But these low cliffs are the first place that my father ever set me on one of the capaill uisce. Not the beach where he had been taught. Because always, always, my father feared the sea more than he feared the heights.
I think they’re both deadly, which isn’t the same as being afraid.
When I double back, Corr stepping high over the long cliff grass, I see Kate Connolly standing beside her little dun pony. Kate’s hair is the color of the cliff grass turned red by autumn, and she has a spatter of freckles across her face that at first glance makes her look far younger. It’s a strange magic: At once she’s a cross child and also something older and wild, something grown from this coarse island soil. She’s looking at my things — my saddle tipped up on its pommel, my rucksack, my thermos, my bells — where I’ve left them, and for some reason, that makes me feel odd, like skin rubbed raw by sand in the wind.
When Kate notices me, she frowns, or at least narrows her eyes. I don’t know her to be able to tell the difference. I feel that same disquieted feeling I had in the cove. Again Fundamental goes under the water, and me with him. But I’m not drowning now; I let out my breath.
Corr’s inspired by the appearance of the mare; instead of slowing to a walk, he trots nearly in place, shivering with his excitement. I don’t dare get as close to her as politeness demands, so from fifteen feet away, Corr dancing beneath me, I say, my voice louder to be heard over the wind, “What do I call you?”
“What?”
I ask, “Is your name Kate or not?”
“Come again?”
“It says ‘Kate’ on the board at Gratton’s, but that’s not what Thomas Gratton called you.”
“Puck,” she says, her voice soaked in lemon juice. “It’s a nickname. Some people call me that.” She doesn’t invite me to be one of them. The wind gasps, long and low, around our feet, flattening the grass and tangling through the horses’ manes. Up here, for some reason, it always smells more strongly of fish. After a moment, she adds, “I thought the rules say that you have to train on the beach.”
I don’t understand her for a moment, then I clarify, “Within one hundred and fifty yards of the shore.”
Something dawns over her face, and for a moment, I needn’t be there — it is merely her and her epiphany. I look at my watch.
“Where’s the other horse?” she asks. Her mare tries to nibble her hair, and Kate slaps at her, absently. The pony tosses her head up with mock displeasure. It’s a game bred of familiarity, one that warms me to both of them.
“Just a bit inland.”
Kate regards us. “Does he always do that?”
Corr hasn’t stopped moving. His neck is arched, too. I’m sure he looks ridiculous as he preens for them. Uisce stallions generally prefer to view land horses as meals, not mates, but sometimes a particular mare will take a stallion’s fancy and he’ll make an idiot of himself. “The bay mare’s worse,” I say.
Kate makes a face that I think might be humor.
“Tell me about her.”
“She’s moody and she’s slippery and she’s in love with the ocean,” I reply. I’d caught her in a rainstorm, salt water making all of my leather straps too slick to hold, clouds turning the sky into sea and vice versa, the cold making my fingers imprecise. She came up in a net behind the boat as I dredged the breakers just off the shore. Local lore had it that a capall uisce caught in the rain wanted to stay wet, but I wouldn’t believe it until I’d tried it for myself.
“That sounds bad,” Kate says.
“It is.”
“Then why am I here?”
I study her. It’s a question that’s been plaguing me since I first saw her on the beach. “Because she’d be a capall uisce in a race made for capaill uisce.”
She looks past me at the cliff’s edge then, her eyebrows drawn close together, her mouth set. There’s something uncompromising about her, a fury that I associate with youth.
“I don’t want to consider this unless I’m sure she’s going to be a better bet than Dove,” she says. It’s not until she’s been quiet for a long moment that I realize that she’s looking at me, waiting for me to agree or disagree.
I’m not certain what she expects me to say. She must know all this, but still I say, “There is nothing faster than a capall uisce. Period. I don’t care what sort of training regimen you’re doing, circles in the surf, or whatever. They have strength on your mare, they have height on her, and your mare runs on grass. The capaill uisce run on blood, Kate Connolly. You don’t stand a chance.”
This seems to solidify her opinions, because she nods, once, sharply. “Okay, then. So, you’ll race me, then, won’t you?”
It’s a curious way that she phrases it. The “won’t you?” means that I’ll have to disagree with her just to keep things as normal.
“Race? Me on the mare, you on Dove?”
Kate nods.
The wind buffets us again, finally stilling Corr as he stops to scent it. I can smell rain on it, far away. “I don’t understand the purpose.”
She just stares at me.
Back at the yard, I have two lots of horses to take out to the gallops yet. I have George Holly and at least two other buyers poking around the barns, looking for the horse that will make their mainland yards famous, or at least famous for the year. I have too much to do in too few hours before the October night comes early. I don’t have time for a fool’s race, a capall uisce against a pony that couldn’t begin to look Corr in the eye.
“It’s no more time than it would take for me to try her,” Kate says. “So if you say no, it’s just because the idea insults you.”
Which is how we end up racing.
I retrieve the bay mare, leaving Corr in her place with a lump of beef heart from my satchel, and find Kate adjusting her stirrups from the back of her pony, one leg crossed over the saddle as she does. It’s something you can’t do on a horse you don’t trust, something I don’t know that I’d ever do on one of the capaill uisce.
Beneath me, the bay mare is twisting and anxious. She’s as hard to hold as the piebald, but less malevolent. She would sooner drown you than eat you.
“Are you ready?” Kate asks me, though I think it’s a question I should’ve been asking instead. I don’t think there’s even a ghost of a chance she wants this horse I’m on. “To the big outcropping over there?”
I nod.
I reason with myself: This doesn’t have to be an entirely wasted exercise. If I can get this bay mare running straight and true for these five minutes, then I’ll reconsider what I told Malvern. I hate releasing a horse after I’ve invested time in it, and she’s had plenty of time sunk into her. Maybe I was wrong and she will shape up for next year. Corr took years to settle.
“Are we waiting for a sign?” Kate says, springing off across the field. The bay mare’s after her like a shot, all predator, and I let her have her head until we’ve caught up. Kate has a big handful of Dove’s mane, which I think is for grip until I realize it’s to keep the strands from slapping the girl’s hands and face with their length. I don’t have to worry about that with the bay mare; she’s rubbed most of hers off on the door frame of her stall, longing for the sea.