The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [92]
I whisper to the sea three times. Once I ask that Corr will be meek and good, so they’ll have no reason to use the bells and magic that he so despises.
But twice I whisper for him to be despicable, so that they’ll beg for me to come back.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
PUCK
The island’s mad.
Because I rode Dove back from Hastoway the evening before, I give her the morning off and tell her to eat some expensive hay. I give her a bit of the grain, too — not too much, because she’ll just get ill on it — and leave her behind to go watch the training and take notes. I don’t have any more November cakes and we weren’t home to bake anything, so I have to settle for a pocketful of stale biscuits.
It doesn’t take me long to realize that Thisby has completely changed now that the festival is done and the storm has passed. Aside from the stray shingles and branches, it looks as if the wind brought people and tents. The road from Skarmouth clear on to the cliffs is lined with tents and tables of every sort. Where I’d helped Dory Maud set up her booth is now a city of booths, all populated by locals trying to seduce tourists with their stuff. Some of them are the vendors who Brian Carroll and I saw while making our way through the festival. But some of them are new: the booth selling riders’ colors, the hasty and incredibly tacky paintings of the race favorites, the mats to sit on to watch the race from the cliffs without getting your backside wet.
I feel, suddenly and alarmingly, like the races are very close. All at once I realize that it’s only days before I will walk Dove down to the beach, and I feel completely unprepared. I don’t know anything about this. Nothing at all.
I’m resurrected from my funk by Joseph Beringer, who dances around behind me singing some poorly rhymed and slightly dirty song about my odds and my skirts.
“I don’t even wear skirts,” I snap at him.
“Especially,” he says, “in my daydreams.”
I had thought, for some reason, that being one of the riders in the Scorpio Races would get me a bit more respect, but it’s ever surprising, the things that don’t change.
I ignore him, which helps a little, if only because it feels familiar, and thread through the people toward Dory Maud’s booth, avoiding puddles and Joseph as best as I can. I can hear the commotion from the beach already, even among all the people poking in the booths. There’s something about the sound that seems unlike the normal noise of the training, and I’m not sure if it’s just because everyone is down on the beach at once as the races draw close.
“Puck!” Dory Maud spots me before I spot her. She is festively dressed in a traditional scarf and rubber boots, a combination that is at once ridiculous and, unfortunately, extremely representative of Thisby. “Puck!” she says again, this time shaking a string of November bells at me — an action that attracts the attention of at least two others near me. She carefully lays the bells down on the table in front of her so that the price tag is showing.
“Hi,” I say. There’s a great shout from the direction of the beach, which I find oddly unsettling.
“Where’s your horse?” Dory Maud asks. “Or do you mean to practice out there without her?”
“I rode her back from Hastoway yesterday evening. She’s taking a break and I’m going to watch from the cliffs.”
Dory Maud eyes me.
“It’s strategy,” I add crossly. “I’m devising strategy. Not all of racing is riding, you know.”
“I know nothing about it,” Dory replies. “Except that Ian Privett’s horse likes to come on strong from the outside at the very end, if it’s anything like the last year he rode him.”
I remember what Elizabeth said before about Dory Maud gambling on the horses. Mum once told Dad that vices were only vices when looked at through the frame of society. I see a possible ally in Dory’s vice. “What else do you know?”
Dory Maud reaches up to better secure a bit of the flapping canvas tent, and then she