The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

When I was eight, the October wind brought a storm that twisted the sea around Thisby. Days before the rain came, the clouds hugged the horizon and the ocean crawled high up on the rocks, hungry for the warmth of our homes. My mother cried and covered her eyes when the shingles of the roof chattered like teeth. I heard her tears against the windows even before the skies clouded. This was before spring came, before the next October came, before the tide took her to the mainland and gave my father Corr instead.

In the dark, my father opened the door and led me out of the cottage and into the briny night. The moon was round and full and brave above us. The beach my father led me to was flat and glasslike, the wet sand reflecting the moon. The ocean stretched out and stretched out and stretched out, and my heart hurt to see it.

My father took me to a cleft in the cliff. We had to climb on ever-larger rocks to reach the end, a hollow in the cliff where a long-ago furious sea had thrown a lovely, dead-white conch shell and a man’s leg bone. Here it was dark and the moon couldn’t see us, although we could see the moon. The beach spread down below us.

I don’t remember my father telling me to be quiet, but I was. The moon moved across the sky as the tide slowly crept in. The surf was storm-maddened and frothy.

They came in with the tide. The moon illuminated long lines of froth as the waves gathered and gathered and gathered offshore, and when they finally broke on the sand, the capaill uisce tumbled onto the shore with them. The horses pulled their heads up with effort, trying to break free from the salt water. As they climbed from the ocean, my father gripped my arm with a pale-knuckled hand. “Be still,” he told me.

But I was already still.

The capaill uisce plunged down the sand, skirmishing and bucking, shaking the sea foam out of their manes and the Atlantic from their hooves. They screamed back to the others still in the water, high wails that raised the hair on my arms. They were swift and deadly, savage and beautiful. The horses were giants, at once the ocean and the island, and that was when I loved them.

Now Puck and I walk my stallion out to the cliffs under a deep blue sky. Her expression is fierce and uncompromising, full of the intrepid bravery of a small boat in an uncertain sea. Above us is the same full moon that lit the ocean all those nights ago.

I remember my father’s white-knuckled hand holding my arm. Be still.

She stands beside Corr, looking up at him.

I want her to love him.