Maggie Stiefvater: The Scorpio Races

I canter on, urging Dove into a gallop once we’re off the walk and back onto the grass. Here, the ground is soft and sandy, and begins to slope rapidly, the track becoming narrow between the hills and dunes that lead to the beach. I can’t tell if Finn is ahead of me or behind me. I have to draw Dove back down to a trot as the ground grows too steep. Finally, she makes the awkward leap that takes us down to sea level. When we round the final bank, I make a noise of irritation: The Morris is already parked where the grass meets the sand. The scent of exhaust hangs in the air, cupped by the rise of the ground around us.

“You’re still a good girl,” I whisper to Dove. She is out of breath but she blows out her lips. She considers it a good race.

Finn stands half in and half out of the car, the driver-side door standing open, his feet on the running board. One arm rests on the roof and the other on the upper part of the open door. He is looking out toward the sea, but when Dove blows out her breath through her lips again, he looks back to me, shielding his eyes. I can see that his face is worried, so I nudge Dove next to the car. I let out the reins so that she can graze while we stand there, but she doesn’t lower her head. Instead, she, too, turns her gaze toward the ocean, a hundred yards ahead of us.

“What?” I ask. I have a sick feeling in my stomach.

I follow the line of his eyes. I can just see a gray head thrusting its way above the surf, so far away and so close to the color of the tossed ocean that I can almost believe I’m imagining it. But Finn’s eyes wouldn’t be so large unless he was certain. Sure enough, the head emerges again, and this time I see dark nostrils blow so wide that I glimpse a tinge of red in them, even from here. Then the rest of the head follows, and the neck, crimped mane pasted to its skin by salt water, and then the powerful shoulders, glistening and damp. The water horse surges from the ocean and gives a mighty leap, as if the final steps over the incoming tide are a huge obstacle to overcome.

Finn flinches as the horse gallops down the beach toward us, and I lay a hand on his elbow, though my own heart is thumping in my ears.

“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Don’t-move-don’t-move-don’t-move.”

I cling to what we’ve been told over and over – that the water horses love a moving target; they love the chase. I make a list of reasons it won’t attack us: We’re motionless, we’re not near the water, we’re next to the Morris, and the water horses despise iron.

Sure enough, the water horse gallops past us without pause. I can see Finn swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny neck, and it’s so true, it’s so hard not to flinch until it’s leapt back into the ocean once more.

They’re here again.

This is what happens every fall. My parents didn’t follow the races, but I know the shape of the story nonetheless. The closer it gets to November, the more horses the sea spits out. Those islanders who mean to race in future Scorpio Races will often go out in great hunting parties to capture the fresh capaill uisce, which is always dangerous, since the horses are hungry and still sea-mad. And once the new horses emerge, it’s a signal to those who are racing in the current year’s races to begin training the horses they caught the years before – horses that have been comparatively docile until the smell of the fall sea begins to call to the magic inside them.

During the month of October, until the first of November, the island becomes a map of safe areas and unsafe areas, because unless you’re one of the riders, you don’t want to be around when a capall uisce goes crazy. Our parents tried hard to shield us from the realities of the uisce horses, but it was impossible to avoid it. Friends would miss school because an uisce horse had killed their dog overnight. Dad would have to drive around a ruined carcass on the way to Skarmouth, evidence of where a water horse and a land horse had gotten into a fight. The bells at St. Columba’s would ring midday for the funeral of a fisherman caught unawares on the shore.

Finn and I don’t need to be told how dangerous the horses are. We know. We know it every day.

“Come on,” I say to him. Staring out to sea, his thin arms bracing him upright, he looks very young, just then, my little brother, though he’s really caught in that strange no-man’s-land between child and man. I feel the sudden urge to protect him from the grief that October is going to bring. But it isn’t really the grief of this October I have to worry about; it’s that of an October already long gone.

Finn doesn’t answer, just ducks back down into the Morris and shuts the door without looking at me. It’s already a bad day. And that’s before Gabe gets home.

Beech Gratton, the butcher’s son, has just slaughtered a cow and is draining the blood into a bucket for me when I hear the news. We are standing in the yard behind the butcher’s, the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us. The day is beautiful and cool, and I’m restless, shifting from foot to foot. The stones beneath me are uneven, pushed up by roots from trees no longer in evidence, and stained, too, brown and black, in dots and splatters and rivulets.

“Beech, did you hear yet? The horses are out,” Thomas Gratton addresses his son, emerging from the open door of his shop. He had started into the courtyard but pauses mid-stride when he sees me. “Sean Kendrick. I didn’t realize you were here.”

I don’t say anything, and Beech grunts, “Came by when he heard I was slaughtering.” He gestures to the cow’s corpse, which now hangs, decapitated and legless, from a tripod of wood. The ground’s awash with blood from where Beech was slow to place the bucket beneath the cow. The cow’s head lies off to the edge of the yard, tumbled onto its side. Thomas Gratton’s mouth works as if he’d like to say something to Beech about the scene, but he doesn’t. Thisby is an island well populated by sons disappointing their fathers.

“Did you hear, then, Kendrick?” Thomas Gratton asks. “Is that why you’re here and not on a horse?”

I am here because the new men that Malvern has hired to feed the horses are afraid at best and incompetent at worst, and the hay has been poor and the cuts of meat even worse. There’s been no blood to speak of for the capaill uisce, as if by treating them as regular horses the grooms hope to make them so. So I am here because I have to do things myself if I want them done properly. But I just say, “I hadn’t heard.”

Beech slaps the dead cow affably on the neck and tips the bucket this way and that. He doesn’t look at his father. “Who did you hear from?”

I don’t really care about the answer to his question; it doesn’t matter who heard or who saw what, only that the capaill uisce are climbing out of the sea. I can feel in my bones that it’s true. So this is why I feel restless. This is why Corr paces before his stall door and why I can’t sleep.

“The Connolly kids saw one,” Thomas Gratton says.

Beech makes a noise and slaps the cow again, more for emphasis than for any practical purpose. The Connollys’ story is one of the more pitiful ones Thisby has on offer: three children of a fisherman, orphaned twice over by the capaill uisce. There are plenty of single mothers to be had on the island, their men gone missing in the night, stolen away by either a savage water horse or by the temptation of the mainland. Plenty of single fathers, too, wives snatched from the shore by suddenly present teeth or seized by tourists with large wallets. But to lose both parents in one blow – that’s unusual. My story – father cold in the ground, mother lost to the mainland – is common enough to have been forgotten long ago, which is fine by me. There are better things to be known for.