The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

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.

I feel, suddenly and alarmingly, like the races are very close. All at once I realize that it’s only days before I will walk Dove down to the beach, and I feel completely unprepared. I don’t know anything about this. Nothing at all.

I’m resurrected from my funk by Joseph Beringer, who dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my odds and my skirts.

“I don’t even wear skirts,” I snap at him.

“Especially,” he says, “in my daydreams.”

I had thought, for some reason, that being one of the riders in the Scorpio Races would get me a bit more respect, but it’s ever surprising, the things that don’t change.

I ignore him, which helps a little, if only because it feels familiar, and thread through the people toward Dory Maud’s booth, avoiding puddles and Joseph as best as I can. I can hear the commotion from the beach already, even among all the people poking in the booths. There’s something about the sound that seems unlike the normal noise of the training, and I’m not sure if it’s just because everyone is down on the beach at once as the races draw close.

“Puck!” Dory Maud spots me before I spot her. She is festively dressed in a traditional scarf and rubber boots, a combination that is at once ridiculous and, unfortunately, extremely representative of Thisby. “Puck!” she says again, this time shaking a string of November bells at me – an action that attracts the attention of at least two others near me. She carefully lays the bells down on the table in front of her so that the price tag is showing.

“Hi,” I say. There’s a great shout from the direction of the beach, which I find oddly unsettling.

“Where’s your horse?” Dory Maud asks. “Or do you mean to practice out there without her?”

“I rode her back from Hastoway yesterday evening. She’s taking a break and I’m going to watch from the cliffs.”

Dory Maud eyes me.

“It’s strategy,” I add crossly. “I’m devising strategy. Not all of racing is riding, you know.”

“I know nothing about it,” Dory replies. “Except that Ian Privett’s horse likes to come on strong from the outside at the very end, if it’s anything like the last year he rode him.”

I remember what Elizabeth said before about Dory Maud gambling on the horses. Mum once told Dad that vices were only vices when looked at through the frame of society. I see a possible ally in Dory’s vice. “What else do you know?”

Dory Maud reaches up to better secure a bit of the flapping canvas tent, and then she says, “I know that I’ll tell you more if you come back after and mind the booth for an hour while I go get lunch.”

I regard her darkly. Again, it’s not something I thought I’d have to do as a rider in the races. “I’ll think about it. What’s that commotion anyway, do you know?”

Dory Maud looks enviously down at the road to the beach. “Oh, it’s Sean Kendrick.”

Interest prickles in me. “What about Sean Kendrick?”

“They’re taking his red stallion down there. Mutt Malvern and some of the other boys.”

“With Sean?”

Dory Maud looks wistful then that she’s trapped in the booth instead of down seeing the action. “I didn’t see him. Talk’s going around that he won’t be in the races. That he and Benjamin Malvern fought over the stallion and he quit. Kendrick, I mean.”

“Quit!”

“Are you deaf?” Dory Maud rings the bells right by my ear. She calls out to someone just behind me. “November bells! Best price on the island!” Sometimes she reminds me a lot of her sister Elizabeth, and not in a favorable way. Then she says to me, “It’s all talk, isn’t it? They say Kendrick wanted to buy the stallion and Malvern said no, so he quit.”

I think of Sean folded low over the red stallion, riding bareback at the top of the cliffs. Of the easy way they had with each other when I met him to look at the uisce mare. I think, even, of the way Sean looked when he stood on the bloody festival rock and said his name, and then Corr’s, like it was just fact, one after the other. Of the way he said “the sky and the sand and the sea and Corr” to me. And I feel a bite of unfairness, because in everything but name, it seems to me that Sean Kendrick already owns Corr.

“So what are they doing with him?”

“How should I know? I just saw them parading past and Mutt Malvern looking like it’s his birthday.”

Now my sense of injustice is truly ringing. I abruptly change my plans from going to the cliff to watch from above to going down the cliff path to find out what’s happening on the beach.

“I’m going down there.”

“Don’t talk to Malvern’s son,” Dory Maud warns.

I’m already heading away, but I glance back over my shoulder. “Why not?”

“Because he might talk back!”

