The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [70]
I said it wrong. I came up out of turn. I did something wrong. I can’t think of what it would be, but I feel uncertainty chewing on my guts.
Eaton says, “She can’t ride.”
My heart falls out of me. Dove! It must be Dove. I should’ve gotten the piebald mare when I had the chance.
“No woman’s ridden in the races since they began,” he says. “And this isn’t going to be the year when that changes.”
I stare at Eaton and the men around him. Something about the way they stand together is familiar, comradely. Like a herd of ponies bunched up against the wind. Or sheep, staring warily out at the collie that means to move them. I’m the outsider. The woman.
Of all the things that could stand between me and the races, I can’t believe that this will be it.
My face flushes. I’m aware that hundreds of people are watching me stand on this rock. But I find my voice anyway. “It didn’t say anything about that in the rules. I read them. Every single one.”
Eaton looks to the man next to him, who licks his lips before saying, “There are rules on paper and rules too big for paper.”
It takes me a moment to realize what this means, which is that there really is no rule against it, but they’re not going to let me ride anyway. This is like when Gabe and I would play games when we were younger — as soon as I got close to winning, he would change the rules on me.
And just like back then, the unfairness of it makes my chest burn.
I say, “Then why have rules on paper at all?”
“Some things are too obvious to have to write down,” says the man next to Eaton, who is wearing a very tidy three-piece suit with a scarf in place of the jacket. I can see the neat triangle of the vest, dark gray against white, more clearly than his face.
“Come down now,” Eaton says.
There is a third man at the base of the rock where I just climbed up, and he holds his hand up in my direction, as if I am going to just take it and go back down.
I don’t move. “It’s not obvious to me.”
Eaton frowns for half a moment, and then he explains, slowly putting the words together as the explanation comes to him, “The women are the island, and the island keeps us. That’s important. But the men are what drive the island into the seabed and keep it from floating out to sea. You can’t have a woman on the beach. It reverses the natural order.”
“So you want to disqualify me because of superstition,” I say. “You think ships will run aground because I ride in the races?”
“Ah, that’s putting too fine a point on it.”
“So it’s just me. You think it’s wrong to have me in the races.”
Eaton’s face reminds me of Gabe’s, down at the pub, as he looks to the crowd with an incredulous expression, certain they, too, see how difficult I’m being. The longer I look at him, the more I find to dislike. Does his wife not find his larger lower lip horrifying? Can he not part his hair so it doesn’t reveal such a lot of scalp? Does he have to work his chin like that between words? He tells me, “Don’t take it personally, now. It’s not like that.”
“It’s personal to me.”
Now they’re annoyed. They thought I would just come down at the first whisper of the word no, and now that I haven’t, I’m less of a story for later and more of a fight for now. Eaton says, “There are other things you could do in the month of October that will please more people than just you, Kate Connolly. You don’t have to ride in the races.”
I think about Benjamin Malvern sitting at our kitchen table, asking what we’re willing to do to save the house. I think about how if I step off this rock right now, Gabe will have no reason to stay, at all, and no matter how angry I am with him, I can’t have that conversation be our last. I think about how it felt to race Sean Kendrick on his unpredictable capall uisce.
“I have my own reasons for riding,” I snap. “Just