I turn back to the ocean, and the wind throws sand in my face, hard enough to offend but not to hurt. I smile a thin smile at the irony and turn up my collar. The girl circles her pony through the water again. I have to appreciate that she’s chosen the only place she can be sure that no one will approach her today. Of course, it’s not just the capaill uisce on the beach the girl has to worry about, but I can tell that she’s already considered that. She glances toward the curve of the incoming surf every so often. I can’t imagine that she’d be able to see a hunting capall uisce — when they swim parallel to the breakers, fast and dark beneath the surface, they’re almost impossible to see — but I also can’t imagine not looking.
Somewhere close by, a man is moaning; he’s been trampled or thrown or bitten. He sounds resentful or surprised. Did no one tell him that pain lives in this sand, dug in and watered with our blood?
I watch the girl’s hands on the reins, the certainty of her seat. She can ride, but so can everyone on Thisby.
“I’ll bet you haven’t seen that before,” says Gorry’s gritty voice. “Their clothes don’t come off with your eyes, Sean Kendrick.”
I glance at him just long enough to see that he still has the piebald mare, and then a second longer so that he sees that I am looking at how he still has the piebald mare, and then I look back to the ocean. There is a knot of fighting horses in front of us, growling and pawing like tomcats. Bells ring sharply. Every water horse on this beach is hungry for the sea, hungry for the chase.
I glance at the piebald mare again. Gorry’s knotted her halter with copper wire, which does nothing but look impressive.
“She’s entered in the races,” Gorry says. He’s smoking, and he gestures toward the girl in the surf with his cigarette. “On that pony. That’s what they’re saying.”
The smell of his cigarette stings worse than the wind. She means to race on that pony? She’ll be dead in a week.
The piebald mare paws at the sand; I see her digging out of the corner of my eye and hear her grinding her teeth. That bridle’s her curse, this island her prison. She still smells of rot.
“I can’t sell this mare — thanks for that,” Gorry says. “Your expert opinion, heh.” I don’t know what to tell him. When you traffic in monsters, that’s the risk you run, that you’ll find one too monstrous to stomach.
Bells jangle again, and I look away from the beach, trying to find the sound with my eyes. It is not my mares; it’s not the piebald. It’s just one horse in a throng of horses, but there’s a sharp urgency to the sound that calls to me. Danger sings on the breeze, throws echoes off the sheer white cliffs. There are too many people on horseback today trying to prove themselves, trying to prepare, trying to get faster. They haven’t discovered yet that it’s not the fastest who make it to race day.
You only have to be the fastest of those who are left.
Suddenly, there’s a shout and a terrible screaming whinny, and I turn in time to see Jimmy Blackwell throwing himself from his white-gray stallion as it leaps into the pounding waves. Blackwell rolls narrowly out of the way of another pair of spooking uisce mares. He’s older, defter. He’s survived a half-dozen Scorpio Races.
“And you thought this mare would be trouble,” Gorry says. He laughs.
I’m listening, but I’m watching, too. Blackwell is still pulling himself clear of the rioting mares. It’s just a petty disagreement between two savage horses, but they’re all teeth and hooves. One of the men tries to tear them apart, but he’s too cavalier. There’s a snap of blunt teeth and just like that, his fingers are gone. Someone shouts “Hey!” but nothing else, moved by the need to speak but having nothing else to say.
My eyes flick beyond all of them to the water to where Blackwell’s stallion half leaps, half swims, the water frothing white beneath him. His eyes are on that dun island pony and the girl on her back.
I hear a wail, and at first I think it is a scream, but then I hear my name. “Where’s Kendrick?”
Someone is about to die.
I set my bag down by the cliffs, out of the way, and I begin to run, heels digging deep into the sand. I can only be in one place at a time, and the fight on the beach is out of my control. In the surf, the dun pony is chest deep in the water and the white stallion rears before her, hooves slicing down toward the girl. The girl jerks the dun mare off balance, sparing them both from the hooves but delivering the girl into the frigid water.
And that was what the capall uisce, a fearful dull Pegasus with disintegrating wings of sea foam, wanted. His teeth flash, the color of dead coral, and his great head smashes against the girl as her head comes up above water. Teeth clamp on to her hooded sweater; legs kick in preparation for his dive. I am already in the water, my fingers numb with the cold, and I swim to him through this perilous water, my progress agonizingly slow. The girl keeps going below water and clawing her way back up.
I drag myself closer with the floating hairs of his tail. I straddle his back and grab a handful of mane as I make my way up his neck. There is no time to trace the outlines of his veins with iron or push him widdershins. He is beyond anything I could whisper in his ear. There is only time for me to grip a handful of death-red holly berries from my coat pocket and to press them into his flared nostrils.
