What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both and there’s nothing like it. Once upon a time, this moment — this last light of evening the day before the race — was the best moment of the year for me. The anticipation of the game to come. But that was when all I had to lose was my life.
“There’s no one braver than you on that beach.”
Her voice is dismissive. “That doesn’t matter.”
“It does. I meant what I said at the festival. This island cares nothing for love but it favors the brave.”
Now she looks at me. She’s fierce and red, indestructible and changeable, everything that makes Thisby what it is. She asks, “Do you feel brave?”
The mare goddess had told me to make another wish. It feels thin as a thread to me now, that gift of a wish. I remember the years when it felt like a promise. “I don’t know what I feel, Puck.”
Puck unfolds her arms just enough to keep her balance as she leans to me, and when we kiss, she closes her eyes.
She draws back and looks into my face. I have not moved, and she barely has, but the world feels strange beneath me.
“Tell me what to wish for,” I say. “Tell me what to ask the sea for.”
“To be happy. Happiness.”
I close my eyes. My mind is full of Corr, of the ocean, of Puck Connolly’s lips on mine. “I don’t think such a thing is had on Thisby. And if it is, I don’t know how you would keep it.”
The breeze blows across my closed eyelids, scented with brine and rain and winter. I can hear the ocean rocking against the island, a constant lullaby.
Puck’s voice is in my ear; her breath warms my neck inside my jacket collar. “You whisper to it. What it needs to hear. Isn’t that what you said?”
I tilt my head so that her mouth is on my skin. The kiss is cold where the wind blows across my cheek. Her forehead rests against my hair.
I open my eyes, and the sun has gone. I feel as if the ocean is inside me, wild and uncertain. “That’s what I said. What do I need to hear?”
Puck whispers, “That tomorrow we’ll rule the Scorpio Races as king and queen of Skarmouth and I’ll save the house and you’ll have your stallion. Dove will eat golden oats for the rest of her days and you will terrorize the races each year and people will come from every island in the world to find out how it is you get horses to listen to you. The piebald will carry Mutt Malvern into the sea and Gabriel will decide to stay on the island. I will have a farm and you will bring me bread for dinner.”
I say, “That is what I needed to hear.”
“Do you know what to wish for now?”
I swallow. I have no wishing-shell to throw into the sea when I say it, but I know that the ocean hears me nonetheless. “To get what I need.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
PUCK
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.”