Sean deftly slices off each of the red ribbons, casting them angrily behind him with a tinny jangle. I start as the stallion moves. Now that his hooves are free of the bells, he picks up and puts down his legs, trotting without moving. Sean exhales sharply; he’s trying to unfasten the breastplate and Corr’s moving too much. I’m not sure how handling a killer capall uisce is any different from handling Dove, so I just react the same way. I pop the reins down smartly and the stallion jerks his head up. I think he’s trembling less, but it’s hard to tell without the bells singing to tell me. I try not to think about how it’s Prince’s blood still wetting my palm. I try to remember what I’ve seen Sean doing with the horses.
Shhhh, shhhhh, I say to the stallion, like the ocean, and his ears instantly prick toward me, his tail hanging motionless for the first time. I’m not entirely sure I like his attention, even blindfolded.
Sean looks at me over Corr’s withers, his expression odd — approving? — for just a moment. Then he throws the iron breastplate behind him into the sand by the bells.
“I’ll take him now.”
“What about that man? Prince?” I ask, not releasing the reins until I’m sure that Sean has them.
“He’s dead.”
I glance over. Now that Sean and I have calmed Corr, someone from the crowd has pulled Prince to safety. But they’ve put a jacket over his face. I shudder in the wind. “He died!” I know it’s stupid to say it, but I can’t not say it.
“He was dead before. He knew it, didn’t you see it in his eyes? My jacket.”
“Your jacket?” I say, with enough force that my shaky voice makes Corr start. “How about ‘my jacket, please.’”
Sean Kendrick looks at me, perplexed, and I can see that he hasn’t a clue of why I’m upset with him. Why I’m upset at all. I can’t stop shaking, as if I’ve taken all of Corr’s trembling and made it my own.
“That’s what I said,” he says after a pause.
“No, it’s not”
“What did I say?”
“You said my jacket.”
Sean looks a little bewildered now. “That’s what I said I said.”
I make an angry noise and go to get his jacket. If there was any chance that the tide wouldn’t take it before he got back down here, I’d have left it. All I can think about is that that man is dead, the man who was just holding my hand, and the more I think about it, the angrier I get, although I can’t think of who to blame except this capall uisce that I just agreed to hold. And somehow that makes me feel like I’m complicit, and that makes me angrier still.
His jacket is absolutely filthy, caked with dried sand and blood and stiff with salt water on top of it all. It’s like a piece of canvas sail. I was going to just drape it over Sean’s bare arm, but without his shirt to soften it, it would chafe.
“I’ll bring it to you,” I tell him. “I’ll wash it with my horse blanket. Where do I bring it?”
“The Malvern Yard,” he says. “For now.”
I look back to Prince. There he is, stretched out, and someone’s gone to get Dr. Halsal to declare him well and truly dead. The men chat quietly next to his body, as if lowered voices show their respect. But I can catch snatches of their conversation and they’re talking about race odds.
“Thanks,” Sean says.
“What?” But I’ve already realized what he’s said, my brain catching up to real time. He sees the realization in my face and nods, shortly. Pulling Corr’s head down, Sean whispers to him, and then he puts his hand to the red stallion’s side. The stallion starts as if Sean’s palm is fiery. But he doesn’t lash out, and Sean leads him away from the beach and back toward the cliffs. He stops only once, an arm’s length from Mutt. From here, he looks wiry and pale without his shirt on, just a boy with a blood-red horse.
“Mr. Malvern,” he says, “would you like to take your horse back to the yard?”
Mutt just stares at him.
As Sean leads Corr away from the beach, I crumple and uncrumple his jacket in my hands. I can’t quite make myself believe the truth of it. That ten minutes ago I held a dead man’s hand. That days from now I will put myself on a beach with a few dozen capaill uisce. That I told Sean Kendrick I’d clean his jacket for him.
“Bit of a bollocks.”
I turn. It’s Daly.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“Bollocks,” Daly says again, that helpless swearing that comes from needing something better to say but not having it on hand. “The whole island is.”
I don’t reply. I don’t have anything to say. I hold Sean’s jacket tightly to still my shaking hands.
“I want to go home,” Daly tells me, voice miserable. “No game’s worth this.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SEAN
Benjamin Malvern wants to meet at the hotel in Skarmouth. That’s a game itself, somehow, because these days the Skarmouth Hotel will churn with people, every room filled with tourists for the races. While the butcher’s is a local hub for betting and news, a place where the riders know to come for talk, the hotel is where the mainlanders compare notes and talk about the day’s training, scratch their heads, and wonder if this mare or that stallion will calm down enough to be a contender in the race. For me to stand in the hotel lobby where Malvern arranged for us to meet is for me to be gobbled up.
So I step into the hotel, out of the cold, but I slide through the lobby as quickly as I can and find a stairwell to wait in. It looks like it leads upward to only a few of the guest rooms, so the odds of being bothered are slight. I rub my arms — it’s drafty — and peer upward through the stairs. The hotel is the grandest building on the island, everything about it designed to make someone from the mainland feel at home. So the architecture inside is painted columns and civilized wooden arches, cornices and polished wood. A Persian rug cushions my feet. On the wall adjacent to me is a painting of a thoroughbred posing in a bridle, standing before a halcyon landscape. Everything about the hotel says that those who stay here are gentlemen and scholars, cultured and safe.
I steal a glance into the lobby, looking for Malvern. Knots of race tourists stand in twos and threes, smoking and discussing the training. The room is full of their foreign, broad accents. From a room off the lobby, a piano plays. The minutes move sluggishly. It’s a strange neverland, right now, between the festival and the races. The most die-hard of race enthusiasts arrive for the Scorpio Festival, but Skarmouth isn’t large enough to entertain them long. There’s nothing for them to do until the races but watch us live and die down on the sand.