The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [65]
I’m once again a boy and I’m watching her hand open, releasing pebbles and sand. The island, the beach, life stretches before me.
The mare goddess seizes my chin with her hand. The shale eye stares at me. The hair around it is matted with age, too long since death.
“Sean Kendrick,” she says, and the voice is throaty, barely human. I hear the sea in it. “Did you get your wish?”
I cannot look away. “Yes. Many times over.”
The shale glints and blinks.
The voice again takes me by surprise. “Has it brought you happiness?”
The question is not one that I would normally consider. I’m not unhappy. Happiness isn’t something this island yields easily; the ground is too rocky and the sun too sparse for it to flourish. “Well enough.”
Her fingers are tight, tight, tight on my jaw. I smell blood and I see, now, that fresh blood, soaked into the shirt, has dripped onto her hands.
“The ocean knows your name, Sean Kendrick,” she says. “Make another wish.”
She reaches up and smears the back of her hand across both of my cheekbones.
Then the mare goddess turns away to follow the drummers, just a woman in a dead horse’s head. But there is something hollow inside me, and for the first time, winning doesn’t feel like enough.
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 pin myself to the ground with the memory of my ordinary errand at Gratton’s. I need to settle up the account, and I need to place another order for the water horses. But my mind keeps turning over the woman in the horse head, trying to decide whose hands they could’ve been. If I can place her, I can fill the void inside me. It becomes only a parlor game again, then, if I know whose voice it was, made gritty inside the dead skull. I think it may have been Peg Gratton, no stranger to blood on her hands, and no taller than me, even with the horse head on.
I push into the butcher’s. As always, it’s the cleanest place in Skarmouth, and it’s lit to a bright, daylight white inside. Two birds have somehow gotten into the building, and as I press my way in, the lights seem to flicker and dim as their wings flash in front of the bulbs.
I don’t see Peg Gratton behind the counter, so it could have been her in the horse costume. I feel lighter. Less called.
I stand at the counter and Beech Gratton sullenly takes my order. It’s not me he resents, but the job, keeping him in when he wants out to the festival.
“Your face is a ruin.” Beech grunts with admiration, and I remember the woman smearing my face with blood. “You look like the devil.”
I don’t reply.
“I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes,” he tells me, though I didn’t ask.
“Thirty! “ calls Peg Gratton from the back.
I taste blood in my mouth. An eye made of shale blinks at me.
Beech jots down my order, and as he does, I look up at the board behind the counter. There is my name, and Corr’s, and beside us are our current odds: 1–5. Below us are also the names of a score of new entrants from the mainland who have found mounts in the first few days of training. They’ll crowd the beach bad as the first day of training, inept and over-brave. I scan down the list to find Kate Connolly; I see her pony’s name first, and then her name. Her odds are 45–1. I wonder how much of that is because of her pony and how much is because of her gender.
I let my eyes trail down the list to find Mutt’s name on the list. There it is, and his horse’s beside it. By all rights, the name written beside his should have been Edana, the horse that he has not touched for two