The Scorpio Races

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.

“Is everybody down there today?” Finn asks.

“Sure looks like it.”

“How are you going to get a horse?”

Because I don’t exactly have an answer, the question annoys me. I’m annoyed even more when I notice we’re both standing in exactly the same position, so either I was standing like my brother or he was standing like me. I take my hands out of my pockets and snap, “Is this riddle day? Are you going to ask me questions all day?”

Finn makes his mouth and his eyebrows into parallel lines. He’s very good at this face, although I don’t know exactly what it means. When he was little, Mum called him a frog because of this face. Now that he sometimes has to shave, it doesn’t look so much like an amphibian.

Anyway, he makes the frog face and sidles off into the commotion. For a moment, I think about going after him, but I’m suddenly pasted to the ground by a shrill wail.

It’s the piebald mare. She’s separated from the others, looking back either toward them or toward the sea. Her head’s thrown back, but she’s not whinnying. She’s screaming.

The keening cuts through the wind, the sound of the surf, the bustle of activity. It’s the wail of an ancient predator. It’s one thousand miles away from any sound that a natural horse would make.

And it’s horrible.

All I can think is: Is this the last thing my parents heard?

I am going to lose my nerve if I don’t get onto the beach right now. I know it. I can feel it. My limbs feel like seaweed. I’m so wobbly that I almost turn my ankle on one of the divots left by the hooves. I’m relieved when the piebald mare stops her crying, but I still can’t ignore that the capaill uisce don’t even smell like proper horses as I get closer to them. Dove smells soft, all hay and grass and molasses. The capaill uisce smell like salt and meat and waste and fish.

I try to breathe through my mouth and not think about it. There are dogs careening around my legs and nobody is looking where he’s going. Horses are clawing at the air and men are hawking insurance and protection to the riders. They’re more riled up than terriers in a butcher shop. I’m glad that Finn’s stormed off because the idea of him seeing me totally bewildered seems unbearable.

The truth is, I have a very rough idea of how to go about securing a horse for the race without money up front, but it’s mostly based on things that we used to talk about in school, when the boys would all boast that they were going to ride in the races when they grew up. They never really did; mostly they just moved away to the mainland or became farmers, but their big plans were a good source of information. Especially since my family was one of the few that didn’t follow the races.

“Girl!” snarls a man holding a roan horse that is pawing and charging, galloping without moving an inch. “Mind your damned feet!”

I stare down at my feet, and it takes me a second too long to realize that there was a circle drawn in the sand, and my boots have scuffed a line through it. I jump out of the circle.

“Don’t bother,” shouts the man as I try to retrace the line of the circle. The roan tugs toward the break in the line. I back up and get shouted at again for my trouble — two men are carrying an older boy away between them. He’s bleeding from his head and he swears at me. I whirl away and almost trip over a scruffy dog with sand in its fur.

“Curse you!” I snap at the dog, just because it won’t say anything back.

“Puck Connolly!” It’s Tommy Falk with his pretty lips. “What are you doing down here?” At least, that’s what I think he says. It’s so loud that other people’s conversations drown out most of his words and the wind robs the rest.

“I’m looking for bowler hats,” I say. Black bowler hats are supposed to mean dealers — on the rest of the island, someone wearing one is called a monger, after the horsemongers, and it’s not the nicest of names. Sometimes the boys wear them if they want to be seen as rebels. Mostly it just means they’re pissers.

Tommy shouts, “I didn’t hear you right.”

But I know he did. He just doesn’t believe what he heard. Dad once said people’s brains are hard of hearing. It doesn’t matter if Tommy’s stone-cold deaf on a plate, though, because I catch a glimpse of a bowler hat, on the head of the little gnome-man who had the piebald mare earlier.

“Thanks,” I tell Tommy, though he hasn’t really helped. I leave him behind and wind through the crowd toward the gnome. Up close, the man does not look quite so short, but he does look like his face has been hit solidly a few times with a brick, twice to really squish it and once more for good measure.

He is arguing with someone.

“Sean Kendrick,” spits the monger, which is a name that sounds familiar for some reason, especially said in that disdainful note. The bowler-hatted gnome doesn’t have a gnome-like voice at all. His voice is lined with cigarette smoke and he puts gritty h’s at the beginning of his words. “Heh. His head’s half full of salt water. What’s he saying about my horses, now?”

“I don’t like to repeat it,” replies the other figure politely. It’s Dr. Halsal, with his shiny black hair parted neatly on the side. I like Dr. Halsal. He’s very levelheaded and he’s a very compact, tidy sort of person, who reminds me of a drawing of a person instead of an actual person. I wanted to marry him when I was six.