The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [127]
The funeral party gathers by the pyre to watch as he walks her to the water’s edge. It’s only then that I notice that Sean’s feet are bare. The surf rushes around his ankles, soaking the bottom few inches of his pants. The mare lifts her hooves high as the water courses in around her pasterns and then she cries out to the sea. There is something not quite horselike about her eyes already. When she snaps at Sean, he simply ducks out of the way and twists his fingers in her forelock, pulling her head down. I see his mouth moving, but it’s impossible to hear what he tells her.
Beside me, Tommy’s father says, “From the sea, to the sea,” and I realize that the words match the movement of Sean’s mouth.
I wonder then at how many times this moment’s taken place. Not with Sean saying the words, but with anyone. It’s like the moment at the bloody stone when I declared Dove as my mount. I feel the pull of my legs to Thisby, the invisible presences of a thousand rituals weights around my ankles.
Sean looks to the group and calls, “The ashes.”
Another boy — another sibling, maybe, this one looks a little like Tommy — hurries across the sand toward Sean. The light is failing quickly, so I can’t see what he’s carrying the ashes in — they must have just been taken from the pyre. Sean holds a hand over the vessel as if testing the temperature, and then he cautiously reaches in. The mare tosses her head and calls out again, and Sean hurls the handful of ashes into the air above her. Sean’s voice is a wind-torn, weightless thing across the sand, but Norman Falk says the words along with him: “May the ocean keep our brave.”
With his back to us, Sean tugs the halter from the mare’s head. She kicks out, but he steps out of the way as if it were nothing at all. With a shake of her mane, she leaps mightily into the water. For a moment she struggles over the waves, and then she is swimming. Just a wild black horse in a deep blue sea full of the ashes of other dead boys.
Then, so sudden and swift that I miss the moment of her disappearing, she’s gone, and there’s only the swaying of the ocean surface.
Sean stands at the edge of the surf, looking out at the sea, and there is something curious and longing in his expression, like he, too, wishes to leap into the ocean and be gone. I think, just then, that this is why Norman Falk asked for Sean to be there. Not because he was the only one who could perform the ritual. But because Sean Kendrick, looking like that, is the races, even if no race was ever run. A reminder of what the horses mean to the island — a bridge between what we are and that thing about Thisby that we all want but can’t seem to touch. When Sean stands there, his face turned out to the sea, he is no more civilized than any of the capaill uisce, and it unsettles me.
My heart feels full and empty with all of the beginnings and endings. Tomorrow is the races with all of their strategy and danger and hope and fear, and on the other side of it is Gabe getting into a boat and leaving us. I feel like Sean looking out over the ocean. I’m so full of an unnamed wanting that I can’t bear it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
SEAN
After I release Tommy Falk’s mare, I am drawn into the funeral party. By the light of the fire, everyone’s face is a secret until you are right upon them. I search one and then the other; I see Gabriel Connolly and Finn Connolly but not Puck.
I ask Finn with his scarecrow posture if Puck had come with them and he says, “Of course,” but no more. I move through the group, touching elbows and asking after her, thinking all the while that to do so is to shout my feelings about her. No one has seen her.
The race is tomorrow and I’ve done my part for Tommy Falk and I should go back to the yard but I feel hollow, knowing that Puck’s here somewhere and I haven’t found her. I need to find