The Scorpio Races

And there’s Malvern and David Prince, the head groom. Malvern holds a shotgun; it’s an optimistic thought on his part.

Out here, the scream sounds like it’s coming from all around us. It vibrates in every raindrop, throbs in the clouds overhead. It’s a howl like venom, a paralyzing promise. This storm has driven the island mad.

Corr jerks and hauls at my arm. I see his hooves leave the cobbles and return, but I can’t hear the sound of them. I can only hear the throbbing scream, loud as if it’s in my head. It’s meant to travel miles underwater.

I yank Corr’s halter to catch his attention, and then I haul his head down next to mine. His lips are pulled back in a ghastly grin; it’s not a Corr I like seeing. My pulse races despite every year we’ve spent together. He’s a monster. With one hand, I press those teeth away from me, and with the other, I turn his ear toward me.

Pursing my lips, I keen into his ear. It’s lower than the scream that we hear now. The scream that’s getting closer.

Corr is distracted. His lips are pulled far, far back from his teeth; he is no horse. I twist his ear hard enough to hurt, and again, I hum into his ear, a low hum that dips to a groan at the end.

Malvern lifts his shotgun, looking at something I can’t see in the dark and the mist.

“Corr!” I shout. Rain creeps into my mouth when I do. And I keen again to him.

Malvern fires, but the scream from the approaching capall uisce is unbroken. It cannot get any louder.

And then, finally, Corr begins to keen as I prompt him. Low, groaning, so that I feel it in the lead rope I hold. So I feel it in the soles of my shoes. So it bubbles beneath the scream. Corr’s keen grows and widens to a groan, a growl, a roar like the wind against the buildings. The sound fills the yard and rolls out through the rain. It’s a territorial battle cry, a threat, a statement: This land is already mine. This is my herd.

The other scream diminishes in the wake of Corr’s howl, which ascends to fill the space that’s left behind. The mares at the gate go wild with fear and I know the horses in the stable are worse for it. Corr’s pure, high scream is no different from the scream it replaced — except this one I can stop.

I listen and listen to be sure that Corr’s cry is the only one. One of my eardrums, the one closest to Corr, merely hisses. But my left ear hears no other contender.

Now I hold Corr’s halter in a tight fist and press my fingers against his veins, tracing counterclockwise. Corr’s scream falters. I press my lips to his shoulder and whisper to his rain-soaked skin.

The night falls silent. My right ear still hums, a radio tuned to an empty frequency. Malvern and Prince look at me. The broodmares at the gate shiver and huddle together. Inside the stable, the kicking has died down.

The rain streams down; there’s not a single dry thing left in the world. Across the yard, Malvern gestures shortly to me.

I lead Corr into the hazy light that Malvern stands in.

Malvern’s eyes flick from me to Corr, who’s black in the wet and the night.

“Have you changed your mind yet?” Malvern asks me. “No.”

Malvern’s tone is dismissive. “I haven’t, either. This changes nothing.”

I’m not sure I believe him.

CHAPTER FORTY

PUCK

As Finn predicted, the storm pounds Thisby for a night and a day, and by the end of that rainy day, we’re able to retreat back to our house. I’m relieved because I’d rather run barefoot in the Scorpio Races than try to sleep in Beech’s narrow ham-scented bed with Gabe again. Tommy’s eager to return home because he left his capall uisce in the care of his family across the island and he’s not certain how well they’re doing. I think that I’d like to meet Tommy’s family, if they are the sort who wouldn’t mind having a water horse left in their care while Tommy ventures out to save the neighbors. It’s not exactly like asking your mother to put out a tin of chopped meat for your cat while you’re gone. I know I must’ve met Tommy’s parents at some point — I must’ve met everyone on Thisby at some point — but I cannot accurately place them in my head. In my imagination Mr. and Mrs. Falk both have Tommy’s brilliant blue eyes and his lovely lips. I also grant him some siblings, while I’m at it. Two brothers and a sister. The sister is homely. The brothers are not.

By evening, we are ready to strike out. The boys are so manly that they have to ride in Tommy’s car again, but I make a hasty bridle by looping Dove’s lead line back through her halter, creating reins so that I can ride her bareback after them.

The door to the house slams, and a moment later, I realize Peg Gratton has come out to stand by me. Her arms crossed, she watches silently as I curry off Dove’s shoulders.

“Thank you again,” I say finally, because I need to say something.

She doesn’t reply, just lifts her eyebrows, like a nod without the head movement. “There’s still a lot of people who don’t want you on that beach.”

I try not to feel angry at her. “I told you I wasn’t going to be talked out of it.”

