“Where is Dory?” I shout.
“Gambling,” snarls Elizabeth. “Of course. While I do the work.”
I’m not certain how guiding me to the top of the cliff counts as work, but I’m grateful for it. I’m also not certain I can imagine Dory Maud betting on the horses. Certainly not in any way that justified Elizabeth’s snarled of course. I do my best to imagine Dory Maud in the butcher’s, placing a bet, but the best I can imagine is her in the Black-Eyed Girl. In my imaginings, she manages it better than I do, swaggering up to the bar like a man.
Elizabeth snaps at me to wake up and propels me with great confidence through the crowd at the cliff top. Only after several long minutes does she stop to catch her bearings. But I can see now that we’re in the right place. Because I spot a point of stillness in the seething crowd: Sean Kendrick. His clothing is dark, his expression darker, and he looks off into the black night in the direction of the sea. He is unmistakably waiting.
“There,” I say.
“No,” says Elizabeth, following my gaze. “That is not where you’re headed. I think the race is dangerous enough without that, don’t you? This way.”
Sean turns his head just as Elizabeth jerks me in the opposite direction, and our eyes meet. There’s something sharp and unprotected in his expression, and then I have to look down to keep Elizabeth from hauling me off my feet.
Finn scoots up beside me, hands shoved in his pockets against the cold. He casts a doleful look toward Elizabeth.
I turn my head and whisper to him, “You’d think this is the race by the speed she’s going.”
Finn doesn’t smile, but his eyes do. Then Elizabeth comes to a halt. “Here,” she says.
We’ve come around to a third bonfire, and before it is a great, flat rock, splattered and streaked with brown. It takes me a moment to understand what I’m seeing. It’s old, old blood, stained all over the rock. Finn’s face is pinched. There’s a huge crowd of people circling the rock, waiting as Sean was waiting, and already I recognize a few of the riders a short distance away: Dr. Halsal, Tommy Falk, Mutt Malvern. Ian Privett. Some of them are talking and laughing with each other — they’ve done this before, and there’s a sense of familiarity. I feel suddenly ill.
“What’s the blood from?” I whisper to Elizabeth.
“Puppies,” Elizabeth says. She’s caught Ian Privett looking at her and she bares her teeth at him in something that I don’t think is supposed to be a smile. Taking me by both my upper arms, she holds me in front of her like a shield. “It’s the riders’. You’ll go up and put a drop of your blood on there to show you’re riding.”
I stare at the rock. That’s a lot of blood for just a drop from each rider over the years.
Now a man’s climbed onto the rock. I recognize him as Frank Eaton, a farmer my father knew. He’s wearing one of the weird traditional scarf-things that the tourists like to buy — it wraps over his shoulder and pins at his hip and looks utterly ridiculous with his corduroy trousers. I have a very strong association of sweat-smell with the traditional costume and he doesn’t look like he will change that impression. Holding a small bowl in his hands, Eaton shouts to the crowd, which is a little quieter now, “It falls to me to speak for the man who will not ride.”
Eaton tips the bowl and blood splashes down over the rock at his feet. He doesn’t stand back, and so drops of it mist his pants. I don’t think he minds.
“Rider without a name,” he says. “Horse without a name. By his blood.”
“Sheep’s,” Elizabeth says. “Or maybe horse. I don’t remember.”
“That’s barbaric!” I’m aghast. Finn looks like he may throw up.
Elizabeth shrugs just one shoulder. Ian Privett watches her do it. “Fifty years ago, it was a man they killed up there, just like every year before. The man who will not ride.”
“Why?” I demand.
Her voice is bored; there’s a real answer, possibly, but she’s not interested in knowing it. “Because men like to kill things. Good thing they stopped. We’d run out of men.”
“Because,” cuts in a voice that I recognize instantly, “if you feed the island blood before the race, maybe she won’t take as much during it.”
Elizabeth turns to Peg Gratton with a sour look. I blink at Peg — she’s barely recognizable under her elaborate headdress. It looks a little like one of the scary tufted puffins that you can sometimes find on the island: It has a great pointed visor that forms the beak, and ropy yellow tassels that come off over each ear like long horns. I search for signs of Peg’s curly hair, but it’s hidden securely under the fabric lining of the headdress.
“Don’t expect them to be friendly to you, Puck,” Peg Gratton tells me, as if Elizabeth’s not there. “A lot of them consider a girl on the beach bad luck. They won’t be happy to see you.”
I press my lips together. “I don’t need them to be friendly. Just need them to let me go about my business.”
“That would be a kindness,” Peg says. She turns her head, and it’s a strange, jerky motion with the bird head on top of hers. If I wasn’t unsettled by anything that I saw tonight, that motion would’ve done it. She says, “I have to go.”
On the rock, a woman wearing a real horse head stands over the place where the man poured the blood. Her tunic is soaked in blood; her hands run with it. She faces the crowd, but with that massive head, it doesn’t seem like she’s looking at us but at some point in the sky. I feel swimmy and feverish from the heat of the bonfire, from the sight of the blood. I’m dreaming, but I’m not.
There’s murmuring from the people assembled. I can’t pick out individual words, but Elizabeth says, “They’re saying no one got the shell. She didn’t drop a shell this year.”
“The shell?”
“For the wish,” Elizabeth says in her impatient way. “She drops a shell and you get a wish. Probably she dropped it down in Skarmouth and they were too dull to find it.”
“Who is it?” Finn asks Elizabeth, the first thing he’s said in a long while. “In the horse head?”
“The mother of all horses. Epona. Soul of Thisby and those cliffs.”
Finn, patient, clarifies, “I meant, who is the woman?”
“Someone with more up front to look at than you,” Elizabeth replies. Finn’s eyes instantly go to the horse-woman’s br**sts, and Elizabeth laughs, high and wild. I scowl in defense of Finn’s virtue, and she gives me a healthy shove. “They’re calling for the riders.”