I hurry down the cliff path past the rest of the tents; as the path descends steeply, the vendors can no longer get their tables to sit evenly so it grows more quiet. And there, down below, is the red stallion, surrounded by four men. I recognize the square form of Mutt Malvern, and the man holding the lead – David Prince, because he used to work Hammond’s farm near us – but none of the others. There’s a loose circle of people gathered around them as well, watching and laughing and shouting. Mutt shouts something back to them. Corr lifts his head, jerking the arm of the man who holds him, and calls to the sea, high and pure.

Mutt laughs. “Having some problems holding him, Prince?”

“I’ll hold him!” shouts someone from the gathered group, and there’s more laughter.

I imagine Dove taken from me in this way, and anger churns in my stomach.

I know that Sean must be here, somewhere. It takes me a moment to spot him, but by now I know how: look for the place with no movement, for the person who’s just a little part away from the rest. Sure enough, there he is, standing with his back to the cliff, an arm across his stomach, his other elbow resting on it. His knuckles push tightly against his lips, but his face is expressionless. There’s something terrible about the way he stands there, watching. He’s not so much still as frozen.

Farther down the beach, Corr keens again, and Mutt loops a scarlet ribbon tied with bells around Corr’s pastern, just above his hoof. At the sound of them, the red stallion flinches, as if the bells are physically painful, and I find myself unexpectedly blinking away tears.

Sean Kendrick turns his face away.

There’s something so wretched in that that I can’t just leave him there by himself. I elbow my way through the tourists and the locals who are watching this spectacle. My heart thuds in my chest. I think of Sean telling me: Keep your pony off this beach. It’s possible I’m the last person he wants to see.

I stand next to him with my arms crossed. We don’t speak. I’m glad that he doesn’t look up, because Mutt has put a saddle on Corr and now they’re draping a breastplate with nails and bells sewn into it over Corr’s withers. The stallion’s skin shivers wherever the iron touches him.

After a moment, Sean says in a low voice, still looking at the ground, “Where is your horse?”

“I worked her last night, after the rain stopped. Where’s yours?”

He swallows.

“How can they do this?” I demand.

Corr makes a strange, frenzied sound, like half a whinny, a sound cut off before it began. He stands still, but he jerks his head as if trying to rid himself of a fly.

“I reckon,” Sean says, in that same low voice, “that it’s wise of you to ride your own horse, Puck, even if she’s just an island pony. Better that your heart’s your own.”

Mutt Malvern says, “I thought he’d be bigger.”

He’s climbed onto Corr, though Prince still holds the lead rope. One of the other men stands between Corr and the sea, his arms held out on either side like a fence. Mutt swings his legs and looks at the ground as if he’s a child on a pony.

“This is Mutt Malvern’s gift to me,” Sean says, and there’s enough bitter in his words for me to taste it with him. “This is my fault.”

I try to think of what I can say to comfort him. I don’t even know if he wants it. I don’t know if I’d want to be comforted, if I’m being honest. If I’m being forced to eat soot, I want to know that somewhere else in the world, someone else has to eat soot as well. I want to know that soot tastes terrible. I don’t want to be told that soot’s good for my digestion. And of course, by soot, I mean beans.

“Probably it is,” I reply. “But in twenty minutes or thirty minutes or an hour, Mutt Malvern will get bored of this. And then he will be back on that wretched black-and-white creature that he’s put on the butcher’s board by his name. And I think the piebald’s quite enough of a punishment for anyone.”

Sean looks at me then, his eyes bright, in a way that makes me feel out of sorts. I glare back.

“Where did you say your horse was again?”

“Home. Trained yesterday evening. Why did you say you quit again?”

He looks away with a rueful snort. “It was a gamble. Like you and your pony.”

“Horse.”

“Right.” Sean looks back to Corr. “Why did you say you were racing again?”

I hadn’t said, of course. It goes against everything in me to confess the true reasons behind my decision. I can imagine it being chatted all over Skarmouth, as easily as Dory Maud told me how Sean Kendrick had quit over Corr. I haven’t told Peg Gratton, even though it seems like she is on my side, nor Dory Maud, and Dory Maud is nearly family. But I hear myself say, “We’ll lose my parents’ house if I don’t win.”

I realize then how foolish it is to say it. Not because I think Sean Kendrick will gossip. But because he’ll know now that I hope not only to race but to make money at it. And that’s a terribly fanciful thing to be saying to Sean Kendrick, four-time winner of the Scorpio Races. He is quiet for a long moment, his eyes on Corr and Mutt on his back.

