I feel shamed for no reason I can name, and then I feel bad that I’ve let myself be shamed. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful.”
Norman Falk’s voice is kind enough. “’Course you don’t. You just don’t have a mum and dad to set you right. That horse of yours is just a horse, is the problem. If the Scorpio Races are just horse races, then all this” — Norman Falk jerks his chin toward the flames — “was just a bloody shame and nothing else.”
Two weeks ago, I would’ve thought he was crazy, that of course it was just about the race, the money, the thrill. And if I’d just been watching the training on the beach, I probably would’ve still said that. But now that I’ve spent time with Sean Kendrick, now that I’ve been on the back of Corr, I feel something inside me slipping. I’m still not sure it was worth Tommy dying for. But I can see the allure of having one foot on the land and one foot in the sea. I’ve never known Thisby so well as I have these last few weeks.
The boy says something to Norman Falk and he replies, “He’s bringing her down now. Look there now.”
We both turn our heads and there is Sean, halfway down one of the little paths to the beach. He holds Tommy’s black mare, and in comparison to Corr, she looks fragile in his hands. Sean wears nothing ritual or unusual, just his same blue-black jacket with his collar turned up. I feel a strange, fierce squeeze in my heart when I see him, like pride, although there’s nothing about Sean that I can take credit for. He leads the black mare across the sand toward us, pausing only when she half rears and squeals, soft as a bird cry.
The funeral party gathers by the pyre to watch as he walks her to the water’s edge. It’s only then that I notice that Sean’s feet are bare. The surf rushes around his ankles, soaking the bottom few inches of his pants. The mare lifts her hooves high as the water courses in around her pasterns and then she cries out to the sea. There is something not quite horselike about her eyes already. When she snaps at Sean, he simply ducks out of the way and twists his fingers in her forelock, pulling her head down. I see his mouth moving, but it’s impossible to hear what he tells her.
Beside me, Tommy’s father says, “From the sea, to the sea,” and I realize that the words match the movement of Sean’s mouth.
I wonder then at how many times this moment’s taken place. Not with Sean saying the words, but with anyone. It’s like the moment at the bloody stone when I declared Dove as my mount. I feel the pull of my legs to Thisby, the invisible presences of a thousand rituals weights around my ankles.
Sean looks to the group and calls, “The ashes.”
Another boy — another sibling, maybe, this one looks a little like Tommy — hurries across the sand toward Sean. The light is failing quickly, so I can’t see what he’s carrying the ashes in — they must have just been taken from the pyre. Sean holds a hand over the vessel as if testing the temperature, and then he cautiously reaches in. The mare tosses her head and calls out again, and Sean hurls the handful of ashes into the air above her. Sean’s voice is a wind-torn, weightless thing across the sand, but Norman Falk says the words along with him: “May the ocean keep our brave.”
With his back to us, Sean tugs the halter from the mare’s head. She kicks out, but he steps out of the way as if it were nothing at all. With a shake of her mane, she leaps mightily into the water. For a moment she struggles over the waves, and then she is swimming. Just a wild black horse in a deep blue sea full of the ashes of other dead boys.
Then, so sudden and swift that I miss the moment of her disappearing, she’s gone, and there’s only the swaying of the ocean surface.
Sean stands at the edge of the surf, looking out at the sea, and there is something curious and longing in his expression, like he, too, wishes to leap into the ocean and be gone. I think, just then, that this is why Norman Falk asked for Sean to be there. Not because he was the only one who could perform the ritual. But because Sean Kendrick, looking like that, is the races, even if no race was ever run. A reminder of what the horses mean to the island — a bridge between what we are and that thing about Thisby that we all want but can’t seem to touch. When Sean stands there, his face turned out to the sea, he is no more civilized than any of the capaill uisce, and it unsettles me.
My heart feels full and empty with all of the beginnings and endings. Tomorrow is the races with all of their strategy and danger and hope and fear, and on the other side of it is Gabe getting into a boat and leaving us. I feel like Sean looking out over the ocean. I’m so full of an unnamed wanting that I can’t bear it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
SEAN
After I release Tommy Falk’s mare, I am drawn into the funeral party. By the light of the fire, everyone’s face is a secret until you are right upon them. I search one and then the other; I see Gabriel Connolly and Finn Connolly but not Puck.
I ask Finn with his scarecrow posture if Puck had come with them and he says, “Of course,” but no more. I move through the group, touching elbows and asking after her, thinking all the while that to do so is to shout my feelings about her. No one has seen her.
The race is tomorrow and I’ve done my part for Tommy Falk and I should go back to the yard but I feel hollow, knowing that Puck’s here somewhere and I haven’t found her. I need to find her, and the needing disquiets me.
