The Scorpio Races

by Maggie Stiefvater

Even under the brightest sun, the frigid autumn sea is all the colors of the night: dark blue and black and brown. I watch the ever-changing patterns in the sand as it’s pummeled by countless hooves.

the horses on the beach, a pale road between the black water and the chalk cliffs. It is never safe, but it’s never so dangerous as today, race day.

I find myself facing the sea, surrounded on all sides by the capaill uisce — the water horses. They are every color of the pebbles on the beach: black, red, golden, white, ivory, gray, blue.

These are not ordinary horses. Drape them with charms, hide them from the sea, but today, on the beach: Do not turn your back.

Some of the horses have lathered. Froth drips down their lips and chests, looking like sea foam, hiding the teeth that will tear into men later. They are beautiful and deadly, loving us and hating us.

see words burned into the leather: Our dead drink the sea. My heart is jerking in my chest as I hand the cloth to my father.

“Sean!” my father snaps, and the capall’s head jerks up quickly enough that his skull nearly strikes mine. “What are you doing with your face next to his today? Does he not look hungry to you? Do you think you’d look fine with half a face?”

She is my mare and my best friend, and I keep waiting for something bad to happen to her, because I love her too much.

There’s been no blood to speak of for the capaill uisce, as if by treating them as regular horses the grooms hope to make them so. So I am here because I have to do things myself if I want them done properly. But I just say, “I hadn’t heard.”

it doesn’t matter who heard or who saw what, only that the capaill uisce are climbing out of the sea.

three children of a fisherman, orphaned twice over by the capaill uisce. There are plenty of single mothers to be had on the island, their men gone missing in the night, stolen away by either a savage water horse or by the temptation of the mainland.

“No one better than him for knowing the horses. He rides every year and I reckon he’s the one to beat. Always is. But he’s got one foot on the land and one foot in the sea. You steer clear of him.” “Of course I will,” I say,

I give the water horses their meat, though I think they’re too wound up to eat it. And all the while, I imagine that this massive stable is mine, that these horses I care for are in my name, that the buyers who try them

And the most impressive painting of all covers the wall at the end of the main stable. In it, there is the sea, and a man — a forgotten ocean god, perhaps — dragging a horse down into it. The water is the color of blood and the horse is red as the sea. It’s an old animal, this stable, the oldest on the island.

One of the capaill uisce makes a clucking sound and another one replies. Even though I know the horses, the sound instinctively makes the hairs on my arms rise. Every other horse in the stable has gone silent and watchful at the noise.

This first week of training is an elaborate, bloody dance where the dance partners determine how strong the other ones are. It’s when riders learn if charms will work on their mounts, how close to the sea is too close, how they can begin to convince their water horses to gallop in a straight line. How long they have between falling from their horses and being attacked. This tense courtship looks nothing like racing.

I am struck first not by the fact that she is a girl, but by the fact that she’s in the ocean. It’s the dreaded second day, the day when people start to die, and no one will get close to the surf. But there she is, trotting up to the knee in the water. Fearless.

Corr watches me. The mares watch the ocean. I watch the girl. My thoughts turn the mystery of her presence over and over as I flip open my leather bag and remove the wax-paper bundle I put in there earlier. I toss the bits of meat into the circle, but the mares don’t touch them. They’re watching the pony and the girl in the ocean, a more interesting meal.

There is a knot of fighting horses in front of us, growling and pawing like tomcats. Bells ring sharply. Every water horse on this beach is hungry for the sea, hungry for the chase.

“She’s entered in the races,” Gorry says. He’s smoking, and he gestures toward the girl in the surf with his cigarette. “On that pony. That’s what they’re saying.”

“I can’t sell this mare — thanks for that,” Gorry says. “Your expert opinion, heh.” I don’t know what to tell him. When you traffic in monsters, that’s the risk you run, that you’ll find one too monstrous to stomach.

My eyes flick beyond all of them to the water to where Blackwell’s stallion half leaps, half swims, the water frothing white beneath him. His eyes are on that dun island pony and the girl on her back.

The girl jerks the dun mare off balance, sparing them both from the hooves but delivering the girl into the frigid water. And that was what the capall uisce, a fearful dull Pegasus with disintegrating wings of sea foam, wanted. His teeth flash, the color of dead coral, and his great head smashes against the girl as her head comes up above water. Teeth clamp on to her hooded sweater; legs kick in preparation for his dive. I am already in the water, my fingers numb with the cold, and I swim to him through this perilous water, my progress agonizingly slow. The girl keeps going below water and clawing her way back up.

I’m not swimming through water. I’m swimming through blood. It billows around me in great underwater thunderheads as one of my hands finds Fundamental’s spine. In my other hand I have a fistful of the holly berries. I’ve gone years without using them to kill one of the water horses, and now I have them in my palm twice in one day.

I feel cold to my bones, as if I’ve swallowed the sea and it lives inside me. My arms ache. I’m holding up the cliffs.

Instantly the red stallion’s ears turn to me. His eyes are black and mysterious, pieces of the ocean. He is more dangerous every day. We are more dangerous every day.

I know that Dove and I are vulnerable on this dark beach. There could be a water horse in the surf right now. My heart’s a low throb in my ears. Shhhhhh, shhhhhh, says the sea, but I don’t believe her. I

The room is long and narrow and low-ceilinged; it feels like a pleasant coffin or a suffocating church.

tea, I’m not sure I would recognize it. “I’ll wait,” I say. She hesitates. Her eyes flicker to me and away again, like a horse uncertain about an unfamiliar object. “May I take your coat?”

“The bay mare without white,” I say, without pause. I haven’t named her because she has yet to earn a name. She’s flighty and sea-wild; she is not fast because she takes no pleasure in what the rider wants.

Neatness makes me feel like I have to be on my best behavior. Clutter is my natural habitat.

I’d caught her in a rainstorm, salt water making all of my leather straps too slick to hold, clouds turning the sky into sea and vice versa, the cold making my fingers imprecise. She came up in a net behind the boat as I dredged the breakers just off the shore. Local lore had it that a capall uisce caught in the rain wanted to stay wet, but I wouldn’t believe it until I’d tried it for myself.

She wants that cliff edge. The ocean is thick in the wind and she cannot think for it. I shuffle my iron out of my pocket, trace it along her veins, but — nothing.

I can’t get the mare goddess out of my head: the timbre of her voice, the imagined feel of her breath on my skin. My throat burns as if I’ve swallowed seawater. I swim now through the crowd, from my encounter with the mare goddess and back into the real world.

“I believe in the same thing they believe in,” I say, with a jerk of my chin toward town and St. Columba’s. “I just don’t believe you can find it in a building.”

It takes everything in me not to whimper. The creature is black as peat at midnight, and its lips are pulled back into a fearsome grin. The ears are long and wickedly pointed toward each other, less like a horse and more like a demon. They remind me of shark egg pouches. The nostrils are long and thin to keep the sea out. Eyes black and slick: a fish’s eyes. It still stinks like the ocean. Like low tide and things caught on rocks. It’s barely a horse. It’s hungry.

“It’s easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don’t understand. Something that makes them feel strong or clever. It’s why they love the ocean.”

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.

I’d always thought I was above being fascinated by anyone but myself.