The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [91]
Peg plucks a piece of straw out of Dove’s mane. “It’s easy to convince men to love you, Puck. All you have to do is be a mountain they have to climb or a poem they don’t understand. Something that makes them feel strong or clever. It’s why they love the ocean.”
I’m not sure that is why Sean Kendrick loves the ocean.
Peg continues, “When you’re too much like them, the mystery’s gone. No point seeking the grail if it looks like your teacup.”
“I’m not trying to be sought.”
She purses her lips. “All I’m saying is that you’re asking them to treat you like a man. And I’m not sure either of you want that.”
There’s something discomfiting about what she says, though I’m not sure if it’s because I disagree or agree with it. I think of Ake Palsson backing his horse away from me and the combination of her words and the memory sit uneasily in my chest.
“I just want to be left alone,” I say.
“Like I said,” Peg replies. “You’re asking to be treated like a man.”
She makes a step out of her fingers laced together to help me up. Then she pats Dove’s rump so that Dove’ll move to follow Tommy’s car as it leaves. I turn around as we go. Peg’s still standing there watching us, but she doesn’t wave.
My spirits slowly lift as we put distance between us and the Grattons’ white house. After so much time cooped up, the air feels clean and well washed. The island itself looks like our kitchen — too much stuff, not enough tidying. There’s bits of wooden fence thrown far away from fence lines, shingles and roof tiles resting in hedgerows, branches from faraway trees abandoned in the middle of fields. Sheep wander freely across the road, which isn’t so unusual, but I spot some glossy mares grazing outside of their fence as well. The watery evening light is like a cautious smile through tears.
There’s no sign of the capaill uisce that came up out of the storm, and I wonder if they’ve all climbed back into the sea again. For the moment, the island seems so utterly peaceful, unmarked by trouble and horses and weather. I think we’d have entirely different tourists if this were the face Thisby wore all the time.
Only I know this isn’t the real Thisby. The real Thisby starts again at sun-up tomorrow. Just a little over a week to go until the races. I don’t think I’m ready. It’s hard to imagine that our story will end the way I told Finn. Good luck doesn’t seem to be something that holds the hands of the Connollys these days.
But when I get home, Finn’s face is shining and joyful. Behind him in the kitchen is Puffin the barn cat. Her tail is bitten off and ugly, and she’s very indignant and sorry for herself, but she’s also very alive.
This island is a cunning and secretive thing. I can’t say what it has planned for me.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
SEAN
That evening, as the last light is fading, I do as my father used to and strike off across the fields to the beach that faces west. As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there’s something below it, I won’t know it. But that’s part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn’t the ocean that killed my father, in the end.
The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I’m perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. Everything about me is exactly the same as it was five hundred years ago, when Thisby priests would stand in the frigid, dark sea and give themselves over to the island.
I try to make the inside of me as