Maggie Stiefvater: The Scorpio Races

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.

“Puck,” he says. “Don’t do this.”

He leans over the fence and watches me toss Dove’s girth over the back of her saddle. He looks a lot like Dad now, in this light, since he hasn’t been sleeping and he’s got the lines under his eyes. He’s starting to look a little like one of the fishermen, with the crinkled corners of their eyes.

“I think it’s a little late for that.” I look over Dove’s back at him. “Tell me how else I get to save the house, and I’ll stay home.”

“Would it be so bad, to leave this house?”

“I like it. It reminds me of Mum and Dad. And it’s not even about the house. You know the first thing to go if we don’t have it? Dove. I can’t -” I stop and busy myself rubbing a smudge off the saddle.

“She’s just a horse,” Gabe says. “Don’t look at me like that. I know you love her. But you can live without her. You can get jobs here and I’ll send money back and it’ll be okay.”

I bury my fingers in Dove’s mane. “No, it won’t be okay. I don’t want to just get a job and work and be okay. I want Dove and I want to have space to breathe and I don’t want Finn to work at the mill. I don’t want to live in a closet in Skarmouth, with Finn in a separate little closet in Skarmouth, getting old.”

“Then next year I’ll have made enough that you can come to the mainland, too. There are better jobs there.”

“I don’t want to come to the mainland. I don’t want a better job. Don’t you get it? I’m happy here. Not everyone wants to leave, Gabe! This is where I want to be. If I could have Dove and my space and a sack of beans, I’d call that enough.”

Gabriel looks at his feet and works his mouth, the way he used to when he and Dad would get into it and he didn’t like the corners he was being pushed into. “And that’s worth dying for?”

“Yeah. I think it is.”

He works a loose splinter on the top of a board. “You didn’t even think about it.”

“I don’t have to. How about this? I won’t race, and you’ll stay here.” But as I say it, I know that he’ll say no, and that I’d race anyway.

“Puck,” Gabe says, “I can’t.”

“Well,” I reply, pushing the gate open and leading Dove out past him, “there you go.”

But I don’t feel angry about it. There’s the old sting, but no surprise. It feels like I’ve known all along, ever since I was little, that he was going to leave, and I’d just been ignoring it. I think Gabe knew, too, when he started this conversation, that there was no way that he’d keep me and Dove off the beach. It was just something we both had to say. As I pass by, Gabe snags my arm. Dove amiably stops as he pulls me into a hug. He doesn’t say anything. It is like any number of hugs he’d given me growing up, when the six years of difference between us was a canyon, me a child on one side, him an adult.

“I’ll miss you,” I say into his sweater. For once it doesn’t smell of fish; it smells of the hay that he moved for me the night before and the smoke from the funeral pyre.

“I’m sorry I made such a hash of things,” he says. “I should’ve trusted you both more.”

I wish that he’d said it before, before he was sad and scared. But I’ll take it now.

Gabe lets me go. “I’ll go find where they’re handing out the race colors.” He looks at me. “You look just like Mum right now.”

It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.

I hear a tap on my cracked door and it pushes open.

“How is Skarmouth’s prize hero on the morning of the races?”

I open my eyes and turn my head to where George Holly stands in my doorway. He glances around at the furnishings of my small flat; there’s nothing but a bed and a sink and a tiny stove shoved under the slanted ceiling, everything turned lavender in the weak morning light.

I give a nod that’s both a greeting and a gesture for him to enter.

“This is grim,” he says. “You look grim as well.” After a pause, he pulls a crate of tins out from next to the sink and sits on it, his legs folded up. He rests his red flat cap across his knees and strokes it like an animal.

“I cannot settle,” I say. I close my eyes. “I can’t go into his stall like this or Corr will feel this on me and I might as well not step foot on the beach at all.”

“Is this about the races?” Holly asks. “Are you afraid of them?”

“I’ve never been afraid,” I reply without opening my eyes.

Holly says, “Is this because you race for Corr this time? What is it you really want, Sean?”

I press my hand to my face, searching somewhere inside myself for the quiet that must be there. For the certainty I wear every year before every race. Every morning before I get onto any horse.

“Is it the freedom? Don’t bother with the race. Come back to the States with me, and I’ll make you partner in my stables. Not head groom. Not head trainer. Come and go as you please.” When I still don’t speak, Holly says, “Now, there, you see? So you were lying to me when you told me it was the freedom you wanted. We’ve discovered it’s not about the freedom at all. I call that progress.”

I turn my face away. Downstairs, I hear the commotion of the yard on race day, and me not among it.

“So it’s about that red stallion, then, you say? You will lose the race and lose him in one swift stroke of Malvern justice? But you’ve won four years out of six, haven’t you, and aren’t those good odds? So I think it’s not about that, either.”

I open my eyes. Holly shifts his weight under my gaze; the crate creaks beneath him.

“Twice I’ve lost to Ian Privett on Penda. The third year he fell and lost Penda and this year he has him again. Blackwell has Margot -”

“- she’s a fast bitch -” notes Holly, my words in his mouth.

“- and there is that piebald. I don’t know her. I think we should all be afraid of her. I think I could lose it all.”

Holly scratches his neck and looks at the shadows beneath my narrow bed. “This ‘it all’ seems to be the heart of it to me.

When you say ‘it all,’ do you by any chance mean Kate Connolly? Ah, I see that you do.”