The Scorpio Races

I’m not sure he can ride one at the same time. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen him at the gallops.

One of the buyers mutters my name to the other and Mutt leans toward them to ask, “What’s that?”

“Kendrick. The name sounds familiar.”

Mutt looks at me.

“I just ride the horses,” I say.

George Holly’s smile is light in the darkness.

“Are you riding in the race, too?” asks a buyer. I nod.

“On the red stallion,” Holly tells him. “The one you saw earlier.”

They mumble their appreciation and ask Mutt who he’s riding in the races.

Mutt sets his jaw. I don’t think he even remembers Edana’s name. He has yet to ride her.

I know this is where I, in the employ of the Malverns, am meant to step in and be helpful and humble, to save Mutt’s face. It’s what I’ve done for most of my life, and I can feel on my lips the words that will make Mutt look good. The words that will remind the clients of my relative hierarchy in the Malvern Yard.

But instead, I say, “I’ve chosen the bay mare with the white blaze, Edana, for him. I think they’ll be a good match.”

The yard is silent. There’s something coiled and repugnant in Mutt’s posture as he fixes his gaze on me. The buyers exchange glances as Holly rocks on his heels.

I can see my words burrow under Mutt’s skin. I feel untethered and dangerous.

Miracle shies at nothing in particular, dancing in place. Her hooves clatter and echo across the stones. I turn to Mutt. I imagine him going beneath the water instead of Fundamental. In Corr’s grasp. Beneath hooves in my father’s place. “Light’s failing. Shall we take your fillies out, then?”

Mutt turns Sweeter without a word.

The gallop is seven furlongs, nearly a mile, and straight as an arrow. The horses are spirited as they step onto it, knowing what is coming next. I feel Mutt’s gaze on me, and when I meet it, his mouth twists. This was not meant to be a race between Miracle and Sweeter, but I see now that there’s no way that it won’t be.

Sweeter leaps out. Miracle is only a moment behind as I give her some rein. We streak along the pale gallop, its surface striped with blue shadows. The air screams by my ears, cold and painful. The shadows are so heavy that both fillies mistake them for real things and lift their knees, jumping invisible hurdles.

Mutt glances over at me to see how far I am, but he needn’t bother. We’re right on him. Shoulder to shoulder, the fillies surge down the track. Speedwise, I know the fillies are evenly matched, but I also know that only half of racing is how fast your horse is. I’ve been on this gallop hundreds of times on hundreds of horses, and I know where the incline starts, I know where the ground is soft by the rail, and I know where the horses slow and stare at the tractor parked near the road. I know everything there is to know about Miracle, too, how she likes to run herself out if you don’t keep her in check, how much I’ll need to push her to keep her strong up the incline, how to wave my crop just a bit to keep her attention on the task at hand and not the tractor.

All Mutt knows is how to beat the hell out of his mount as he’s losing.

I know I should hold Miracle back. I know I should let Mutt and Sweeter finish first.

I feel the buyers’ eyes on me.

I lean forward and whisper to Miracle. Her ear tips back at me, and I release the reins.

It’s not even a contest.

Miracle pulls away from Sweeter by one length, two lengths, three lengths, four, not even breathing that hard. Mutt is bogged down somewhere in the wet ground near the rail, Sweeter slow and inattentive.

I turn around, standing in my stirrups, and salute Mutt Malvern with my crop.

I know it’s a deadly game I’m playing.

“Not a jockey?” Holly says to me as I walk Miracle back into the yard.

“Just a horse lover,” I reply.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

PUCK

Sean Kendrick told me to meet him at the point of the cliffs over Fell Cove, but there’s no sign of him when I get there.

The cliffs here aren’t as high as the ones that border the racing beach, and they’re not as pure white. The shore by the cove is a weird, awkward place to get to, and once Dove and I manage to creep down the narrow, uneven path to the beach, I find that it’s no good for riding on. The beach here is rocky and uneven, and the sea hugs it closely. It’s low tide, but still, there’s only fifteen feet of rocks before the unruly sea smashes itself against them. It’s the sort of place we were always warned against, because a horse could be up out of that ocean and back down with us before one wave had gone out and another taken its place.

I wonder, suddenly, if Sean Kendrick sent me here as a prank.

Before I have time to consider if he seemed like that sort of person and think something truly foul about him, I hear hoofbeats. I can’t tell at once where they’re coming from, and then I realize that they’re coming from above me. I crane my head up to look.

I see a lone horse, stretched out to its fullest, galloping along the edge of the cliff, bits of turf plowed up beneath its hooves. I recognize the horse a moment before I recognize the rider — Sean Kendrick, folded up tightly along the stallion’s back, moving as one with the horse. As the bloody red capall uisce pounds past me overhead, I see that Sean rides bareback, the most dangerous way of all. Skin to skin, pulse to pulse, nothing to protect you should the horse’s magic seize you.

