The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater [93]
I regard her darkly. Again, it’s not something I thought I’d have to do as a rider in the races. “I’ll think about it. What’s that commotion anyway, do you know?”
Dory Maud looks enviously down at the road to the beach. “Oh, it’s Sean Kendrick.”
Interest prickles in me. “What about Sean Kendrick?”
“They’re taking his red stallion down there. Mutt Malvern and some of the other boys.”
“With Sean?”
Dory Maud looks wistful then that she’s trapped in the booth instead of down seeing the action. “I didn’t see him. Talk’s going around that he won’t be in the races. That he and Benjamin Malvern fought over the stallion and he quit. Kendrick, I mean.”
“Quit!”
“Are you deaf?” Dory Maud rings the bells right by my ear. She calls out to someone just behind me. “November bells! Best price on the island!” Sometimes she reminds me a lot of her sister Elizabeth, and not in a favorable way. Then she says to me, “It’s all talk, isn’t it? They say Kendrick wanted to buy the stallion and Malvern said no, so he quit.”
I think of Sean folded low over the red stallion, riding bareback at the top of the cliffs. Of the easy way they had with each other when I met him to look at the uisce mare. I think, even, of the way Sean looked when he stood on the bloody festival rock and said his name, and then Corr’s, like it was just fact, one after the other. Of the way he said “the sky and the sand and the sea and Corr” to me. And I feel a bite of unfairness, because in everything but name, it seems to me that Sean Kendrick already owns Corr.
“So what are they doing with him?”
“How should I know? I just saw them parading past and Mutt Malvern looking like it’s his birthday.”
Now my sense of injustice is truly ringing. I abruptly change my plans from going to the cliff to watch from above to going down the cliff path to find out what’s happening on the beach.
“I’m going down there.”
“Don’t talk to Malvern’s son,” Dory Maud warns.
I’m already heading away, but I glance back over my shoulder. “Why not?”
“Because he might talk back!”
I hurry down the cliff path past the rest of the tents; as the path descends steeply, the vendors can no longer get their tables to sit evenly so it grows more quiet. And there, down below, is the red stallion, surrounded by four men. I recognize the square form of Mutt Malvern, and the man holding the lead — David Prince, because he used to work Hammond’s farm near us — but none of the others. There’s a loose circle of people gathered around them as well, watching and laughing and shouting. Mutt shouts something back to them. Corr lifts his head, jerking the arm of the man who holds him, and calls to the sea, high and pure.
Mutt laughs. “Having some problems holding him, Prince?”
“I’ll hold him!” shouts someone from the gathered group, and there’s more laughter.
I imagine Dove taken from me in this way, and anger churns in my stomach.
I know that Sean must be here, somewhere. It takes me a moment to spot him, but by now I know how: look for the place with no movement, for the person who’s just a little part away from the rest. Sure enough, there he is, standing with his back to the cliff, an arm across his stomach, his other elbow resting on it. His knuckles push tightly against his lips, but his face is expressionless. There’s something terrible about the way he stands there, watching. He’s not so much still as frozen.
Farther down the beach, Corr keens again, and Mutt loops a scarlet ribbon tied with bells around Corr’s pastern, just above his hoof. At the sound of them, the red stallion flinches, as if the bells are physically painful, and I find myself unexpectedly blinking away tears.
Sean Kendrick turns his face away.
There’s something so wretched in that that I can’t just leave him there by himself. I elbow my way through the tourists and the locals who are watching this spectacle. My heart thuds in my chest. I think of Sean telling me: Keep your pony off this beach. It’s possible I