Maggie Stiefvater: The Scorpio Races

It wasn’t that we were unfriendly with the rest of the island. We were just friendlier with ourselves. Being a Connolly came first. That was the only rule. You could hurt all the feelings you liked, so long as you weren’t hurting the feelings of a Connolly.

It’s midway through October now. Like all autumn days on the island, it begins cold but warms and gains color as the sun rises. I get a currycomb and a brush and I knock the dust out of Dove’s dun hide until my fingers warm up. By the time I saddle her up, she’s clean and I’m grubby. She is my mare and my best friend, and I keep waiting for something bad to happen to her, because I love her too much.

As I pull up her girth, Dove pushes her nose into my side, just shy of a nip, and pulls her head back quickly; she loves me, too. I can’t ride long; soon I’ll have to come back and help Finn make cookies for the local shops. I also paint teapots for the tourists, and since the races are coming up, I have more than enough orders backed up. After the races, there’ll be no more visitors from the mainland until spring. The ocean is just too uncertain a thing when it’s cold. Gabe will be out all day, working at the Skarmouth Hotel, getting the rooms ready for the race spectators. When you’re an orphan on Thisby, it’s hard work making ends meet.

I didn’t actually realize there wasn’t much to the island until a few years ago, when I started reading magazines. It doesn’t feel it to me, but Thisby’s tiny: four thousand people on a rocky crag jutting from the sea, hours from the mainland. It’s all cliffs and horses and sheep and one-track roads winding past treeless fields to Skarmouth, the largest town on the island. The truth is, until you know any different, the island is enough.

Actually, I know different. And it’s still enough.

So I am up and riding, my toes cold in my scruffy paddock boots, and Finn is sitting in the Morris in the drive, carefully applying black tape to a rip in the passenger seat. The rip was a gift from Puffin, the barn cat. At least Finn has now learned to never leave the windows rolled down. He’s pretending to look annoyed with the repairs, but I can tell that he is actually cheerful to be doing it. It is against Finn’s code to reveal too much happiness.

When he sees me riding Dove, Finn gives me a funny look. Once upon a time, before last year, that funny look would’ve changed into a sly smile and then he would’ve gunned the engine and we would’ve raced, me on Dove, him in the car, though he was technically too young to drive. A lot too young. It didn’t matter, though. Who was going to stop us? So we would race, me through fields, him on the roads. First to the beach had to make the other’s bed for a week.

But we haven’t raced for nearly a year. Not since my parents died on the boat.

I turn Dove away, making little circles in the side yard. She’s eager and too brisk to concentrate this morning, and I’m too cold to make her soft and round on the bit. She wants to gallop.

I hear the Morris’s engine rev. I turn in time to see the car go tearing down the lane, accompanied by a puff of ill-advised exhaust. I hear Finn’s whoop a moment later. He pokes his head out the window, face pale under his dusty hair, smiling a grin that shows every tooth he has.

“Are you waiting for an invitation?” he calls. Then he retreats back into the cab and the engine revs high as he shifts gears.

“Oh, you’re on,” I tell him, though he is far, far out of earshot. Dove’s ears swivel back toward me and then prick toward the road, quivering. It is a wild, cool morning, and she barely needs to be asked. I press my calves into her sides and cluck my tongue.

Dove leaps into action, hooves digging up half circles of dirt behind her, and we tear after Finn.

Finn’s path is no mystery; he has to follow the roads, and there’s only the main one, heading into Skarmouth past our house. It’s not the straightest way, though. It winds around patchwork fields protected by stone walls and hedges. There’s no sense following his serpentine progress, marked by a trail of dust. Instead, Dove and I tear across the fields. Dove is not large – none of the natural island horses are, as the grass isn’t great – but she’s scopey and brave. So she and I throw ourselves over hedgerows at will, so long as the footing’s good.

We shave off the first corner, spooking several sheep. “Sorry,” I say to them over my shoulder. The next hedgerow comes up while I’m minding the sheep, and Dove has to twist herself in a hurry to launch herself over. I throw out reins in the world’s worst release but at least keep from jerking on her mouth, and she tucks her legs up tight beneath her and saves us both. As she canters away from the hedge, I gather up the reins again and pat her shoulder to show that I noticed her rescuing us, and she tips her ear back to show she appreciates that I cared.

Then it’s sailing across a field that used to hold sheep but now holds scrubby heather waiting to be burned off. The Morris is still a little ahead of us, a dark shape in front of a tower of dust. I’m not worried about his lead; to get a car down to the beach, he’ll have to either take the road through town, with its sharp right angles and crossing pedestrians, or make a detour around the town, losing several minutes and giving us a good chance to catch up.

I hear the Morris hesitate at the roundabout and then zoom toward town. I can take the road around Skarmouth and avoid any more jumping – or I can skirt through the very edge of the town, popping through a few back gardens and risking being seen by Gabe at the hotel.

I can already imagine being the first to charge onto the beach.

I decide to risk Gabe seeing me. It’s been long enough since we did this that the stodgy old ladies can’t complain too much about a horse passing through their yards, as long as I don’t squash anything useful.

“Come on, Dove,” I whisper. She charges across the road and through a break in a hedgerow. Here there are houses looking like they grew out of the rock, and cluttered back gardens full of possessions that have spilled out of the houses, and on the other side of them, a stretch of solid stone that no horse should have to canter on. The only way across is to tear through a half-dozen yards and past the hotel on the other side.

I hope that everyone’s busily at work at the piers or in their kitchens. We burst through the gardens, half leaping over wheelbarrows in the first, avoiding a crop of herbs in the second, and getting barked at by an evil terrier in the third. Then, inexplicably, over an old, empty bathtub in the final yard, and we’re off down the road to the hotel.

Of course, there is Gabe, and he sees me instantly.

He’s sweeping the walk in front of the hotel with a mighty push broom. The hotel is a forbidding, ivy-covered building behind him, the leaves cut in neat squares to let the sun into the windows with their bright blue sills. The height of the hotel blocks the morning light and casts a deeper blue shadow on the stone walk he sweeps. Gabe looks tall and grown-up with his brown jacket stretched across his broad shoulders. His gingerblond hair creeps down the back of his neck, a little long, but he is still handsome. I feel a sudden surge of fierce pride that he is my brother. He stops what he’s doing to lean on the end of the broom and watch me canter by on Dove.

“Don’t be mad!” I shout at him.

A smile walks over one side of his face but not the other. It almost looks like he’s actually happy, if you’ve never seen one of his real ones. The sad thing is this – I’ve gotten used to this fake one. I’ve become willing to wait for the real one to reappear, without realizing I should’ve been working hard to find it again.