There’s a long pause before Sean speaks. He says, “Maybe not yet.”
Yet! I don’t think I’ve heard such a fine word before.
I say, “And the whispering. What do you tell him?”
Sean stands at Corr’s shoulder, and for the first time he smiles at me. It’s the smallest of things, and it’s not amusement or humor, so I’m not sure what it means. He’s younger when he has it on, easier to look at, which is maybe why he avoids it. He leans his cheek against Corr’s withers and says, “What he needs to hear.”
One of Corr’s ears flicks back to him; the other stays trained on me. I don’t want to look away from Sean leaning on Corr. There’s something about it — this massive red giant that killed a man and slight, dark Sean Kendrick beside him as if they are friends — that fascinates and terrifies me.
Sean watches me watching him and then says, “Are you afraid of him?”
I don’t want to say yes, because I’m not afraid of him right now when he looks more like a horse and less like a fiend, but I don’t want to say no, either, because yesterday morning, on the beach, I was horrified and terrified. I would just say no anyway, but I feel certain that Sean Kendrick with his lacerating gaze would see right through me to the vagaries behind that no. So instead I reply, “You said you didn’t trust him.”
“I don’t trust the ocean, either; it would kill me as soon as not. It doesn’t mean I’m afraid of it.”
I frown at him. I’m thinking again of that image of Sean crouched tightly on top of the red stallion, galloping bareback on the top of the cliffs. Of Sean, unable to watch Mutt Malvern on Corr’s back. For once, I don’t look away from his narrow gaze. “But you aren’t just unafraid. You love them, don’t you? You love Corr.”
Sean Kendrick flinches as if I’ve startled him. He is quiet so long that I notice the sounds of the yard outside the stable, the calls and whinnies and water running and doors shutting. Then he says, “And you love the island. Tell me how it’s any different.”
As soon as he says it, I know that I can’t counter his argument. Of course, it’s true the island would just as soon see me dead as alive and it’s also true that I love it despite that. Possibly because of it.
“I don’t think I’d like to argue with you,” I say. “I think it would be a very dissatisfying pastime.”
He looks out the window, as if in reply, and he studies that hopeless landscape so intently that I look, too, certain he must have seen something. It’s only because I’ve lived with brothers that I realize, after a moment, that he’s not looking outside but rather inside, wrestling with something inside himself. And there’s nothing for it but to wait.
Finally, he asks, “Do you want to ride him?”
I don’t think I’ve heard him right. I don’t want to say excuse me? because if I did hear him right, it sounds like I don’t want to, and if I’ve heard him wrong, it sounds like I wasn’t paying attention.
He adds, “I’ll ride with you.”
My mind is a jumble of thoughts. That I watched this horse rip a man’s throat out only a day ago. That he’s the fastest horse on the island. That I’ll dishonor my parents’ death. That I’m afraid that I’ll love it. That I’m afraid I’ll be afraid. That I want Sean Kendrick to think well of me. That I need to be able to live with myself at night when I’m lying in bed and thinking about what I’ve done that day.
“On the cliffs,” I say. The tide is high so it would have to be. I imagine the other capall uisce he rode, throwing herself over the edge.
He watches me for a long time. “You can say no.”
But he knows I won’t.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
SEAN
When I was eight, the October wind brought a storm that twisted the sea around Thisby. Days before the rain came, the clouds hugged the horizon and the ocean crawled high up on the rocks, hungry for the warmth of our homes. My mother cried and covered her eyes when the shingles of the roof chattered like teeth. I heard her tears against the windows even before the skies clouded. This was before spring came, before the next October came, before the tide took her to the mainland and gave my father Corr instead.
In the dark, my father opened the door and led me out of the cottage and into the briny night. The moon was round and full and brave above us. The beach my father led me to was flat and glasslike, the wet sand reflecting the moon. The ocean stretched out and stretched out and stretched out, and my heart hurt to see it.
