The Scorpio Races

I slide down the aisle as quickly as silence allows. The crying has gone silent but I’m certain now that it’s Edana. In the darkness, I can barely see inside the stall. The night outside throws some dark blue light in, just enough for me to press myself against the bars and look in.

When she keens again, I start back. She’s right by my face.

Her head lies against the bars, neck pressed against the wall, nose pointed toward the ceiling, jaw cracked open.

I whisper her name and she cries back to me softly. My eyes follow the line of her neck to her sloping withers and the slanting line her hips make low to the ground. I’ve never seen a horse stand like this. There’s a sick knot inside me as I pull open the door and step into the stall. Now, her body silhouetted against the light of the window, I see that she leans against the wall with her head and neck, sunk down onto her haunches like a dog. Her back legs splay out as if the ground is slippery.

I touch her shoulder; it’s trembling. I have a terrible feeling rising inside me. I run the flat of my hand from her withers down her spine, and then, crouching to keep searching, around the curve of her twitching haunches, and down toward her hamstring. Edana whimpers.

My hand comes away soaked. I lift it toward my eyes, but I don’t need it any closer to smell the blood on it. I snatch my flashlight from my pocket and flick it on.

Both of her hamstrings have been sliced.

The top edge of the wound curves up like a ghastly smile, and blood pools around her hocks.

I go to her head and she struggles, trying to get her legs under her. I stroke her forelock and whisper in her ear. Be still. Don’t be afraid. I wait for her breathing to become easier, for her to believe me.

She’ll never walk again.

I can’t understand it. I don’t understand who would mutilate Edana, a horse that wasn’t in the races, a horse that was no threat to anyone. And like this, this savage cruelty — I was meant to find her and be sickened. I can think of only one person who would want to hurt me like that.

I think I hear a rustle somewhere in the depths of the stable.

I flick off the flashlight.

In the dark, in his stall, Edana’s bay coat looks very much like Corr’s blood-red one. It would be very easy to mistake them if you were expecting Corr and were concentrating on getting into the stall without getting hurt.

There’s movement again, farther away in the stable.

I scramble out of the stall and into the aisle. I stand and wait, listening. My heart has already raced ahead of me. All I want is for the sound to be from anywhere but the back seven stalls. All I want is for Mutt Malvern to have guessed wrong when he went looking for Corr. There are five other stalls equipped for the capaill uisce. He could have gone looking in any of them after he discovered Edana was the wrong horse.

I hear the commotion again.

It’s from the back seven stalls.

Now I run.

I strike the lights on as I round the corner by the door. If he knows I am here, surely he will abandon this.

“Mutt!” I shout. Now, under the light, I see blood on the floor, the edge of a shoe printing scarlet every step. I jog along, following, watchful. “You’ve gone too far! Mutt!”

My voice echoes in the high arches of the stable; there’s no reply. Perhaps he’s left.

Corr screams.

Now I run like I’ve never run. I can see Edana in my mind, her head stretched unnaturally toward the ceiling as she lies against the wall, ruined in her own skin and not yet knowing it.

If he has touched Corr, I will kill him.

I burst around the corner. The door to Corr’s stall is open. Mutt Malvern stands with a wicked blade in one hand and, in the other, a three-pronged leister spear of the sort used to poach fish or birds. The iron heads of the spear press into Corr’s shoulder, forcing him back against the wall. His skin shivers and ripples under the metal. Mutt Malvern has given some thought to this plan of his.

“Get away from him,” I say. “Every drop of his blood will be ten of yours.”

“Sean Kendrick,” Mutt replies. “Pretty foul of you to swap stalls like that.”

Corr makes a low roar in his throat, a sound that we feel in our feet instead of hear. But he’s pinned by the leister spear, not only points of iron but three of them as well.

“If you knew a thing about the horses under this roof, you would’ve known the difference between them, even in the dark.”

Mutt glances at me long enough to see that I’ve closed the distance between us. He jerks his chin toward the spear. “Stay out of this stall, knacker.”

I slowly wipe my bloody hand across my jacket and draw my switchblade from my pocket. I show it to him.

Mutt regards it with contempt. “How is it you’re thinking you’ll stop me with that wee thing?”

The blade snaps out audibly. Mutt would not be the largest thing to die on the slender point of it.

“I don’t think I’ll stop you,” I say. “I think that you will cut my horse and then when you come out of that stall, I will use this to cut your heart out and hand it to you.”

I am sick to the ends of my fingers. I cannot look at Corr’s eye or I won’t be steady.

Mutt says, “Do you really think I believe that you can do anything to me while I have these in my hands?” But he does believe. I can see it in his eyes.

I say, “What’s it you hope to prove in there? That you are the better horseman? That the horses love you better? Do you mean to carve your father’s approval in the side of every capall uisce on this island?”

“No,” says Mutt. “Just this one.”