Peg laughs then, a sound like a crow cawing. “I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about men who don’t want a girl in their race.”

My mouth says “oh” but my voice doesn’t.

“You just watch yourself. Don’t let anyone tighten your girth for you. Don’t let anyone else feed your mare.”

I nod, but I’m thinking that it’s easy to imagine someone being annoyed by me riding, but harder to imagine someone being willing to do anything nefarious about it.

I ask, “What about Sean Kendrick?”

I look at Peg Gratton, and she is smiling a small, secret smile at me, as masked as she was beneath the bird headdress. “You sure don’t like to do anything the easy way, do you?”

“I didn’t know,” I start truthfully, “that it was the hard way when I started on it.”

Peg plucks a piece of straw out of Dove’s mane. “It’s easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don’t understand. Something that makes them feel strong or clever. It’s why they love the ocean.”

I’m not sure that is why Sean Kendrick loves the ocean.

Peg continues, “When you’re too much like them, the mystery’s gone. No point seeking the grail if it looks like your teacup.”

“I’m not trying to be sought.”

She purses her lips. “All I’m saying is that you’re asking them to treat you like a man. And I’m not sure either of you want that.”

There’s something discomfiting about what she says, though I’m not sure if it’s because I disagree or agree with it. I think of Ake Palsson backing his horse away from me and the combination of her words and the memory sit uneasily in my chest.

“I just want to be left alone,” I say.

“Like I said,” Peg replies. “You’re asking to be treated like a man.”

She makes a step out of her fingers laced together to help me up. Then she pats Dove’s rump so that Dove’ll move to follow Tommy’s car as it leaves. I turn around as we go. Peg’s still standing there watching us, but she doesn’t wave.

My spirits slowly lift as we put distance between us and the Grattons’ white house. After so much time cooped up, the air feels clean and well washed. The island itself looks like our kitchen — too much stuff, not enough tidying. There’s bits of wooden fence thrown far away from fence lines, shingles and roof tiles resting in hedgerows, branches from faraway trees abandoned in the middle of fields. Sheep wander freely across the road, which isn’t so unusual, but I spot some glossy mares grazing outside of their fence as well. The watery evening light is like a cautious smile through tears.

There’s no sign of the capaill uisce that came up out of the storm, and I wonder if they’ve all climbed back into the sea again. For the moment, the island seems so utterly peaceful, unmarked by trouble and horses and weather. I think we’d have entirely different tourists if this were the face Thisby wore all the time.

Only I know this isn’t the real Thisby. The real Thisby starts again at sun-up tomorrow. Just a little over a week to go until the races. I don’t think I’m ready. It’s hard to imagine that our story will end the way I told Finn. Good luck doesn’t seem to be something that holds the hands of the Connollys these days.

But when I get home, Finn’s face is shining and joyful. Behind him in the kitchen is Puffin the barn cat. Her tail is bitten off and ugly, and she’s very indignant and sorry for herself, but she’s also very alive.

This island is a cunning and secretive thing. I can’t say what it has planned for me.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

SEAN

That evening, as the last light is fading, I do as my father used to and strike off across the fields to the beach that faces west. As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end.

The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. Everything about me is exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago, when Thisby priests would stand in the frigid, dark sea and give themselves over to the island.

I try to make the inside of me as still as the outside. I have no more care than one of the gulls circling above me, thinking only of how to survive this moment and then the next.

I whisper to the sea three times. Once I ask that Corr will be meek and good, so they’ll have no reason to use the bells and magic that he so despises.

But twice I whisper for him to be despicable, so that they’ll beg for me to come back.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

PUCK

The island’s mad.

Because I rode Dove back from Hastoway the evening before, I give her the morning off and tell her to eat some expensive hay. I give her a bit of the grain, too — not too much, because she’ll just get ill on it — and leave her behind to go watch the training and take notes. I don’t have any more November cakes and we weren’t home to bake anything, so I have to settle for a pocketful of stale biscuits.

It doesn’t take me long to realize that Thisby has completely changed now that the festival is done and the storm has passed. Aside from the stray shingles and branches, it looks as if the wind brought people and tents. The road from Skarmouth clear on to the cliffs is lined with tents and tables of every sort. Where I’d helped Dory Maud set up her booth is now a city of booths, all populated by locals trying to seduce tourists with their stuff. Some of them are the vendors who Brian Carroll and I saw while making our way through the festival. But some of them are new: the booth selling riders’ colors, the hasty and incredibly tacky paintings of the race favorites, the mats to sit on to watch the race from the cliffs without getting your backside wet.