The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

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.