scorpiobird | [Practice Thread]

[Practice Thread]

It costs a lot of money to maintain a horse in Darrow, more than I expected. I thought it was hard on Thisby but at least no one was charging us on her lean-to. The money that comes each month isn't enough to pay for my apartment and Dove's stall at Villa Cordova. That's without her food, the costs of her veterinary care, or the new shoes the farrier put on her. No one cares here that she's the first normal horse to win the Scorpio Races.

People talk of things arriving from home sometimes and in the back of my mind, I can think of any number of things that I'd like to see arrive but the Races' purse is most prominent in my thoughts.

Until then, I work. I've sold some painted plates and teapots at the cat cafe but not enough. Computers, mysterious as they are to me, seem a requirement to getting real paid work around here, so I'm bound for the library with mine in my bag. Hopefully someplace quiet will help.

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This place is a mystery, above all mysteries. Thisby, not all I've ever known but very near to, was no longer a mystery to me, I realize. It's the rest of the world--and whether this qualifies or not is up for debate--that is a curious thing. Darrow is more a mystery than the mainland, more a mystery than any far away place my mother read to me in storybooks as a child. I still don't know what to think of it. But Corr is here, and thriving well enough in these strange seas. And Kate Connolly--Puck Connolly.

To see her in Darrow is to wonder how I never noticed her on Thisby for all those years, with such fewer people, and with her hair, red in a different way than Corr is, but bright. Today, we're not particularly crossing paths, but I see her, and I've time enough to divert my path. After all, there's no Benjamin Malvern to stare down his bulbous nose at me here in Darrow. I'm owned by no man's time but my own.

I fall into stride with her, and say nothing at all.

Just like that, we may as well be on the cliffs again because I feel certain and solid. The world is something that happens around us while we observe and make our notes. If only there were November cakes and perhaps this would feel familiar.

But it's July and the sun is hotter over us than I've ever felt it on Thisby, even on the days the clouds could be moved to give it some time. To see Sean Kendrick in any weather but cold is as strange as rain on a sunny day. It can't be explained and it doesn't look right, though it has its beauty too.

I don't need to say anything to him but I do reach out so I can slot my first two fingers around his.

"I don't like it," I say finally, apropos of nothing else because there's been no other words between us, after we've walked for a while. To assure Puck knows I don't mean her fingers, I shift mine a little, taking her hand a bit more surely. I'm unfamiliar with this. We've only kissed twice, and I'm more sure of reins than hands.

"The weather. Doesn't it rain here?"

Which only reminds me of George Holly, standing in his white shoes in the capaill uisce round pen in the cliff, asking if Thisby was ever not raining.

For a second, I do start to withdraw my hand, thinking that he does mean that. Then I stop and I can't decide whether I should chastise myself for being so worried about it or else just hold his hand properly, fingers and thumb wrapped securely around his.

It's one thing to love Sean Kendrick but it's another to know how to be his, or anyone's, sweetheart.

And now we're talking about the weather. On Thisby, it isn't a topic of conversation so much as a subject of complaint and often deservedly so. Here, it's an unfortunate mystery.

"Sunny days and a safe beach. I don't think I know how to function in this place," I say. "But Dove has never been happier."

"You're looking awful fit yourself," I say, which is maybe a strange thing, but she's not the waif on the back of a hay-bellied island pony any more. Even as strange as this place is, it has been good enough that neither of us seems to be eating as poorly as we were--beans for Puck, tinned meats for me.

But speaking of her like this is a strange thing. I think I must have told her, at some time or another, how remarkable she is. But perhaps I haven't. Perhaps I've only thought it.

Now, I say, "Where are we going?"

It strikes me as the type of thing that other boys would say and usually to insult me. From Sean it sounds as odd as it does a bit flattering, but I try my best not to preen like Corr in front of Dove. The last thing we need is to make fools of each other now.

"The library," I say. "I'm going to find a book on computers until I understand it will enough to get a job and afford better than beans."