My father took me to a cleft in the cliff. We had to climb on ever-larger rocks to reach the end, a hollow in the cliff where a long-ago furious sea had thrown a lovely, dead-white conch shell and a man’s leg bone. Here it was dark and the moon couldn’t see us, although we could see the moon. The beach spread down below us.
I don’t remember my father telling me to be quiet, but I was. The moon moved across the sky as the tide slowly crept in. The surf was storm-maddened and frothy.
They came in with the tide. The moon illuminated long lines of froth as the waves gathered and gathered and gathered offshore, and when they finally broke on the sand, the capaill uisce tumbled onto the shore with them. The horses pulled their heads up with effort, trying to break free from the salt water. As they climbed from the ocean, my father gripped my arm with a pale-knuckled hand. “Be still,” he told me.
But I was already still.
The capaill uisce plunged down the sand, skirmishing and bucking, shaking the sea foam out of their manes and the Atlantic from their hooves. They screamed back to the others still in the water, high wails that raised the hair on my arms. They were swift and deadly, savage and beautiful. The horses were giants, at once the ocean and the island, and that was when I loved them.
Now Puck and I walk my stallion out to the cliffs under a deep blue sky. Her expression is fierce and uncompromising, full of the intrepid bravery of a small boat in an uncertain sea. Above us is the same full moon that lit the ocean all those nights ago.
I remember my father’s white-knuckled hand holding my arm. Be still.
She stands beside Corr, looking up at him.
I want her to love him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
PUCK
Out here on the cliffs, the red stallion moves constantly. His nostrils flare to catch the sea wind that lifts my hair from my forehead. When I was younger and I’d ride Dove bareback and bridleless and filthy in her paddock, I’d use the fence or a rock outcropping to scramble onto her back. Today, with Corr, it’s no different, only the outcropping we stand by is taller than the ones I’d need for Dove. Sean maneuvers him into place and says, “That’s as still as he’s going to get.”
My heart is already galloping. I cannot believe that I’m really about to get onto a capall uisce. And not just any capall uisce, but the one whose name is on the top of the board at the butcher’s. The one who has won the Scorpio Races four times. The one who tore out David Prince’s throat yesterday morning. I grab a fistful of his mane and struggle to keep from being tugged off the rock as he dances. Finally, I pull myself on his back, clutching his mane with both hands like a little kid.
Sean says, “I’m going to give you the reins now. I’ll need you to hold him while I get on or you’ll be on your own. Can I trust you to hold him?”
The way he says it makes me realize just how much he’s risking right now, putting me on his horse, giving me the reins.
“Could others hold him?”
His face remains the same. “There are no others. You’re the only one.”
I swallow. “I can hold him.”
Sean drags his foot in a semicircle before Corr and spits in it. Then he quickly loops the reins over Corr’s head and hands them to me. If I had never seen or touched Corr, this would be the moment when I realize just how large he is, how unlike Dove. Through the reins, I can somehow feel how powerful he is. They’re spiderwebs anchoring a ship. He tries my hold and I try him back. I don’t want him to try harder.
Sean settles swiftly behind me, and I’m startled by the sudden closeness of him, my back suddenly warm against his chest, the press of his h*ps against me.
I turn to ask him a question, and he jerks his face away from the proximity to mine. I say, “Oh. Sorry.”
“Are you all right with the reins?” He’s all black and white in this light, his eyes hidden in shadow beneath his eyebrows.
I nod. But Corr won’t go forward; he only backs, shaking his head. When pushed, he lifts his front feet a little off the ground. Not rearing, but warning me. Sean says something that’s lost to the wind.
“What?”
“My circle,” Sean says, right into my ear, his breath warm. I shiver, hard, although the wind is no colder than before. “He won’t want to cross it. Go around.”
As soon as we’re free of the circle, Corr is like a bird in a gale. I can’t tell if he’s walking or trotting, only that we’re moving, and that all directions feel possible. When Corr jerks to the side, I press my legs into his sides to straighten him and Sean’s arms go around me to grab his mane.
