The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [41]
Fundamental keeps swimming. I was there when he was born, just a collection of knobby joints and massive eyes. He doesn’t look at me as he swims. Behind the boat, swimming is his sole purpose. He has enough capall uisce blood in him to lend him a single-mindedness. I have to watch him as closely as Daly watches the entrance to the cove. Fundamental would swim until he sank.
Tomorrow, Malvern will want me to assign Mutt a horse. Every year on the third day, he asks me to decide, and every year I’m afraid he will ask me to put Mutt on Corr.
I cannot bear the thought of it.
Fundamental shakes his head, as if to unstick his wet mane from his neck. I lean to make certain that he’s not tiring. Exercising in the water is lower impact than on land, but I don’t want him exhausted; I was told buyers are coming to look at him tomorrow.
I feel disquieted. I’m not certain why. If it’s because of the girl, interrupting the routine I’ve followed for years. Or if it’s because of Mutt’s piss in my boots. Or if it’s because, as we make our way back across the cove, the water level against the cliffs appears slightly wrong to me. Too high, perhaps. The sky is bright and populated with fluffy clouds; if there’s to be a storm, it’s days away.
But I cannot settle.
“Kendrick! Kendrick!”
My name, a shout made thin by the boat motor.
I have seconds to see it:
Daly is standing on the small crescent beach by the boat slip, far from the cove’s entrance. I don’t have time to think about why he’s moved. The shout is his.
There’s a silhouette at the point of the cove where Daly had been. Mutt Malvern. Just watching me. No — watching a point in the water just before me.
A slight drop in the water only thirty feet from us.
I know that dip, that unnatural crevice into the sea. It looks like nothing, but it’s what happens to the salt water when there’s a massive body traveling very fast just under the surface.
There’s no time to make it to shore.
Fundamental kicks his hind legs, his head thrown back.
Then he goes under.
Mutt Malvern stands motionless at the point of the cove.
I dive into the water.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SEAN
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.
Fundamental’s spine writhes. I feel a strange sucking sensation beneath me as one of his legs cuts through the water under my feet, the current dragging at me. I feel forward along his mane. My lungs feel pressed small in my chest.
I can’t see, and then I can.
Fundamental’s eye is wide open, white all around it, but he can’t see me. A slick, dark capall uisce holds Fundamental’s throatlatch in its jaws. Blood floats from a ragged tear like steam. The uisce horse’s legs slice through the salt water, smooth and purposeful. It spares no attention for me. The capall uisce has the colt in a steel grasp and I, a small, vulnerable stranger in this world, am no threat.
I need a breath. I need more than a breath. I need a long gasp and another one and another one. But in front of me I see the capall’s nostrils, long and thin. The berries are hard and deadly in my hand. I could watch it drown.
But next to their two heads, I see the edge of Fundamental’s wound. The colt’s great, brave heart pumps his life out in time with my hammering pulse.
There’s no saving him from this.
I watched him being born. Fundamental, rare colt, so close to the water horses that he loves the ocean like I do.
Colors without any name flicker at the corner of my vision.
I have to leave him behind.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PUCK
Finn and I both wait up for Gabe that night. I boil beans — infernal beans, it feels like that’s all we eat — and simmer inside my skin, planning what I will say to him when he gets here. Finn messes over the windows while