The Scorpio Races

by Maggie Stiefvater

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

Thisby is an island well populated by sons disappointing their fathers.

I can feel in my bones that it’s true. So this is why I feel restless. This is why Corr paces before his stall door and why I can’t sleep.

I am here on firm ground, but part of me is already down on the beach, and my own blood is singing I’m so, so alive.

My father told me they were completely harmless. I don’t believe him. Nothing is completely harmless.

He controls the horse like a fishing boat controls the sea.

I pull some of my hair out of my ponytail, across my forehead, trying to look like someone other than the girl I grew up being.

“Salt,” Finn says, “makes cocoa sweeter.”

“You will not be the one to drown me.”

Dad once said people’s brains are hard of hearing.

But he’s got one foot on the land and one foot in the sea.

There are moments that you’ll remember for the rest of your life and there are moments that you think you’ll remember for the rest of your life, and it’s not often they turn out to be the same moments.

What I want is this: a roof over my head that is my own, accounts at Gratton’s and Hammond’s in my name, and, most of all, I want Corr.

Corr watches me. The mares watch the ocean. I watch the girl.

“That is not where you’re headed. I think the race is dangerous enough without that, don’t you? This way.”

“Sean Kendrick. Corr. By my blood.”

“This island runs on courage, not blood,”

“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.”

“What are you doing?” I ask. “Looking for God,” Holly says, matching my stride. “If you say he’s out here, I’ll take a gander.”

“The sky and the sand and the sea and Corr.”

“That’s a poor match, Sean Kendrick,”

“You swallow her with your eyes. I’m surprised there’s any of her left for the rest of us to see.”

“Forty-five to one.”

“You two are a strange pair. You are a pair, aren’t you?” “We’re in training.”

He is slow, and the sea sings to us both, but he returns to me.