The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [51]
I get a little pit of nerves in my stomach thinking about it.
“Yes, are you?” Dory Maud’s voice carries into the room. She stands in the doorway, one of her eyebrows arched. She’s wearing a dress that looks like she stole it. It has lace sleeves and Dory Maud does not have lace sleeve arms.
I frown at her with bad temper. “You aren’t going to try to talk me out of it, are you?”
“The parade, or the race?” Dory Maud pulls out the third chair at the table and sits down. “What I don’t understand,” she says, “is why such a clever and useful girl as yourself, Puck, would waste so much time looking like an idiot or being dead?”
Finn smiles at his biscuit.
“I have my reasons,” I snap. “And don’t tell me that my parents would be so sad about it, either. I’ve already heard it. I’ve heard it all.”
“Has she been this short all week?” Dory Maud asks Finn, who nods. To me, she adds, “Your father would be displeased, but your mother — she wouldn’t have much room to talk. She was a hellion and the only thing she didn’t do on this island was ride in the races.”
“Really?” I ask, hopeful for more information.
“Probably,” Dory Maud replies. “Finn, why are you eating that? It looks like cat food.”
“Brought it from home.” Finn sighs heavily. “At Palsson’s, they were setting out cinnamon twists.”
“Oh yes.” Dory Maud begins scratching something on a piece of paper. Her handwriting is so utterly illegible that I have to believe she works at it. “Even the angels could smell them.”
Finn’s expression is wistful.
I feel guilty about the load of hay and grain I just bought. I’m not sure it’s a better investment than cinnamon twists would’ve been.
“Could I get an advance on some teapots, Dory Maud?” I ask. I push a signed and numbered one toward her so she is convinced of my dutifulness. “Horse food’s expensive.”
“I’m not a bank. If you help me set up the festival booth Friday afternoon, I’ll do it.”
“Thanks,” I say, without feeling much gratitude.
After a moment, Finn says, “I don’t know why you aren’t just riding Dove.”
“Finn.”
“Well, that’s what you said.”
“I’d like to have a chance of winning money,” I say. “I thought it might actually help to ride, you know, a water horse in a race for, you know, water horses.”
“Mmm,” remarks Dory Maud.
“Exactly,” Finn says. “How do you know they’re faster?”
“Oh, please.”
“Well, you are the one who told me that they don’t always go in straight lines. I just don’t see why you’re changing your mind now just because some expert told you.”
I feel my cheeks warm again. “He’s not some expert. And he didn’t tell me anything. I’m just looking.”
Finn presses his thumb into his pile of crumbs, hard, so that the tip turns white. “You said that you weren’t riding one of them on principle. Because of Mum and Dad.”
His voice is even because Dory Maud is there and because he’s Finn, but I can tell he’s agitated.
I say, “Well, principle won’t pay the bills.”
“It’s not much of a principle when you can just change it like — like that. Overnight. Like —” But he must not be able to think of what else it’s like, because he stands up and storms past Dory Maud’s chair and out of the room.
I blink after him. “What? What?”
I think brothers are the most inexplicable species on the planet.
Dory Maud brushes invisible crumbs from her paper and studies what she’s written. “Boys,” she says, “just aren’t very good at being afraid.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SEAN
That evening, I saddle up a filly named Malvern Small Miracle, so called because she was so motionless and quiet when she was born that everyone thought she was stillborn.
I’m worn and tired. Something’s wrong with my right arm where one of the horses jammed it earlier today, and I want nothing more than to crawl into my bed to consider whether or not my meeting tomorrow with Kate Connolly is a poor idea. But there are two buyers here, just off the boat, and word’s come that I need to show two of the three-year-olds to them while there’s still light. Why it won’t hold until tomorrow, I don’t know.
When I walk out into the