The Scorpio Races

He’s done with the wrap, but he stays crouched by Corr’s leg. “With my savings and my part of the purse, I’ll buy Corr and I’ll move back to my father’s house out on the western rock and let only the wind change my direction.”

Perhaps because I’ve only just discovered the formidable beauty of the Malvern stables, I’m incredulous. “Wouldn’t you miss all this?”

Now he looks up at me, and from this angle, it looks like someone has smeared charcoal beneath the skin under his eyes. “What’s there to miss? This was never mine to miss.” This makes him heave a deep sigh, which seems like the closest thing to a confession I’ve heard from him, and then he pushes to his feet. “What about you, Kate Connolly? Puck Connolly?”

The way he says it, I feel certain he misremembered intentionally, because he liked the weight of the words when he said my name twice, and that makes me feel warm and nervous and agreeable.

“What about me?”

He trades me again, the bucket for the lead, and I step back. “What will you do if you win the Scorpio Races?”

I look into the bucket.

“Oh, I’ll buy fourteen dresses and build a road and name it after myself and try one of everything at Palsson’s.”

Though I don’t quite look up, I can still feel his gaze on me. It’s a heavy thing, this look of his. He says, “What’s the real answer?”

But when I try to think of a real answer, it reminds me of Father Mooneyham saying that Gabe had sat in the confessional and cried, and it makes me think of how, no matter what happens in the races, the best option still has Gabe sailing away in a boat. So I snap, “Do you think I just turn my secrets out for everyone?”

He is unfazed. “I didn’t know they were secrets,” he says. “Or I wouldn’t have asked.”

It makes me feel ungenerous, since he’d answered so honestly. “I’m sorry,” I say. “My mother always said that I was born out of a bottle of vinegar instead of born from a womb and that she and my father bathed me in sugar for three days to wash it off. I try to behave, but I always go back to the vinegar.” When Dad was in one of his rare, fanciful moods, he told guests that the pixies left me on the doorstep because I bit their fingers too often. My favorite was always when Mum said that before I was born, it rained for seven days and seven nights solid, and when she went out into the yard to ask the sky what it was weeping for, I dropped out of the clouds at her feet and the sun came out. I always liked the idea of being such a bother that I affected even the weather.

Sean says, “Don’t apologize. I was being too free.”

And now I feel even worse, because that wasn’t what I meant at all.

Beside Sean, Corr abruptly shifts his weight and the motion of his head seems more lupine than equine. Something in his expression makes Sean spit on his fingers and press Corr toward the wall again.

I’m afraid that he’s going to ask me to leave the stall now, so I ask hurriedly, “What is the spitting? I saw you do it before.” I don’t have to fabricate interest. It appeals to a part of me that has been repressed by years of studious effort on the part of the adults in my life.

Sean looks at his fingers as if he means to spit on them to demonstrate, and then he simply opens and closes them. He studies Corr as he thinks, as if Corr will somehow provide a way for him to frame his answer. “It’s — spit. Salt. Me. It’s a part of me, it’s a way for me to be somewhere. When the rest of me can’t be.”

I remember how Corr stilled for Sean as he would for no one else on the beach. How the scent of Sean on his shirt calmed him when nothing else would.

I reply, “Something tells me my spit wouldn’t mean as much to Corr as yours would.”

There’s a long pause before Sean speaks. He says, “Maybe not yet.”

Yet! I don’t think I’ve heard such a fine word before.

I say, “And the whispering. What do you tell him?”

Sean stands at Corr’s shoulder, and for the first time he smiles at me. It’s the smallest of things, and it’s not amusement or humor, so I’m not sure what it means. He’s younger when he has it on, easier to look at, which is maybe why he avoids it. He leans his cheek against Corr’s withers and says, “What he needs to hear.”

One of Corr’s ears flicks back to him; the other stays trained on me. I don’t want to look away from Sean leaning on Corr. There’s something about it — this massive red giant that killed a man and slight, dark Sean Kendrick beside him as if they are friends — that fascinates and terrifies me.

Sean watches me watching him and then says, “Are you afraid of him?”

I don’t want to say yes, because I’m not afraid of him right now when he looks more like a horse and less like a fiend, but I don’t want to say no, either, because yesterday morning, on the beach, I was horrified and terrified. I would just say no anyway, but I feel certain that Sean Kendrick with his lacerating gaze would see right through me to the vagaries behind that no. So instead I reply, “You said you didn’t trust him.”

“I don’t trust the ocean, either; it would kill me as soon as not. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid of it.”

I frown at him. I’m thinking again of that image of Sean crouched tightly on top of the red stallion, galloping bareback on the top of the cliffs. Of Sean, unable to watch Mutt Malvern on Corr’s back. For once, I don’t look away from his narrow gaze. “But you aren’t just unafraid. You love them, don’t you? You love Corr.”