“That’s a good reason to gamble,” he says, and I feel incredibly warm toward him for saying that, instead of telling me that I’m a fool.

I exhale. “So was yours.”

“Do you think so?”

“He’s yours no matter what the law says. I think Benjamin Malvern’s jealous of it. And,” I add, “I think he likes to play games with people.”

Sean looks at me in that sharp way of his. I don’t think he realizes how it impales people. “You know a lot about him.”

I know that Benjamin Malvern likes to drink his tea with butter and salt in it, and that his nose is big enough to hide acorns in. I know that he wants to be entertained but that few things manage it. But I don’t know if that means that I know him.

“Enough,” I reply.

“I’m not,” he says, “fond of games.”

We both look back to Corr, who has, against everything I would’ve thought, settled down. He stands perfectly still, looking over the crowd, his ears pricked. Every so often, he quivers, but otherwise he doesn’t move.

“Should I see how fast he is?” Mutt says. He turns in the saddle to eye Sean, who doesn’t flinch. David Prince, still holding the lead, has an odd expression as he glances over to us. A bit guilty, a bit apologetic, a bit thrilled.

“Ho, Sean Kendrick,” Prince says, as if either we or he has just appeared on the beach. “Any advice?”

“Don’t forget about the sea,” Sean says.

Mutt and Prince exchange a laugh at this.

“Look how tame he is,” Mutt tells Sean. And surely, Corr’s ears are pricked and interested. He sniffs at his saddle and at Mutt’s leg as if surprised only that it’s not his usual, as if it’s a curious turn of events. The bells on his bridle shrill almost inaudibly with the movement. “None of Sean Kendrick’s much-touted brand of witchcraft needed. Does it bother you that he’s so faithless?”

Sean doesn’t reply. Mutt’s eyes swipe over me dismissively. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone take so much pleasure in making someone else miserable. I remember that first night when I saw them both outside the pub, the hatred that lurked in both their expressions. There’s nothing hidden about it now; it’s an ugly sore. Mutt addresses the crowd – tourists, most of them. “What do you think? I’m about to take the fastest horse on the island out for a gallop. He’s a legend, right? A hero? A national treasure. Who doesn’t know his name?”

They clap and hoot. Sean is immobile, a piece of the cliffs.

“I know it!” I shout then, and my voice is so loud that it surprises me. Mutt’s gaze finds me next to Sean. I call, “But what’s yours, again?”

I give him my most horrible smile, the one that I learned from having two brothers.

As I watch Mutt’s face light up with anger and listen to the murmur of amusement from the onlookers, I remember, too late, Dory Maud’s advice.

“Where’s your pony, then?” Mutt snaps back. “Plowing fields?”

I’m more embarrassed by the attention than by the insult. Probably because when I’m done down here, I’ll be back in Dory Maud’s booth selling baubles to tourists. It occurs to me that Mutt Malvern doesn’t know me well enough to say something to properly hurt me.

It’s not me that Mutt wants to hurt anyway. He calls, “I have to say I’m pleased for you, Kendrick. Is she a better ride than you’re used to?” He pretends to caress Corr’s rump. I feel my cheeks go hot. Sean’s face doesn’t change and I wonder at it – is it practice? Is it that he’s heard all these things too many times for them to prick his skin?

Beneath Mutt, Corr moves restlessly. He pushes his nose toward Prince, nuzzling into his chest. Prince scratches his forehead and pushes back.

“Steady, old lad,” he says. Prince tilts his head back to face Mutt. “Are you taking him out, then? Before the tide gets up on us?” As he speaks, Corr presses again, more insistently, so that the bells ring again, and Prince pushes back.

“Yeah, indeed,” Mutt replies. He wiggles one of the reins to get Corr’s attention; Corr still nuzzles and pushes at Prince. I see the shudder of Corr’s skin beneath the ironbound breastplate they’ve put on him.

“Okay, now,” Prince says. Corr’s muzzle is at his collarbone, like Dove does when I scratch her mane and she’s feeling fond. Prince lays his hand flat on Corr’s cheek as Corr’s breath whuffs against Prince’s neck.

Sean’s feet kick up sand even as he shouts. “David!”

Prince looks up.

