The Scorpio Races

I warm Dove up in easy, trotted circles. I keep waiting for my body to relax, to forget where I am, but I can’t. Every reflection on the water makes me jerk. My body is screaming at me about the threat of that black ocean. I remember the story we’re all told as soon as we become teens, of the two teen lovers who met illicitly on the beach, only to be dragged into the waves by a waiting water horse. It was considered a good cautionary tale to all the youth of Skarmouth: That would teach us to kiss.

But that story never seemed real, told in a classroom or related over a counter. Here on the beach, it feels like a promise. But it’s no use to think about that. I need to use my time wisely. I try to pretend I’m up in the muddy pasture. For endless minutes Dove and I exercise like this, trotting one way and then the other, then cantering one way, and then the other. I stop between them to listen. To scan the darkness for anything more dark. Dove is calming down, but I can’t stop shivering. Both because it’s cold and because I’m still wound so tight.

There’s just barely a bit of dawn, far away on the horizon. The others will be here soon.

I stop Dove and listen. Nothing but shhhhhh, shhhhhh.

I wait for a long, long moment. Only the ocean.

And then I push her into a gallop.

Joyfully she springs forward, tail snapping in her thrill. The waves become one long dark blur beside us and the cliffs transform into a wall of formless gray. Now I can’t hear the ocean’s shushing, only the pounding of Dove’s hooves and the huffing of her breath.

My hair escapes from its ponytail and beats my face, tiny lashes from tiny whips. Dove bucks once, twice, from the sheer excitement of running, and I laugh at her. We pull up short and race back the way we came.

I think I see someone standing up at the top of the cliffs, watching us, but when I look again, there’s no one.

I consider the morning’s work. Dove is out of breath, and I’m out of breath, and the sea is retreating. The other riders have yet to come down to the beach, and we’re already done for the day.

This might work.

I don’t know how fast we were, but right now it doesn’t matter. One victory at a time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SEAN

There’s no one on the second floor of the tearoom at this time of day. It is only me and a herd of small, cloth-covered tables, each bearing a purple thistle flower in a vase. The room is long and narrow and low-ceilinged; it feels like a pleasant coffin or a suffocating church. Everything glows in slightly rose hues because of the pink lacy curtains in front of the small windows behind me. I am the darkest thing in the room.

Evelyn Carrick, the young daughter of the owner, stands by the table I sit at and asks what I’d like. She doesn’t look at me, which is all right, because I don’t look at her, either. I look at the little printed card on the tablecloth in front of me.

There are some French words on the menu. The items in English are long and descriptive. Even if I wanted to order tea, I’m not sure I would recognize it.

“I’ll wait,” I say.

She hesitates. Her eyes flicker to me and away again, like a horse uncertain about an unfamiliar object. “May I take your coat?”

“I’ll keep it.” Having dried on my radiator overnight, my jacket is crisp with salt water and stained with mud and blood.

Every day that I’ve been on the beach is written on it. I can’t imagine her touching it with her small white hands.

Evelyn does something complicated and useful looking with the napkin and saucer on the other side of the table, and then slips back down the narrow stairs. I listen to the creak of her footsteps; every single step pops and groans. The tall, narrow teahouse is one of the oldest buildings in Skarmouth, pressed right against the grocer and post office. I wonder what it was before it sold petit pain.

Malvern is late for the appointment he has set, an appointment whose timing I was expecting, if not the location. I turn to look out the rose-curtained window at the street below. Already there are a few long-necked tourists down there, here in advance of the festival, and I can hear the drummers practicing a few streets away. In a few days, I think the tables on this level of the teahouse will be full, as will the streets. At the end of the festival, the other riders and I will be paraded among the crowd. If I still have my job.

I pull up the cuff of my sleeve a little to look at my wrist; the stiff jacket has rubbed my skin raw during the morning’s training. There was a fight this morning among the horses and I had to intervene. I wish Gorry would give up trying to sell the piebald mare; she’s a bad influence on the others.

The stairs pop and growl as someone heavier than Evelyn climbs them. Benjamin Malvern strides across the room and then stands by the table until I rise to greet him. Malvern, who has been moneyed for his whole life, has that air about him of well-cared-for ugliness, like an expensive racehorse with a coarse head. The glossy coat, the bright eye, the bulbous nose over too-fleshy lips.

“Sean Kendrick,” he says. “How are you?”

“Tolerable,” I reply.

“How is the sea?” This is where he makes a joke to show empathy with me, and where I pretend it is funny to show I appreciate my salary.

I smile thinly. “Well as always.”

“Shall we sit?”

I let him sit first, and then follow him. He picks up the menu card but doesn’t read it. “So you are ready for the festival this weekend?”

The stairs creak again and it’s Evelyn. She sets a cup full of frothy liquid in front of Malvern.