“Will that be enough?” I ask. “What will be next?”

“There is no next,” Mutt says. “This beast’s the only thing you care about.”

He looks at my face, though, and he’s not quite sure. Maybe because it wasn’t meant to happen with me watching. I was meant to come down in the morning and find Corr as I just found Edana. Maybe because he is looking at me and dreaming of a better way to hurt me.

Surely I must know something that would satisfy Mutt more than crippling Corr. There must be something. I think of his contorted face at the auction and I say, “You really want to prove something to your father, you’ve got to win against us. Beat us on the sand.”

His face shifts. That fiendish piebald has him well fascinated. Mutt glances at me again, then back at the points of the spear on Corr’s shoulder.

I know what is going through his head, because it’s going through mine as well. Benjamin Malvern telling George Holly that I am the rightful heir to the yard. The name Skata printed on the board at the butcher’s. The breathless speed of the piebald.

It’s a siren song, and it wins him over.

Mutt backs out of the stall. Corr charges up toward the space he leaves behind. His eyes are wild. I see the pricks of blood the spear has left in his shoulder, and when Mutt slides the door shut, I spring onto Mutt and press my little switchblade to his great bulging neck. I can see his skin sucking in with his pulse. My knife lies right next to it.

“I thought you said to beat you on the sand,” Mutt says. Corr slams the wall of his stall with his hooves.

My voice hisses out through a cage of my teeth. “I also said ten drops of your blood for every drop of his.” I want a pool of his blood around him like the one beneath Edana. I want him to lie against this wall and whimper like she does. I want him to know he’ll never stand again. I want him to remember David Prince’s death mask as he wears it for himself.

“Sean Kendrick.”

The voice comes from behind me. I incline my head even as Mutt’s eye catches mine.

“It is late for this sort of entertainment, isn’t it?”

With great reluctance, I snap the blade away and step backward from Mutt. Mutt’s hands remain by his side with the spear and his wicked carving knife still dark with blood. We both face his father, who stands with Daly at the entrance to the aisle. He wears a buttoned undershirt that he must’ve been sleeping in, but he is no less powerful-looking in it. Daly, shamefaced, won’t meet my eyes.

“Matthew, your bed is lonely.” His voice is cordial although his posture is not. Malvern meets Mutt’s gaze and for a moment, nothing happens. Then Malvern’s expression hardens and Mutt strides past him without a word or glance toward me.

Malvern turns his eyes to me. I am shaking still, struck with what Mutt nearly did to Corr and with what I was ready to do to Mutt.

“Mr. Daly,” Malvern says without turning his head. “Thank you for your assistance. You may return to your bed.”

Daly nods and vanishes.

Benjamin Malvern stands an arm’s length from me, his eyes steady on me. He says, “Do you have anything to say?”

“I would not” — I close my eyes for a moment. I need to get my bearings. I need to find the stillness inside me. I cannot find it; I’m destroyed. I stand in the ocean, my hands cupped to the sky. I’m immovable in the current. I open my eyes — “have been sorry.”

Malvern cocks his head. For a long moment he looks at me, at the switchblade in my hand, at my face. Then he folds his arms behind his back. “Mr. Kendrick, go put that mare out of her misery.”

He turns and walks from the stable.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

SEAN

The next day is bitter and ruthless. The wind races around the horses’ feet and makes them wild. Overhead, clouds like ragged breath flee in front of the cold. There’s a gray ocean above and below us.

I meet Puck at the head of the cliff road. She frowns when she sees me; I know my face must be a wasteland of fatigue after last night. Her hair is held down by a lumpy knitted hat, but a few strands snap across her face. The vendors are struggling to keep their tents from flying away. The riders heading down the cliff path endeavor to keep their mounts from doing the same.

Puck tugs down the edge of her hat with one hand. Something nearby creaks and groans in the wind. Dove tosses her head. I see terror in her wide eyes.

“Take Dove home,” I tell her. “This isn’t a day to be on the beach.”

“There isn’t any more time,” she replies. “I thought you said I should get used to the beach. There’s no more time.”

I have to shout to be heard over the wind. I spread my empty palms to the sky. “Do you see Corr in my hands? This isn’t a beach you want to get used to.” Killing sands, that was what my father called a day like today. Today the riders would die because they didn’t know or because they were desperate or because they were foolishly brave.

Puck frowns at the cliff road. I see her uncertainty in the wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“If you trust me on anything, don’t risk today. You’re ready as you’ll ever be,” I say. “Everyone else is robbed the extra day, too.”

She bites her lip in dark frustration, looks at the ground for a moment, and then, like that, she’s done. “It is what it is, I reckon. Is Tommy Falk down there?”

I don’t know. My interests don’t lie with Tommy Falk.

“Hold Dove,” she says, when I can’t answer to her satisfaction. “I’m going to get him if he’s down there.”