His massive legs slash convulsively through the water, and I see one of his knees glance off the girl’s head. I can’t see if she stays above water, though, because now the stallion is snorting, seaweed and jelly and bits of coral all spewing from his nostrils around the red berries, and in his drowning and his death throes, it’s taking all my energy to keep from going underwater with him.
The stallion’s jaw swings toward me, wide open, and I see, in a suddenly frozen moment of time, the coarseness of the hairs on his jaw and the way that salt water has beaded along them.
My vision explodes into one thousand colors, not one of them the sky.
And then, in a rush of sound, my sight returns, and with it, sensation: the girl’s hand pulling my head above water and the sting of ocean in my nostrils. The white capall is nothing but his mane floating in the water, the surf kicking his corpse toward the beach. The dun pony stands on the sand and whinnies to the girl, a high, anxious sound. There’s blood in the water and blood there on the sand, too, where the man lost his fingers. They are still calling my name on the beach, though I can’t tell if it’s to solicit my help or to solicit help for me. The girl coughs but no water comes up. She’s shivering, though her eyes are fierce.
I’ve killed one of the beautiful, deadly capaill uisce that I love, and I’ve nearly died, and a fever is racing through my veins, but all I can find to say to the girl is “Keep your pony off this beach.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PUCK
I’m still shaking and coughing by the time I get into the yard. Dove spooks at every shadow, her every movement as jerky as a puppet’s. Even the sound of the gate closing behind her sends her dashing farther into the paddock, her haunches tucked underneath her. I’m lucky she’s not lame.
I close my eyes. I’m lucky she’s not dead.
It only took moments for the stallion to overpower us, and in another moment, I would’ve been under the water for good.
I lean on the gate, waiting for Dove to calm down enough to pick at her hay — she doesn’t — until I’m too cold in my wet clothing. Inside, I peel off my layers and replace them with new ones, but I’m still frigid.
She could’ve died.
In the kitchen, I eat an entire orange and a piece of bread slathered with quite a bit of our precious butter. The price of an orange is so dear that normally I would have borrowed one of Mum’s techniques for making each fruit go as far as possible. With a few oranges, Mum would make an orange cake, flavor butter or icing for a treat, and simmer some marmalade with the rest. If we did eat an orange just as an orange, we’d share the sections among us.
But I eat the entire thing, and by the time I get to the end of it, I’ve stopped shivering. My head still thuds dully from where the capall uisce’s knee hit it.
I suck on my index finger to get the last of the orange flavor, but all I taste is salt from the ocean, which makes me even more irritable. My first day on the beach with Dove and all I have to show for it is sand in every crevice of my skin and a kick in the head.
I couldn’t even make it one day without being rescued.
I keep trying to put Sean Kendrick out of my head, but my mind keeps conjuring up images of his sharp face and the sound of his voice made hoarse by swallowing the sea. And every time I relive the moment, my face flushes hot with embarrassment again.
I run a hand over my forehead, which is gritty with salt, and sigh a long, shuddering breath.
Keep your pony off this beach.
I want to give up. I’m doing all this to win just a few bare weeks with Gabriel on the island. And for what purpose? I haven’t seen a hair on his head since I announced I was racing. My plan seems suddenly foolish. So I’m going to make an idiot of myself in front of the entire island and possibly get myself and Dove killed for a brother who can’t be bothered to come home anyway.
The idea of throwing in the towel is simultaneously relieving and discomfiting. I can’t bear the idea of going back to the beach. But I can’t even imagine telling Gabe that I changed my mind. It’s hard to think that I have enough pride left to damage, but there it is.
There’s a knock on the door. I don’t have any time to make my hair look better — actually, I don’t think there is a way to make it better; it has that greasy, thick feeling of hair bathed in salt water. My heart feels leaden inside me. I can’t think of anyone positive who knocks on the door.
The door opens and it’s Benjamin Malvern. I know it’s Benjamin Malvern because there’s a signed photo of him on the wall behind the bar at the Black-Eyed Girl. I once asked Dad why it was there, and he said that was because Benjamin Malvern had given a lot of money to the pub so it could open. But I still didn’t see why that was a good reason to have someone’s signature on your wall.
“Gabriel Connolly here?” Malvern asks as he comes into the kitchen. I’m left holding the door open. The richest man on Thisby stands in our house with his arms crossed, his gaze shifting from the cluttered kitchen counter to the collapsed pile of wood and peat by the sitting room fireplace to the saddle I’ve perched on the back of Dad’s armchair. He wears a V-necked wool sweater and a tie. He’s got gray hair and is not good-looking. He smells nice, which I resent.
I don’t close the door. It seems like closing the door would be like saying that I invited him in, and I didn’t.
“Not at present,” I say.
“Ah,” says Malvern. He’s still looking around. “And you’re the sister.”
“Kate Connolly,” I clarify, with as many bristles as I can manage.
“Yes. I think we should have some tea.”
He sits at our table.
“Mr. Malvern,” I start, sternly.