Maggie Stiefvater: The Scorpio Races

Below me, the water creeps between the boulders as the tide comes in. My palm is bleeding.

I hear a sound, like a kitten mewling, or a baby screaming, and I freeze. There are no kittens or babies here on the beach; there is only me and the horses. Brian Carroll has told me that when he is out at sea at night, he can sometimes hear the horses calling to each other under the water, and it sounds like whale song, or a widow wailing, or something chuckling.

I look down to the water in the deepest cleft of the rocks below me; it has risen fast. How long have I been standing here? The boulders in front of me are already nothing but shiny humps of rock barely above the black water. I am empty-handed, but I am also out of time – I need to turn back and pick my way across the seaweed-slimed rocks while I still can.

I look at my hand; a thick trickle of blood has welled in my palm and down between the two bones of my arm. It gathers, swells, drips soundlessly into the water. My palm will hurt later. I look at the water where my blood disappears. I am silent. The cave is silent.

I turn around and there is a horse.

It is close enough to smell the briny odor of it, close enough to feel the warmth off its still-wet skin, close enough to look into its eye and see its dilated square pupil. I smell blood on its breath.

And then they wake me.

It is Brian and Jonathan Carroll, and their faces both spell concern. Brian’s face wears the traditional brand: furrowed eyebrows, lips puckered. Jonathan’s comes out as an apologetic smile that changes shape every few seconds. Brian is my age and I know him from the piers; we both deal with the water for our living and so we have history together, though we are not friends. Jonathan is his brother, trailing Brian in every way, including brains.

“Kendrick,” says Brian. “You up?”

I am now. I lie there in my bunk like I am tied to it and say nothing.

Jonathan adds, “Sorry to wake you, mate.”

“You’re the man,” Brian says. Though I’m feeling no kinship for him now in the middle of the night, I don’t mind Brian. He says what he means. “There’s nothing else for it; Mutt’s in a world of trouble. He had a mind to wait up for one of the capaill to come out of the water and now he’s gotten what he asked for and I don’t think he likes it.”

“It’s going to kill them,” Jonathan says. He looks pleased to have been able to state something so obvious before Brian could.

“Them?” I echo. It’s cold and I’m wide awake.

“Mutt and a bunch of his mates,” Brian says. “They’re all in it, and they’ve got the capall sort of caught, but they can’t let it go and they can’t bring it in.”

Now I’m sitting. I don’t have any love in the world for Mutt – also known as Matthew Malvern, the bastard son of my boss – or any of the grooms who scurry in submissive friendship behind him, but they can’t leave a horse tangled up on the beach in whatever fool trap they’ve devised.

“You’re the one for the horses, Kendrick,” Brian says. “I reckon someone’s going to get killed unless we fetch you back there.”

Back there. Now I understand their expressions; they were part of this and they know that I’ll think less of them for it.

I don’t say anything else. Just get out of bed, pulling on my old sweater and snatching up my grease-black-blue coat with all my things in its pockets. I jerk my chin toward the door, and they scurry before me like sandpipers, Jonathan wrenching the door open so that Brian can lead the way out of the stable.

Outside, the wind is a live, starving thing. The sky over Skarmouth is a dull brown, lit by the streetlights, but everywhere else is inky. There is a bit of a moon, so it will be brighter by the ocean, but not much. We strike out across the fields, taking the straightest path to the beach. There’s nothing out here but rocks and sheep, but it’s easy enough to fall over either of them.

“Torch,” I say, and Brian flicks on a flashlight and offers it to me. I shake my head. I’ll need my hands free. Behind us, Jonathan jogs and trips keeping up with our pace, making a beam of light arc crazily as his flashlight-hand jerks. I’m reminded of my mother pretending to write words on the wall with a flashlight when the storm knocked out our power.

“How far up the beach?” I ask. The tide will be coming in in a few hours, and if they are around the point, a new capall uisce will be the least of their problems.

“Not far,” pants Brian. He is not unfit, but strenuous activity tends to wind him. If not for their expressions earlier, I would’ve stopped to let him catch his breath.

I can just see where the hills split and cleft for the path down to the sand – the land is a darker black against the sky – and then I hear a scream. The wind carries it to us, high and thin and ragged, and it is impossible to say whether it is human or animal. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle in a warning I ignore as I break into a run.

Brian does not follow my lead – I don’t think he can – and I sense that Jonathan is torn between staying with Brian and accompanying me.

“I need the torch, Jonathan!” I shout back over my shoulder. The wind throws my words behind me and though Jonathan replies, I can’t hear him. I pelt out of the dim circle of his flashlight and into the darkness, stumbling and slipping down the steep descent to the beach. For a brief moment I think I can’t go forward any more because I cannot see, but then I step a few feet on and glimpse a knot of wildly moving flashlights down on the sand. Beyond them, I see the water dimly illuminated by the scant light of the moon.

The wind is sucking the sound away from me, so as I approach the scene, it seems as if the men are voiceless. The struggle is almost artful, until you get up to it. It’s four men, and they’ve snagged a gray water horse around its neck and by the pastern on one of its hind legs, right above the hoof. They tug and they jump back as the horse lunges and retreats, but they are in a bad place and they know it. They have the tiger by its tail and have just realized the tail is long enough for the claws to reach them.

“Kendrick!” shouts someone. I cannot tell who it is. “Where’s Brian?”

“Sean Kendrick?” shouts someone else, and this, I know, is Mutt, holding the line that leads to the horse’s neck. I can tell by the shape of his silhouette, the broad shoulders and thick neck that is both neck and chin. “Who asked for that bastard to come? Go back to sleep, knacker – I’ve got this under control!”

He controls the horse like a fishing boat controls the sea. I see now that the other line is held by Padgett, an older man who should know better than to trust Mutt with his life. Next to me, I hear a soft sound in a moment between gusts of wind; I glance over and there is another of Mutt’s friends sitting against the rock wall where the cliffs meet the beach. He is curled around his own arms, and one of them he holds gingerly. It looks broken. The sound I heard was his whimper.

“Get out of this, Kendrick!” Mutt calls.

I cross my arms over my chest and wait. The horse has stopped struggling for the moment. Against the light chalk of the cliffs, I can see the trembling dark lines leading to the capall uisce. The horse is tiring, but so are the others. Mutt’s muscled arms mimic the shaking of the lines. The other men creep around, laying loops of rope on the beach, hoping the horse will step into one. It would be easy, for someone who didn’t know the water horses, to think that the capall uisce, standing there with its sides heaving, is defeated. But I see its head drawn back, predatory, raptor-like rather than equine, and know that things are about to get ugly.