For a long moment I stand on the rocks, imagining where she would be, and then I climb back up the cliff path. The ground is dark but here, closer to the sky, the evening air is still dark and red. Elsewhere on Thisby it must be night, but here, we still have a whisper of the evening sun, far away across the western sea. I find her there at the top of the cliff, facing the horizon. Her knees are pulled up to her chin and her arms wrapped around them. She looks like she has grown from the rocks and dirt around her. Though she hears my footsteps, her eyes keep searching the sea.
I draw myself up next to her and look at her profile, making no effort to disguise my attention, here, where there is only Puck to see me. The evening sun loves her throat and her cheekbones. Her hair the color of cliff grass rises and falls over her face in the breeze. Her expression is less ferocious than usual, less guarded.
I say, “Are you afraid?”
Her eyes are far away on the horizon line, out to the west where the sun has gone but the glow remains. Somewhere out there are my capaill uisce, George Holly’s America, every gallon of water that every ship rides on.
Puck doesn’t look away from the orange glow at the end of the world. “Tell me what it’s like. The race.”
What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both and there’s nothing like it. Once upon a time, this moment — this last light of evening the day before the race — was the best moment of the year for me. The anticipation of the game to come. But that was when all I had to lose was my life.
“There’s no one braver than you on that beach.”
Her voice is dismissive. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It does. I meant what I said at the festival. This island cares nothing for love but it favors the brave.”
Now she looks at me. She’s fierce and red, indestructible and changeable, everything that makes Thisby what it is. She asks, “Do you feel brave?”
The mare goddess had told me to make another wish. It feels thin as a thread to me now, that gift of a wish. I remember the years when it felt like a promise. “I don’t know what I feel, Puck.”
Puck unfolds her arms just enough to keep her balance as she leans to me, and when we kiss, she closes her eyes.
She draws back and looks into my face. I have not moved, and she barely has, but the world feels strange beneath me.
“Tell me what to wish for,” I say. “Tell me what to ask the sea for.”
“To be happy. Happiness.”
I close my eyes. My mind is full of Corr, of the ocean, of Puck Connolly’s lips on mine. “I don’t think such a thing is had on Thisby. And if it is, I don’t know how you would keep it.”
The breeze blows across my closed eyelids, scented with brine and rain and winter. I can hear the ocean rocking against the island, a constant lullaby.
Puck’s voice is in my ear; her breath warms my neck inside my jacket collar. “You whisper to it. What it needs to hear. Isn’t that what you said?”
I tilt my head so that her mouth is on my skin. The kiss is cold where the wind blows across my cheek. Her forehead rests against my hair.
I open my eyes, and the sun has gone. I feel as if the ocean is inside me, wild and uncertain. “That’s what I said. What do I need to hear?”
Puck whispers, “That tomorrow we’ll rule the Scorpio Races as king and queen of Skarmouth and I’ll save the house and you’ll have your stallion. Dove will eat golden oats for the rest of her days and you will terrorize the races each year and people will come from every island in the world to find out how it is you get horses to listen to you. The piebald will carry Mutt Malvern into the sea and Gabriel will decide to stay on the island. I will have a farm and you will bring me bread for dinner.”
I say, “That is what I needed to hear.”
“Do you know what to wish for now?”
I swallow. I have no wishing-shell to throw into the sea when I say it, but I know that the ocean hears me nonetheless. “To get what I need.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
PUCK
It used to be that before Dad went onto the boat, the house would be alive with movement. Even if he left early in the morning or late at night to follow the shoals and the tides, Mum would be up baking things for him to take with him and Gabe would be sitting in his room making certain he packed his razor and Finn and I would be clutching his legs or climbing into his bag or getting into Mum’s flour. The day that they both went out together, it was me baking for them and Gabe watching what Mum packed and Finn sulking, unhappy that they were leaving.
Now, the morning of the Scorpio Races, I feel like I’m the one going out on the boat. Finn’s anxiously checking my pack and Gabe’s polishing my boots and I’m tugging my hair into a ponytail and thinking, Is this really it? We can afford to be inefficient; the morning is dominated by the shorter, less serious races, and so I won’t have to be out there with Dove until the early afternoon. At one point, I reach into the biscuit tin, meaning to get some money just in case I need to buy something for Dove. My fingers touch the cool, bare bottom of the jar. We’ve finally used it all.
As if I needed the reminder of why I was racing. Nerves creep along the back of my neck.
When I finally head out, Finn says that he will bring me lunch — not that I can imagine ever eating, as my guts are a bed of snakes, which makes for poor digestion — and Gabe follows me out of the house.