Quick as a snake, Corr’s flat teeth crush into his neck.

Mutt Malvern hauls back on the reins; Corr climbs into a rear. The crowd shouts and scatters. The other two men who were with Mutt leap back, uncertain if they should defend themselves or help Mutt. Sean jerks to a stop, face turned from the spraying sand. On the ground, Prince arches his back, his feet scrabbling. I can’t look away.

Corr rears again, and this time, Mutt can’t keep his hold. He rolls out of the reach of Corr’s hooves and comes up bloody. Prince’s blood, not his. The stallion’s eyes are white and rolling as he spins. His gaze is on the surf. Everyone else’s gaze is on him and on Sean, but none of them is moving.

When Corr circles another time, I dart across the sand to where Prince lies. I can’t tell how badly he’s hurt; there’s too much blood to see his skin. I’m afraid that Corr will trample him, but I don’t know if I can move him. The best I can do is stand between him and the hooves and try to press down this horror inside me.

Corr turns and cries out again; this time it’s like a choked sob. There’s a spiderweb of veins standing out on his shoulder.

“Corr,” Sean says.

He doesn’t shout it. It doesn’t seem loud enough to be heard above the sound of the hoofbeats and the surf or the sound of Prince’s gagging, but the red stallion stills. Sean holds his arms out and approaches slowly. There’s blood on Corr’s lower jaw; his lips quiver. His ears are flat back against his head.

“Hold on,” I whisper to Prince. Up close, he’s not as young as I thought; I can see every line carved around his eyes and mouth. I don’t know if he can hear me. He holds fistfuls of sand and his eyes on me are a terrible, terrible thing. I don’t want to touch him, but I reach down. When he feels my fingers, he clutches my hand so hard that it hurts.

Near Corr, Sean shoulders off his jacket and abandons it on the sand, then tugs his shirt off over his head. Underneath, he’s pale and scarred. I’ve never given much thought to whether broken ribs healed straight before now. Sean speaks to Corr in a low, low voice. Corr shakes, his eyes rolling toward the ocean.

Prince’s blood is all over me. I’ve never seen so much blood before. This is how my parents died. I tell myself not to imagine it, but it doesn’t matter; I can’t picture it. There’s just no way to make my mind accept the possibility of it, and I’m sorry that I can’t. Because as terrible as imagining that might be, it has to be better than living in this current reality with Prince’s shaking hand gripping mine.

Sean slowly approaches Corr, speaking in the same low voice all the way. He’s three steps away. Two. One. Corr lifts his head, pulling back, his teeth bared and bloody; he’s shaking as much as Prince. Sean balls up his shirt and then presses it to Corr’s muzzle. He waits a long moment until Corr smells nothing but Sean Kendrick, and then Sean wipes the blood from Corr’s mouth. As the stallion stands, rigid, Sean folds the shirt so that the blood faces the sky, then wraps the fabric over Corr’s nostrils and eyes.

“Daly,” Sean says. Beside him, Corr’s nostrils suck the fabric of his shirt against them, showing the outline of his muzzle through the shirt, and then blow it back out again. One of the men who’d come with Mutt jerks at his name. He looks terrified. Sean’s eyes flit away, disappointed by whatever he sees in Daly’s face, and then they find me. “Puck.”

I don’t want to leave Prince as long as he’s holding my hand so tightly, but I realize suddenly that somewhere along the way it switched to me holding his hand and not the other way around. Horrified, I drop his fingers with a start and climb to my feet.

Sean gestures to the reins that trail from Corr’s bridle. “Hold this. Will you hold this? I need…” The red stallion still quivers beneath the mask Sean’s made. I can’t seem to feel afraid – it’s like my fear has fled somewhere deep inside me. Someone needs to hold the horse. I can hold the horse. I wipe my bloody palm on my pants and step forward. Taking a deep breath, I hold out my hand.

Sean puts the reins and a bunch of fabric in my fist, whether or not I’m ready. This close, I hear a faint metallic humming, and I realize that it’s the bells around Corr’s bridle and pasterns. The stallion shakes so subtly and constantly that the metal balls inside the bells whirr like metal grasshoppers.

Sean checks my grip and then, swift and certain, he crouches and slides beneath the red stallion. He produces a knife from his pocket, and runs his palm down Corr’s foreleg.

