The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater Read Free Book Online

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