“‘That’s a piebald,’” mimics Finn. I smack him and look back to where the red horse and rider were, but they’re gone.
I feel strangely put out. “I guess we should go down,” I say.
“Is everybody down there today?” Finn asks.
“Sure looks like it.”
“How are you going to get a horse?”
Because I don’t exactly have an answer, the question annoys me. I’m annoyed even more when I notice we’re both standing in exactly the same position, so either I was standing like my brother or he was standing like me. I take my hands out of my pockets and snap, “Is this riddle day? Are you going to ask me questions all day?”
Finn makes his mouth and his eyebrows into parallel lines. He’s very good at this face, although I don’t know exactly what it means. When he was little, Mum called him a frog because of this face. Now that he sometimes has to shave, it doesn’t look so much like an amphibian.
Anyway, he makes the frog face and sidles off into the commotion. For a moment, I think about going after him, but I’m suddenly pasted to the ground by a shrill wail.
It’s the piebald mare. She’s separated from the others, looking back either toward them or toward the sea. Her head’s thrown back, but she’s not whinnying. She’s screaming.
The keening cuts through the wind, the sound of the surf, the bustle of activity. It’s the wail of an ancient predator. It’s one thousand miles away from any sound that a natural horse would make.
And it’s horrible.
All I can think is: Is this the last thing my parents heard?
I am going to lose my nerve if I don’t get onto the beach right now. I know it. I can feel it. My limbs feel like seaweed. I’m so wobbly that I almost turn my ankle on one of the divots left by the hooves. I’m relieved when the piebald mare stops her crying, but I still can’t ignore that the capaill uisce don’t even smell like proper horses as I get closer to them. Dove smells soft, all hay and grass and molasses. The capaill uisce smell like salt and meat and waste and fish.
I try to breathe through my mouth and not think about it. There are dogs careening around my legs and nobody is looking where he’s going. Horses are clawing at the air and men are hawking insurance and protection to the riders. They’re more riled up than terriers in a butcher shop. I’m glad that Finn’s stormed off because the idea of him seeing me totally bewildered seems unbearable.
The truth is, I have a very rough idea of how to go about securing a horse for the race without money up front, but it’s mostly based on things that we used to talk about in school, when the boys would all boast that they were going to ride in the races when they grew up. They never really did; mostly they just moved away to the mainland or became farmers, but their big plans were a good source of information. Especially since my family was one of the few that didn’t follow the races.
“Girl!” snarls a man holding a roan horse that is pawing and charging, galloping without moving an inch. “Mind your damned feet!”
I stare down at my feet, and it takes me a second too long to realize that there was a circle drawn in the sand, and my boots have scuffed a line through it. I jump out of the circle.
“Don’t bother,” shouts the man as I try to retrace the line of the circle. The roan tugs toward the break in the line. I back up and get shouted at again for my trouble – two men are carrying an older boy away between them. He’s bleeding from his head and he swears at me. I whirl away and almost trip over a scruffy dog with sand in its fur.
“Curse you!” I snap at the dog, just because it won’t say anything back.
“Puck Connolly!” It’s Tommy Falk with his pretty lips. “What are you doing down here?” At least, that’s what I think he says. It’s so loud that other people’s conversations drown out most of his words and the wind robs the rest.
“I’m looking for bowler hats,” I say. Black bowler hats are supposed to mean dealers – on the rest of the island, someone wearing one is called a monger, after the horsemongers, and it’s not the nicest of names. Sometimes the boys wear them if they want to be seen as rebels. Mostly it just means they’re pissers.
Tommy shouts, “I didn’t hear you right.”
But I know he did. He just doesn’t believe what he heard. Dad once said people’s brains are hard of hearing. It doesn’t matter if Tommy’s stone-cold deaf on a plate, though, because I catch a glimpse of a bowler hat, on the head of the little gnome-man who had the piebald mare earlier.
“Thanks,” I tell Tommy, though he hasn’t really helped. I leave him behind and wind through the crowd toward the gnome. Up close, the man does not look quite so short, but he does look like his face has been hit solidly a few times with a brick, twice to really squish it and once more for good measure.
He is arguing with someone.
“Sean Kendrick,” spits the monger, which is a name that sounds familiar for some reason, especially said in that disdainful note. The bowler-hatted gnome doesn’t have a gnome-like voice at all. His voice is lined with cigarette smoke and he puts gritty h’s at the beginning of his words. “Heh. His head’s half full of salt water. What’s he saying about my horses, now?”
“I don’t like to repeat it,” replies the other figure politely. It’s Dr. Halsal, with his shiny black hair parted neatly on the side. I like Dr. Halsal. He’s very levelheaded and he’s a very compact, tidy sort of person, who reminds me of a drawing of a person instead of an actual person. I wanted to marry him when I was six.
“He’s crazy as the ocean,” says the bowler-hatted monger. “Come now, if you back her, you’ll want her.”
“All the same,” Dr. Halsal says, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass.”
“She’s fast as the devil,” the gnome says, but the doctor is already retreating, and his back doesn’t listen.
“Excuse me,” I say, and my voice sounds very high to me. The gnome turns. His mismatched face is fearsome when matched with an irritable expression. I try to organize my thoughts into a respectable-sounding question. “Do you do fifths?”
Fifths is another thing I learned about from the daydreaming boys. It’s gambling, more or less. Sometimes a monger will let you have a horse for nothing on the condition that whatever you win in the race, they get four-fifths of it. That’s not really anything, unless you come in first. Then you could buy the whole island, if you wanted. Well, at least most of Skarmouth, except for what Benjamin Malvern owns.
The gnome looks at me.
“No,” he says. But I can tell what he really means is Not for you.
I feel a little shaky inside, because it hadn’t occurred to me that they would say no – were there that many people who would ride capaill uisce that the mongers could be choosy? I hear myself say, “Okay. Could you point me toward someone else who might?” I add, hurriedly, “Sir,” because Dad once said that saying “sir” makes gentlemen out of ruffians.
The gnome says, “Bowler hats. Ask ’em.”
Some ruffians stay ruffians. When I was younger, I would have spit on his shoes, but Mum had broken me of the habit with the help of a small blue stool and a lot of soap.
So I just leave without saying thanks – he was even less help than pretty Tommy Falk – and I wind my way through the crowd looking for the next bowler hat, only to get the same results. All of them say no to the ginger-haired girl. They don’t even consider it. One frowns and one laughs and one doesn’t even let me finish my sentence.
By now it’s lunchtime and my stomach is snarling at me. There are people hawking food to the riders, but it’s expensive and everything smells like blood and bad fish. There’s no sign of Finn. The tide is starting to creep in and some of the less brave souls have already left the beach. I retreat a bit and press my back against the chalk cliff, my hands spread out on the cold surface. Several feet above my head, the chalk is lighter, marking where the water will rise in a few hours. I imagine standing here until it does, salt water slowly swallowing me.