#askkendrick

Catching a Capaill Uisce 

Nine Years Earlier  It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die... They run the horses on the beach, a pale road between the black water and the chalk cliffs. It is never safe, but it’s never so dangerous as today, race day. 

I have forgotten what it is like to be warm and what a full night’s sleep feels like and what my name sounds like spoken instead of shouted across yards of sand. 

I am so, so alive 

As I head down to the cliffs with my father a race official stops me. He says 

you haven’t discovered it yet, but...

My father doubles back, they share a brief exchange about age restrictions during the race. My father wins. 

My Father does not answer him, just leads his uisce stallion away. 

I find myself surrounded on al sides by the capaill uisce - the water horses. Men hang the bridles with red tassels and daisies to lessen the danger of the dark November sea but I wouldn’t trust a handful of petals to save your life.

Last year a water horse trailing flowers and bells tore a man’s arm half from his body 

These are not ordinary horses. Drape them with charms, hide them form the sea, but today, on the beach: Do not turn your back 

My father send me off to get his saddlecloth and armband. the colour of the cloth is meant to allow the spectators to identify my father, but in his case, they won’t need it, not with his stallion’s brilliant red coat. 

The red uisce stallion is restless and snorting, ears pricked, eager. He is very hot today. He will be fast. Fast and difficult to hold. I watch my father tie the matching armband around his upper arm 

Every year I have watched him, and every year he has tied it with a steady hand, but not this year. His fingers are clumsy and I know he is afraid of the red stallion.  

I lean close to the stallion’s ear and trace a counterclockwise circle above his eye as a whisper into his soft ear. 

“Does he not look look hungry to you?”

But I just look at the stallion’s square pupil, and he looks back, his head turned slightly away from me. I hope he’s remembering what I told him:

My father makes a noise in this throat and says, “I think you should go up now”

He slaps my shoulder before mounting up.

He is small and dark on the back of the red stallion. Already his hands work ceaselessly on the reins to keep the horse in place. I want to tell my father to mind how the stallion spooks to the right, how I think he sees better out of his left eye, but instead I say

We nod to each other like strangers, the goodbye unpracticed and uncomfortable.

I am watching the race from the cliffs when a gray uisce horse seizes my father by his arm and then his chest...The gray cannot keep its ragged grip on my father’s chest and so my father fall to the sand, already ruined before the hooves get to him. 

The red stallion circles, halfway to a hungry creature of the sea, but he does as I asked: He does not eat the thing that was my father. Instead the stallion climbs back into the water. Nothing is as red as the sea that day. I don’t often think of my father’s body strung out through the reddening surf. Instead, I remember him as he was before the race: afraid.

I won’t make the same mistake

It happens at the start of every November: The Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die.

“A dark haired boy who is made of all corners, silent and still in his blue-black jacket, his arms folded across his chest. He looks out of place and wild here; expression sharp, collar turned up again the back of his neck, hair still windblown from the beach. Everyone else is being crowed and jostled, but no one crowds of jostles him, though they don’t seem to avoid him, either. It’s like he’s just not in the same place as the rest of us.”

“No one better than him for knowing the horses. He rides every year and I reckon he’s the one to beat. Always is. But he’s got one foot on the land and one foot in the sea. You steer clear of him.”

Sean Kendrick Mood Board 

K: Congrats anon you were the first to guess! (dm me to discuss your prize :D) 

For those who don’t know Scorpio Races is a book written by the lovely Maggie Stiefvater 

Based on the legends of the eich uisce — the Celtic water horse — The Scorpio Races take place on the tiny, fictional island of Thisby. Each November, water horses emerge from the black ocean and gallop the beach beneath the cliffs of Thisby. And each November, men capture these horses for a thrilling and deadly race.