I'm not eating beans anymore but I'm not eating well either. I've traded beans for eggs and, when I am feeling as if I deserve something nice, a large bag of oranges. I thought about buying a chicken but it was such a colorless, flabby thing under the plastic wrap that I had a hard time believing it would taste of anything anyway.

"You know there are postings at the City Hall and the colleges?" For myself, I've made myself valuable to the stables, as I always do, but they've a number of valuable grooms and trainers and what not, and there's no one to sell the horses to here. So, it's been every odd job I can find.

No one cares that I have won the Scorpio Races four of the last seven years, that Puck Connolly was the first woman, the first rider on horse back, to win a Scorpio Race. No one cares that Corr must be fed in blood and meet. To everyone here, we are just two new people, and one exceptionally odd horse.

"There's sure to be something you could do posted there."

"I know that, but all of those jobs ask that you know how to use a computer." I don't mean to be acerbic, to speak to him the way I'd speak to Joseph Berringer or Gabe or Dory Maud. Sean Kendrick is none of those people. "Sorry." There I go again, born out of a vinegar bottle.

"I don't like the idea of being old-fashioned and not knowing how things work." In the distance, there's a little boy and he can't be older than five but he's playing with his brother with one of those tablets and it's as easy for him as breathing. Put one of those things in my hands and it might as well be a magic mirror.

I nod a bit. All the jobs I've found have been with my hands - roofing and helping people move about, which seems an odd job in a city you can't leave, and that sort of thing. You don't need to know how to use anything but your hands and a bit of your head for things like that.

"Old-fashioned," I say, because Thisby was a bit old fashioned maybe, in comparison to the mainland, and my father and I had loved it. And, of course, everything's old-fashioned to Darrow, with it's clean steel lines. I hate this place more than anything maybe. Maybe more than the Malvern Yards.

The library's not much further off, which is just as well because the sun is only getting hotter. I'll be twice as ginger and twice as freckled by summer's end than I have been in my entire life, which is the last thing I need. I don't know that Sean will notice or, if he does, if he'll care that I am more ginger and more freckled but I don't like the idea that either of those things will also make it easier for me to blush.

And all the while, my hands are getting softer from lack of work. Any work.

"It'll be as cool and oppressively quiet in there as Saint Columba's anyway. So we'll feel at home."

Cool and quiet is a thing that are found in short supply in Thisby, I've realized as we've both been here. The apartment that came with the city was so quiet, even, that I couldn't bare to stay there. I sleep more nights on the beach than in a bed, trying to find the rhythm of Thisby's ocean in these unfamiliar waves.

"I think I've only been in Saint Columba a few times," I confide. My confessional was the sea, had been since I was a child. I needed no priest for that.

"And I was feeling bad for missing a few weeks' confession," I say. It feels like smalltalk. I hate smalltalk and Sean's words are so clipped and efficient that there isn't any room for it but I don't quite know how to talk to Sean Kendrick about things that aren't the Scorpio Races and strategy. I don't know what dreams to promise him in this city.

I don't know how to ask for more kisses.

"There, I think it's that building with the lion sculptures."

"I know it's important to people." That seems a disingenuous thing to say, in the face of knowing that Puck has gone to confession. A part of me wants to ask if Puck attends a mass here in Darrow, but none of them would be the solemnity of Saint Columba. None of them will ever be Saint Columba. I've walked past those houses of worship, and they're - sterile. Even to me, with none of that faith.

We walk along in silence, a comfort to me and my inability to formulate my thoughts around Puck. When we reach the library, all I can do is shake my head a little bit.

"Do you think there are lions that come out of the woods or something?" I ask. Besides the library, there are statues with the beasts at City Hall as well. The sort of motifs that would have been horses on Thisby.

"Finn and Gabe were very grave about it." Both of my brothers had entertained the idea of being priests with some degree of seriousness. Gabe in word and deed and Finn in his careful and constant terror for the state of his immortal soul.