“What’ll you have?” she asks me again.

“I’m fine.”

“He’ll not abuse your hospitality, dear,” Malvern tells her. “Bring him a cup of tea.”

I nod to Evelyn. Malvern doesn’t seem to notice her going.

“No sense going without, when there’s unpleasant business making it unpleasant enough,” Malvern says. He drinks his strange, frothy tea.

I am still and silent.

“You’re a man of no words, Sean Kendrick,” he says. Outside the window, the practicing Scorpio drummers beat a tripping, ascending beat firmly at odds with the soft pink world we’re in. He leans forward, elbows on the table. “I don’t think I’ve told you the story of how I got into horses, have I?”

I meet his eyes.

He goes on. “I was young, poor, an islander, but not on this island. I had nothing to my name but my shoes and the bruises on my skin. There was a man who sold horses down the road from us. Royal horses and nags, jumping horses and eating horses.

Every month there would be an auction and people would come from farther than you’ve been in your life to see it.”

He pauses, only to see if I am sad that my legs have grown into this island already. When he doesn’t find what he’s looking for, Malvern goes on, “He got this one stallion in, golden like Midas touched him. Seventeen, eighteen hands tall, mane and tail like a lion’s. To see him in the yard was to know what a horse should look like, but there was a problem: No one could back him. He’d thrown four men and killed another and he was eating four or eight bales of hay a day and no one would touch an unbackable man-killer at that auction. So I told the man that I would break him, and if I did, he’d give me a job and I’d never be poor again. The horsemonger told me he couldn’t promise me that I’d never be poor again, but he’d give me a job as long as he was alive. So I took that golden stallion and I bridled him. I cut a blindfold from a virgin’s dress and covered his eyes and I backed him. We galloped all over the countryside, him blind and me a king, and when I brought him back, he was tame, and I had a job. What do you think of that?”

I look at Malvern. He tips his foreign tea against his lips. I can smell the butter in it from here.

“I don’t believe you,” I say. When Malvern raises an eyebrow, I add, “You were never young.”

“And here I was thinking you had no sense of humor, Mr. Kendrick.” He pauses as Evelyn sets my cup of tea before me. She offers milk and sugar and I shake my head. Malvern waits until she has gone back down the stairs before he speaks again.

Malvern puts a napkin over the top of his teacup, as if it’s a corpse instead of an empty cup. “My son says you killed one of my horses.”

Anger touches the top of my mouth, my chest, with a hot hand.

“You look unsurprised,” Malvern adds.

“I’m not surprised,” I say.

Outside, the Scorpio drummers beat closer, louder, and there is laughter among them. One of the laughs in particular is a low, derisive chuckle, the sort that elicits a frown from those not in on the joke. Malvern’s eyebrows draw down over his eyes, and his head is cocked as if he can imagine the scene outside more clearly than my face. The drums now sound quite intentionally like hoofbeats, and I wonder if he is seeing again the golden stallion the size of a barn galloping over the countryside of some alien island.

“Quinn Daly told me what he saw,” Malvern says. “He told me how you were exercising Fundamental in the cove. He said that you seemed distracted. He said your mind was far from your job and you would have never seen a threat in the water.”

Of course I had been distracted. That ginger-haired girl and her island pony and the smears of blood on the sand from the savage mares. I cannot imagine that Malvern will fire me for this, cannot imagine that he would fire me for anything, but then again, I can. I stand on a knife blade.

I meet Malvern’s gaze. “What else did Quinn Daly tell you?”

“That Matthew told Daly he would relieve him at his post and watch the cove. That the next thing Daly saw was Fundamental going under and you diving after him.” Malvern folds his hands together on the table before him. “But that is not the account my son gave. It’s their words against each other. What do you have to say?”

I set my teeth. This is an unwinnable game. I drag the words out. “I cannot speak out against your son.”

“You don’t have to,” Malvern answers. “Your jacket tells me which story is the true one.”

We’re both silent.

Finally, Malvern says, “I would know your mind. What is it you want out of this life?”

The question catches me off guard. There may have been a person who I would turn the pockets of my heart out for them to see, but there was never a time when Benjamin Malvern was that person. I can’t imagine confessing my wants to Malvern any more than I can imagine him confessing his to me.

With his gaze on me, I say, “A roof over my head and reins in my hand and the sand beneath me.” A slender and abridged truth.

“Ah, so you have what you want already, then.”

I cannot sit here drinking this tea and tell him that what I want is to be free of him.

“It has been a long time since I broke that first stallion,” Malvern says. “I don’t know what it looked like from the outside, this path I took to get to this ruin of an island in the middle of the ocean. I can’t compare Matthew’s path to see where he might be going.”

There are many paths that Mutt Malvern might be on, but I think we both know that none of them ends as the mogul of an internationally famous breeding yard.