“That one looks like two horses stuck together,” Finn says.

His observation pulls my gaze away from the red horse and closer to the cliffs.

“That’s a piebald,” I tell him. The mare he’s gesturing to is snowy white splashed with big patches of black. Near her withers she has a small black spot that looks like a bleeding heart. A tiny little gnome of a man in a bowler hat is leading her away from the others.

“‘
That’s a piebald,’
” mimics Finn. I smack him and look back to where the red horse and rider were, but they’re gone.

I feel strangely put out. “I guess we should go down,” I say.