"I think that's the sort of question that's asking for trouble in this city." Darrow, I've learned in a short time, provides no lack of the magical and terrible but with less of the predictability we had learned on Thisby. I hope, at least for now, that the statuary is really just statuary.

"But not you." It's a question without the intonation of it. She's said she's gone to confession--or missed it, purposefully or otherwise--which would imply a certain gravity, but the lack of her own mention in being grave about it says otherwise. A mystery on top of all the other Kate Connolly mysteries.

I have a feeling, ascending the steps toward the library, that George Holly might be having a laugh if he could see the two of us.

"Oh, doubtlessly," I agree. "But at least it would be something, wouldn't it? I suppose Darrow's strange enough, having brought us here."

"Of the three of us, I was the horrible one," I say. Sean looks at me then and I feel a bit like what Peg Gratton says I'm not. I don't want to be a line of poetry that Sean can't decipher, a mountain he can't climb, because it seems to me that once you've figured out a way to do those things, you've no reason to stay. "I'm still the horrible one, if half of Skarmouth is to be believed."

Pushing past the door, I'm hit by the rush of cool air from the library. It's not the same as the cool damp of Thisby, but I'll take it over the heat.

"I'm not sure that's the kind of adventure that would suit us."

"Is that what they're calling it these days?" I ask, because nothing about Puck seems horrible at all these days. There was a time, that first day on the beach when I dove into the surf to deal with the capall that was going for her and Dove, that I thought unkindly of her. But that was my own horridness, and not hers.

"It's a good thing I don't listen to half of Skarmouth for their opinions." If I did, I would probably care a lot more, or a lot less, about some people I cared a lot less, or a lot more, about. But I rather like how much I care about the few people I care about.

The library has an oppressive silence, but I'll take that, and the cool, to be with Puck. It is rather nice, after all.

I wish I had Sean's economy with words that I could get away on half a dozen words to answer a question. Sean Kendrick is not Father Mooneyham and I don't need to tell him all my sins, even if I think that he could absolve me in half an hour on horseback, charging together until all I know is sea and wind.

As I find a table, I realize I'm still holding Sean's hand and it's reluctantly that I let go so we can sit. There's an airlessness here that feels like Saint Columba's in its quiet, even without long, lean statues of goggle-eyed men and horses to inspect my soul.

"I'm going to learn how to use this wretched thing," I say. "Or...Or I'll eat nothing but beans for a month." It's an awful threat, made more awful by the fact that if I remain jobless, it will come true.

When we settle at the table, I make a point of sitting beside her - but not too close - instead of across from her. I wasn't planning for this visit, so I haven't really got anything. And, besides, it will be a good learning experience for both of us. Probably.

Assuming we don't make complete arses of ourselves.

"Maybe one of the librarians can help? They seem to know a lot about these sorts of things, anyway."

"Probably," I say. Many of the staff here are sitting behind the computers as we speak, typing away as if it's the simplest thing in the world. I could ask for help. I should ask for help but the apparent ease of use makes me stubborn.

Reaching into my bag, I withdraw the small, flat computer and prop it open. "I've gotten as far as turning it on and that's about all," I admit, pressing the button.

I smile, very small, at the way that Puck's eyebrows come together as she looks at the librarians. It seems just as much a challenge to approach them for guidance as it was for us to create our understanding on the cliff overlooking the beach. But, for her, it may be just as vital, unless she wants to eat beans for a month.

"That's about as far as I've gotten as well," I admit softly, and shake my head. Her computer takes a moment to come to life, and we're both left momentarily staring at it. I end up snorting a laugh at how helpless we both are about this.

Sean Kendrick laughs so rarely that it catches me off-guard to hear him do something so common as snort. I laugh too, suddenly reminded that he's an odd man and an old one in a young skin but he's still a man as much as I'm a woman. Or almost one. We're human, the both of us.

"I'm going to find a book. At least I know how to use a library." Maybe the only library I've used is the school library in Skarmouth but how different can the sorting be?

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