I know that Sean only did it to steady himself, not me, but suddenly, I feel more grounded. I turn my face, and again, he moves his head to give me room. But I don’t know what I was going to say.
“What?” His mouth makes the shape of the word although I don’t properly hear it. “Is it —?” He starts to withdraw his arms, and I shake my head. My hair whips across my forehead, and he winces as it lashes him, too. He says something again, and once more, the wind steals his voice.
When Sean sees that I didn’t hear him, he leans forward to my ear again. I can’t think of the last time I was so close to another person. I can feel the rise and fall of his chest when he breathes. His words are warm in my ear: “Are you afraid?”
I don’t know what I am right now, but it’s not afraid.
I shake my head.
Sean takes my ponytail in his hand, his fingers touching my neck, and then he tucks my hair into my collar, out of the reach of the wind. He avoids my gaze. Then he links his arms back around me and pushes his calf into Corr’s side.
Corr springs into the air.
When Dove moves up from a canter to a gallop, sometimes the only way I can tell the difference is because her hooves pound a four-time rhythm instead of a three.
But when Corr moves into a gallop, it’s as if it’s a gait that’s just been invented, something so much faster than all the others that it should be called something else. The wind roars savagely across my ears. There are uneven stones standing watch in the field, but they’re nothing to Corr. He barely lifts his knees and they’re behind us. Each stride feels like it takes us a mile. We’ll run out of island before he runs out of speed.
We’re giants, on his back.
Sean says into my ear, “Ask him for more.”
And when I squeeze my legs around him, Corr bounds forward again, as if we’d been merely straggling before. I can’t believe that any of the horses on the beach are faster than this. I can’t believe there’s a horse in the world faster than this. And this is with two people on him. With only Sean during the race, how can he lose?
We are flying.
Corr’s skin is hot against my legs — clingy, somehow, like when the current pushes your toes deeper into the sand. I feel his pulse in my pulse, his energy in mine, and I know this is the mysterious, terrifying power of the capaill uisce. We all know it, how it seizes you and confuses you and then you are in the water before you know it. But Sean leans forward, hard, against me, in order to reach Corr’s mane, and ties knots in it. Three. Then seven. Then three again. I try to focus on what he’s doing instead of his body pressed against mine, his cheek against my hair.
I lay the rein against Corr’s neck and he gallops to the left, away from the line of the cliffs. Sean is still tightly against me, the fingers of one hand pressing into one of Corr’s veins while the other grips his mane. The magic becomes a dull hum through me. My body warns me of the danger of this capall uisce beneath me, but at the same time it screams that it’s alive, alive, alive.
We wheel back the way we came. I keep waiting for Corr to flag, to show some signs of tiring, but there’s nothing but the pounding of his hooves across the turf, the snort of his breath around the bit, the wind blowing across my ears.
The island spools out beneath the moonlight. We gallop parallel to the cliff edge, and beyond it I see a flock of white birds keeping pace with us. Gulls, perhaps, soaring and gliding on air currents that send them violently upward as they get close to the rocks. This is Thisby, I think. This is the island I love. I suddenly feel I know everything about the island and everything about me all at the same time, only I know that it will go away as soon as we stop.
We are back to where we began, and reluctantly I slow Corr. My heart is crashing in my ears, galloping even though Corr has stopped.
I slide off and step a few feet away, turning to watch Sean dismount as well. He reaches into his pocket and gets a handful of salt or sand from it, then drops it in a circle around Corr and spits in it while I watch. Once this is done, he walks over to me, dark and silent. He’s looking at me like he looked at me at the festival, and I know I’m looking back. Something wild and old spins inside me, but I don’t have any words.
Sean reaches out between us and takes my wrist. He presses his thumb on my pulse. My heartbeat trips and surges against his skin. I’m pinned by his touch, a sort of fearful magic.
We stand and stand, and I wait for my pulse against his finger to slow, but it doesn’t.