Sean Kendrick flinches as if I’ve startled him. He is quiet so long that I notice the sounds of the yard outside the stable, the calls and whinnies and water running and doors shutting. Then he says, “And you love the island. Tell me how it’s any different.”

As soon as he says it, I know that I can’t counter his argument. Of course, it’s true the island would just as soon see me dead as alive and it’s also true that I love it despite that. Possibly because of it.

“I don’t think I’d like to argue with you,” I say. “I think it would be a very dissatisfying pastime.”

He looks out the window, as if in reply, and he studies that hopeless landscape so intently that I look, too, certain he must have seen something. It’s only because I’ve lived with brothers that I realize, after a moment, that he’s not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there’s nothing for it but to wait.

Finally, he asks, “Do you want to ride him?”

I don’t think I’ve heard him right. I don’t want to say excuse me? because if I did hear him right, it sounds like I don’t want to, and if I’ve heard him wrong, it sounds like I wasn’t paying attention.

He adds, “I’ll ride with you.”

My mind is a jumble of thoughts. That I watched this horse rip a man’s throat out only a day ago. That he’s the fastest horse on the island. That I’ll dishonor my parents’ death. That I’m afraid that I’ll love it. That I’m afraid I’ll be afraid. That I want Sean Kendrick to think well of me. That I need to be able to live with myself at night when I’m lying in bed and thinking about what I’ve done that day.

“On the cliffs,” I say. The tide is high so it would have to be. I imagine the other capall uisce he rode, throwing herself over the edge.

He watches me for a long time. “You can say no.”

But he knows I won’t.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

SEAN

When I was eight, the October wind brought a storm that twisted the sea around Thisby. Days before the rain came, the clouds hugged the horizon and the ocean crawled high up on the rocks, hungry for the warmth of our homes. My mother cried and covered her eyes when the shingles of the roof chattered like teeth. I heard her tears against the windows even before the skies clouded. This was before spring came, before the next October came, before the tide took her to the mainland and gave my father Corr instead.

In the dark, my father opened the door and led me out of the cottage and into the briny night. The moon was round and full and brave above us. The beach my father led me to was flat and glasslike, the wet sand reflecting the moon. The ocean stretched out and stretched out and stretched out, and my heart hurt to see it.

My father took me to a cleft in the cliff. We had to climb on ever-larger rocks to reach the end, a hollow in the cliff where a long-ago furious sea had thrown a lovely, dead-white conch shell and a man’s leg bone. Here it was dark and the moon couldn’t see us, although we could see the moon. The beach spread down below us.

I don’t remember my father telling me to be quiet, but I was. The moon moved across the sky as the tide slowly crept in. The surf was storm-maddened and frothy.

They came in with the tide. The moon illuminated long lines of froth as the waves gathered and gathered and gathered offshore, and when they finally broke on the sand, the capaill uisce tumbled onto the shore with them. The horses pulled their heads up with effort, trying to break free from the salt water. As they climbed from the ocean, my father gripped my arm with a pale-knuckled hand. “Be still,” he told me.

But I was already still.

The capaill uisce plunged down the sand, skirmishing and bucking, shaking the sea foam out of their manes and the Atlantic from their hooves. They screamed back to the others still in the water, high wails that raised the hair on my arms. They were swift and deadly, savage and beautiful. The horses were giants, at once the ocean and the island, and that was when I loved them.

Now Puck and I walk my stallion out to the cliffs under a deep blue sky. Her expression is fierce and uncompromising, full of the intrepid bravery of a small boat in an uncertain sea. Above us is the same full moon that lit the ocean all those nights ago.

I remember my father’s white-knuckled hand holding my arm. Be still.

She stands beside Corr, looking up at him.

I want her to love him.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

PUCK

Out here on the cliffs, the red stallion moves constantly. His nostrils flare to catch the sea wind that lifts my hair from my forehead. When I was younger and I’d ride Dove bareback and bridleless and filthy in her paddock, I’d use the fence or a rock outcropping to scramble onto her back. Today, with Corr, it’s no different, only the outcropping we stand by is taller than the ones I’d need for Dove. Sean maneuvers him into place and says, “That’s as still as he’s going to get.”

My heart is already galloping. I cannot believe that I’m really about to get onto a capall uisce. And not just any capall uisce, but the one whose name is on the top of the board at the butcher’s. The one who has won the Scorpio Races four times. The one who tore out David Prince’s throat yesterday morning. I grab a fistful of his mane and struggle to keep from being tugged off the rock as he dances. Finally, I pull myself on his back, clutching his mane with both hands like a little kid.

Sean says, “I’m going to give you the reins now. I’ll need you to hold him while I get on or you’ll be on your own. Can I trust you to hold him?”