The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The next day is bitter and ruthless. The wind races around the horses’ feet and makes them wild. Overhead, clouds like ragged breath flee in front of the cold. There’s a gray ocean above and below us.

I meet Puck at the head of the cliff road. She frowns when she sees me; I know my face must be a wasteland of fatigue after last night. Her hair is held down by a lumpy knitted hat, but a few strands snap across her face. The vendors are struggling to keep their tents from flying away. The riders heading down the cliff path endeavor to keep their mounts from doing the same.

Puck tugs down the edge of her hat with one hand. Something nearby creaks and groans in the wind. Dove tosses her head. I see terror in her wide eyes.

“Take Dove home,” I tell her. “This isn’t a day to be on the beach.”

“There isn’t any more time,” she replies. “I thought you said I should get used to the beach. There’s no more time.”

I have to shout to be heard over the wind. I spread my empty palms to the sky. “Do you see Corr in my hands? This isn’t a beach you want to get used to.” Killing sands, that was what my father called a day like today. Today the riders would die because they didn’t know or because they were desperate or because they were foolishly brave.

Puck frowns at the cliff road. I see her uncertainty in the wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“If you trust me on anything, don’t risk today. You’re ready as you’ll ever be,” I say. “Everyone else is robbed the extra day, too.”

She bites her lip in dark frustration, looks at the ground for a moment, and then, like that, she’s done. “It is what it is, I reckon. Is Tommy Falk down there?”

I don’t know. My interests don’t lie with Tommy Falk.

“Hold Dove,” she says, when I can’t answer to her satisfaction. “I’m going to get him if he’s down there.”

I don’t want her on the beach on a horse or off it. “I’ll go look for him. Take her home.”

“We’ll both go,” Puck says. “Wait a moment. I’ll get Elizabeth to tie her behind the booth. Don’t move.”

I watch Puck make her way back to Fathom & Sons’ booth and get into a spirited discussion with one of the sisters who tends it.

“That’s a poor match, Sean Kendrick,” says a voice at my elbow. It’s the other sister from Fathom & Sons, and she follows my gaze to Puck. “Neither of you are a housewife.”

I don’t look away from Puck. “I think you assume too much, Dory Maud.”

“You leave nothing to assumption,” Dory Maud says. “You swallow her with your eyes. I’m surprised there’s any of her left for the rest of us to see.”

I shift my glance to her. Dory Maud is a hard-looking woman, clever and industrious, and even I know from my perch at the Malvern Yard that she could fight the strongest man on the island for the last penny in his pocket. “And what is she to you, then?”

Dory Maud’s expression is canny. “What you are to Benjamin Malvern, only less salary and more affection.”

We both look back to Puck, who has won the battle with Elizabeth and ties Dove behind the booth. This ill wind throws both the ends of her hair and Dove’s mane to and fro. I remember the feel of Puck’s ponytail in my hand, the heat of her skin when I tucked her hair into her collar.

“She doesn’t know any better,” Dory Maud says. “What a girl like her needs is a man with both his legs on the land. A man who will hold her down so that she doesn’t fly away. She doesn’t know yet that someone like you looks better on the shelf than in your hand.”

I can hear in her voice that she means no cruelty by it. But I say, “Someone to hold her down just as you are held?”

“I hold myself down,” snaps Dory Maud. “You and I both know what you love, and those races are a jealous lover.”

And now I hear in her voice that she knows this firsthand. But she’s pegged me wrong, because it’s not the races I love.

Puck comes up to us just then, still wearing the vicious smile from winning the battle with Elizabeth. “Dory!”

“Watch yourself on that beach,” Dory Maud says, and then she leaves us behind with a bit of a growl. Puck mutters something about bad tempers.

“Have you changed your mind?” I ask her.

“I never do,” she says.

The beach is every bit as bad as I’d guessed. The sky is down near the sand and occasional rain hits our faces like sea spray. From our vantage on the cliff road, I can see the thrashing ocean, the capaill uisce blowing across the black wet sand, the quarrels between horses and the smears of red down the beach. A dark, dead capall lies out flat by the surf, every wave washing around its legs but not moving it. It’s not only humans this is dangerous for.

Puck says, “Do you see Tommy?”

I do not, but only because there’s much to see in this ceaselessly moving play. Rain hisses in my ears.

She pushes down the path and I have no choice but to follow her. At the base are a few huddled spectators and a race official. One of the Carrolls, I think, an uncle of Brian and Jonathan’s. I stop to talk to him, my head ducked down into my collar.

“What’s been happening down here?” My voice is thin in the wind; my eyes are on the dead water horse.

“Fighting. The horses are fighting. The sea’s driving them mad.”

“Is Tommy Falk down here?” I ask him.

“Falk?”

“Black mare!”

He says, “They’re all black when they’re wet.”

“Tommy Falk?” echoes one of the spectators next to him, a mainlander by his navy suit coat and tie, even down here on the sand. “Good-looking boy?”

I have no idea if he is or not. “Maybe yes at that?”

He points toward the curve of the cliffs. The race official, as an afterthought, adds, “Someone was looking for you, Mr. Kendrick.” I wait for him to say who, but he doesn’t, so I step away. In all this I’ve lost Puck. Everyone looks the same in this vile weather. If all of the capaill uisce are black when they’re wet, so is every human. The beach is populated by dark, insensible beasts and the smaller dark creatures on their backs. There’s no point calling for her; in five feet all sound becomes the savage howl of the wind.

With my eyes, I finally find not Puck, not Tommy Falk, but his mare. She is blacker than a mirror and unmistakable with her fine bone. She stands about ten lengths away in the shelter of the cliffs, tied near another capall uisce, her head low to the ground. The mare’s still in her tack, but there’s no sign of Tommy Falk about her. I think perhaps that Puck has seen her as well, so I head toward the mare, across the loose stones of the high beach.

But before I get even halfway there, I find Puck. Tucked behind the curve of the cliff road, slightly protected from the weather, there are four bodies stretched out parallel to each other, dark outlines on the pale beach, casualties of the morning. Puck crouches beside one of them, not touching or even looking at it. Just hunched down against the wind, studying the ground between her feet.

I walk over to stand beside her and look down at the battered face of Tommy Falk.