“I’m here,” he says, and Corr’s ear trembles and turns to catch his voice.

Sean deftly slices off each of the red ribbons, casting them angrily behind him with a tinny jangle. I start as the stallion moves. Now that his hooves are free of the bells, he picks up and puts down his legs, trotting without moving. Sean exhales sharply; he’s trying to unfasten the breastplate and Corr’s moving too much. I’m not sure how handling a killer capall uisce is any different from handling Dove, so I just react the same way. I pop the reins down smartly and the stallion jerks his head up. I think he’s trembling less, but it’s hard to tell without the bells singing to tell me. I try not to think about how it’s Prince’s blood still wetting my palm. I try to remember what I’ve seen Sean doing with the horses.

Shhhh, shhhhh, I say to the stallion, like the ocean, and his ears instantly prick toward me, his tail hanging motionless for the first time. I’m not entirely sure I like his attention, even blindfolded.

Sean looks at me over Corr’s withers, his expression odd – approving? – for just a moment. Then he throws the iron breastplate behind him into the sand by the bells.

“I’ll take him now.”

“What about that man? Prince?” I ask, not releasing the reins until I’m sure that Sean has them.

“He’s dead.”

I glance over. Now that Sean and I have calmed Corr, someone from the crowd has pulled Prince to safety. But they’ve put a jacket over his face. I shudder in the wind. “He died!” I know it’s stupid to say it, but I can’t not say it.

“He was dead before. He knew it, didn’t you see it in his eyes? My jacket.”

“Your jacket?” I say, with enough force that my shaky voice makes Corr start. “How about ‘my jacket, please.’”

Sean Kendrick looks at me, perplexed, and I can see that he hasn’t a clue of why I’m upset with him. Why I’m upset at all. I can’t stop shaking, as if I’ve taken all of Corr’s trembling and made it my own.

“That’s what I said,” he says after a pause.

“No, it’s not”

“What did I say?”

“You said my jacket.”

Sean looks a little bewildered now. “That’s what I said I said.”

I make an angry noise and go to get his jacket. If there was any chance that the tide wouldn’t take it before he got back down here, I’d have left it. All I can think about is that that man is dead, the man who was just holding my hand, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get, although I can’t think of who to blame except this capall uisce that I just agreed to hold. And somehow that makes me feel like I’m complicit, and that makes me angrier still.

His jacket is absolutely filthy, caked with dried sand and blood and stiff with salt water on top of it all. It’s like a piece of canvas sail. I was going to just drape it over Sean’s bare arm, but without his shirt to soften it, it would chafe.

“I’ll bring it to you,” I tell him. “I’ll wash it with my horse blanket. Where do I bring it?”

“The Malvern Yard,” he says. “For now.”

I look back to Prince. There he is, stretched out, and someone’s gone to get Dr. Halsal to declare him well and truly dead. The men chat quietly next to his body, as if lowered voices show their respect. But I can catch snatches of their conversation and they’re talking about race odds.

“Thanks,” Sean says.

“What?” But I’ve already realized what he’s said, my brain catching up to real time. He sees the realization in my face and nods, shortly. Pulling Corr’s head down, Sean whispers to him, and then he puts his hand to the red stallion’s side. The stallion starts as if Sean’s palm is fiery. But he doesn’t lash out, and Sean leads him away from the beach and back toward the cliffs. He stops only once, an arm’s length from Mutt. From here, he looks wiry and pale without his shirt on, just a boy with a blood-red horse.

“Mr. Malvern,” he says, “would you like to take your horse back to the yard?”

Mutt just stares at him.

As Sean leads Corr away from the beach, I crumple and uncrumple his jacket in my hands. I can’t quite make myself believe the truth of it. That ten minutes ago I held a dead man’s hand. That days from now I will put myself on a beach with a few dozen capaill uisce. That I told Sean Kendrick I’d clean his jacket for him.

“Bit of a bollocks.”

I turn. It’s Daly.

“Excuse me?” I ask.

“Bollocks,” Daly says again, that helpless swearing that comes from needing something better to say but not having it on hand. “The whole island is.”

I don’t reply. I don’t have anything to say. I hold Sean’s jacket tightly to still my shaking hands.

“I want to go home,” Daly tells me, voice miserable. “No game’s worth this.”