I don’t want to admire them, to admit that the two of them together are something altogether different than I’ve ever seen, but I can’t help it. The red stallion is so fast that it steals my breath and speeds my heart with the thrill of it. I thought the horses I saw on the first day of training were fast, but I’ve never seen a horse move like this before. And Sean Kendrick on him, bareback. He is a pisser, for sure, but the old man I met in the butcher’s is right: There is something about him. He knows his horses, but there is something else about him, too.

I think about the way his face felt in my hand when I pulled it above the water.

I think, too, about what it would be like to ride a horse like that. A bit of guilt stabs just inside my ribs as I remember Finn and his principles, or rather, my principles, the ones that started to slip when the house was at stake. I wish the idea of this sat more easily with me.

Back we go to the top of the cliff, Dove prancing a bit. Even going uphill, even after being ridden well for days now, she’s still excited about running. I hear Finn’s voice whispering in my ear as she flicks her tail.

By the time I get to the top of the cliff road, I know what I’m going to ask Sean.

SEAN

There’s no sign of Kate Connolly when I arrive at the point of the cliff, though I wait for several long moments — moments I can’t spare. I tie the bay mare down, draw a circle around her and spit in it, and take Corr out for a run. If Kate doesn’t show up, I’ll at least have stretched him out. He’s eager and forward today, glad as me for the gallop.

Galloping up at the top of this cliff requires a gull’s heart and a shark’s nerve. It’s not as high as the cliffs over the racing beach, sure, but a fall over these would kill you just the same. And to a capall uisce, the call of the sea is nearly as powerful one hundred feet above it as it is one hundred feet across a beach from it. More than one man has ridden that sinking ship over the edge and onto the rocks, just shy of the ocean.

But these low cliffs are the first place that my father ever set me on one of the capaill uisce. Not the beach where he had been taught. Because always, always, my father feared the sea more than he feared the heights.

I think they’re both deadly, which isn’t the same as being afraid.

When I double back, Corr stepping high over the long cliff grass, I see Kate Connolly standing beside her little dun pony. Kate’s hair is the color of the cliff grass turned red by autumn, and she has a spatter of freckles across her face that at first glance makes her look far younger. It’s a strange magic: At once she’s a cross child and also something older and wild, something grown from this coarse island soil. She’s looking at my things — my saddle tipped up on its pommel, my rucksack, my thermos, my bells — where I’ve left them, and for some reason, that makes me feel odd, like skin rubbed raw by sand in the wind.

When Kate notices me, she frowns, or at least narrows her eyes. I don’t know her to be able to tell the difference. I feel that same disquieted feeling I had in the cove. Again Fundamental goes under the water, and me with him. But I’m not drowning now; I let out my breath.

Corr’s inspired by the appearance of the mare; instead of slowing to a walk, he trots nearly in place, shivering with his excitement. I don’t dare get as close to her as politeness demands, so from fifteen feet away, Corr dancing beneath me, I say, my voice louder to be heard over the wind, “What do I call you?”

“What?”

I ask, “Is your name Kate or not?”

“Come again?”

“It says ‘Kate’ on the board at Gratton’s, but that’s not what Thomas Gratton called you.”

“Puck,” she says, her voice soaked in lemon juice. “It’s a nickname. Some people call me that.” She doesn’t invite me to be one of them. The wind gasps, long and low, around our feet, flattening the grass and tangling through the horses’ manes. Up here, for some reason, it always smells more strongly of fish. After a moment, she adds, “I thought the rules say that you have to train on the beach.”

I don’t understand her for a moment, then I clarify, “Within one hundred and fifty yards of the shore.”

Something dawns over her face, and for a moment, I needn’t be there — it is merely her and her epiphany. I look at my watch.

“Where’s the other horse?” she asks. Her mare tries to nibble her hair, and Kate slaps at her, absently. The pony tosses her head up with mock displeasure. It’s a game bred of familiarity, one that warms me to both of them.

“Just a bit inland.”

Kate regards us. “Does he always do that?”

Corr hasn’t stopped moving. His neck is arched, too. I’m sure he looks ridiculous as he preens for them. Uisce stallions generally prefer to view land horses as meals, not mates, but sometimes a particular mare will take a stallion’s fancy and he’ll make an idiot of himself. “The bay mare’s worse,” I say.

Kate makes a face that I think might be humor.

“Tell me about her.”

“She’s moody and she’s slippery and she’s in love with the ocean,” I reply. I’d caught her in a rainstorm, salt water making all of my leather straps too slick to hold, clouds turning the sky into sea and vice versa, the cold making my fingers imprecise. She came up in a net behind the boat as I dredged the breakers just off the shore. Local lore had it that a capall uisce caught in the rain wanted to stay wet, but I wouldn’t believe it until I’d tried it for myself.

“That sounds bad,” Kate says.

“It is.”

“Then why am I here?”