Due to the nature of my new self, I sometimes struggle to recall my old life. The details blur, washed away by the relentless tide. Even my old name is lost to me.

But there are two things I remember with absolute clarity: the first is the claustrophobia that permeated my existence before, the feeling of the trap slowly springing shut.

The second is the night everything changed, the first and last time I attended the Scorpio Festival. The horse-head of the Mare Goddess, the crush of bodies and flickering lights, the cold, rough shell I held in my palm as I made my wish, "I want to be free."

The rest only comes to me now in streaks of shadow and dimmed colors. The memories are never reliable, and come and go like the wind. My father, a faded wash of pale color. An even more faded woman, his wife, lost to a mainland tourist and then to the mainland itself, gone like a sandy footprint in the waves. The way he would never let me out of his sight, let alone off the island. The way the shores of the tiny speck of land seemed to be growing ever smaller, constricting around my neck like a noose. The forbidden ships that endlessly sailed away over the horizon, the ones I was never permitted to board nor had the money for. I faintly remember I used to scrutinize them, but now their shapes are nebulous and distorted in my fading recollection.

You see, for the capaill uisce memories aren't as important. What matters is the present; all else slowly drifts out of sight.

Every day the water grows colder, biting.

We can all feel it. Our slippery pelts itch with it. Every day the pull of the shore grows stronger, a music rising in pitch.

The herd has been thinning. There are fewer long, serpentlike faces with eyes narrow and stretched like slits, chasing our flashing prey through the deep. They disappear in the night, or in the chaos of a frantic hunt. We don't see them anymore.

The herd accepted me cautiously, recognizing that in some inscrutable way I was different. But slowly I learned their ways: baring my teeth in a menacing grin at the hungry, scavenging sharks; chasing with reckless speed the flashing silver fish and the waving manes and tails through the swirling water; the lilting, eerie songs that echoed here under the waves.

Now there are only six of us left, the few creatures of the sea as yet resisting the call of land.

It is night: I wake to hear a deep, almost tactile music drifting along the currents from a long way off. It twists and swirls, somehow finding the beating pulse of my heart and thrumming in my blood. A fish, short and flat like a grey coin turned on its side, eyes me with one glassy eye and darts away. The kelp sways, reaching for the surface. I follow the sound, pulled like driftwood in the tide towards the song of land. The song of warm blood and pounding hoofbeats.

Silent as an eel, I snake through the caressing leaves of kelp, the murky slope rising under me. Soon I no longer hear the low burbles and sighs of the sea's belly, but the crashing of waves overhead. With every step I get closer the deep, earthy song grows louder, more insistent. It pounds with the beat of my heart, a low, steady drumming increasing in tempo. It pulls me forward.

And finally, my head breaks over the waves, and I breathe my first breath of air, and my lungs seem to expand so much that I feel they would burst. The ocean's fists beat at me, breaking over my neck and threatening to send me under again. They tug me back, but I press forward, the feeling of breath too strong to give up.

I can feel my eyes widening, adjusting to the air, my nostrils changing their shape. The sensation of water running down my long, bony legs is so peculiar I snort and stamp my way onto the beach. The firm feeling of my four hooves in the sand is a triumph.

The wind, the wind, whispers over the grass, throws up the gritty bits of sand. The night is still. The stars blink overhead.

It is all so familiar.

I recognize this beach.

I used to run on it when I had only two legs, the rare times the blur of a father I can barely remember now let me walk with him the short distance from our house to play in the sand. I can see now a path, worn, snaking away through the tall grass. In the distance there is a faint plume of smoke rising.

I had to see. I had to remember.

A wholly different song willed me forward.

Sean

You'll have a nest of horses outside your window and Puck Connolly in your bed and I'll buy from you instead of Malvern. That's your future for you.

A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth at Mr. Holly's words as I absentmindedly fiddle with a lock of Puck Connolly's wild hair, forming a bright figure eight in my fingers.

Mr. Holly's fantastical prediction had come so close to prophecy.

Outside my window I can hear the sound of Corr as he eats his bloody meal. His noises soothe me, as much as anyone can be said to be soothed by a capall. They remind me that he is here, that he is mine, that he isn't lost. No, he isn't a nest of horses, just one, but I would rather have him, broken as he was, than every horse in Malvern's stable. Even if he did come, Mr. Holly wouldn't find much to buy; I wouldn't sell Corr for the world, much less anything even Mr. Holly could offer.

Puck and I are lying under the roof I had talked with Mr. Holly about a year before, my father's house on the northwestern cliffs. Home. Though the house is small, with only one bedroom and a kitchen that doubly served as the sitting and dining room, it is expansive compared to the suffocating flat I'd lived in while working for Malvern. Most importantly, I can call it my own, and better yet: it has Puck in it.

She is lying next to me on the bed, her hair flared out over the pillow, the moonlight shining in from the window softly illuminating her features. She should be calm, happy, relaxed, but instead her face is scrunched up with worry.

Her eyes flick over to mine, and she asks- no, demands, "Are you sure Gabe and Finn will be alright, in that house?"

Her older brother had come back from the mainland, and so we had decided that we should all stay over at my house for the night and spend the next day on the beach. I could not understand why, but Puck insisted that it was my "turn to play host." The only problem was, my house was too small to fit all of us, so Finn and Gabe were sleeping in the recently abandoned, yet perfectly serviceable, house next door. It was one of two houses that could claim to be my neighbor, both vacant.

"They'll be fine," I reply, running more of her hair through my fingertips. "They're hardly a stone's throw away."

She makes a small sound in her throat that is half agreement and half that-wasn't-what-I-meant. "Did you hear about what happened, about this time last year?"

"I heard the stories." I had been too caught up in my last Scorpio Races to pay much attention to it. The old neighbors, living in that house, had been allegedly attacked by a capall that had somehow gotten inside. The bodies of the father and his young son had been found strewn in various stages of escape, looking more like meat than anything human. Only a woman who had been spending the night had escaped to tell the tale. The body of his daughter, about my age, had never been found. There were holes in the story, the most glaring of which was how or why the capall had ever gotten inside. The second was the girl. It was thought that the capall had somehow entered through her room, for that was where the rest of the family first heard it from, but there was not a drop of blood there. It was as if that night the girl had ceased to exist.

Puck frowns. "Your other neighbors left after that because they thought these houses were cursed, didn't they?"

"They were afraid."

Puck accepts the explanation, turning on her side and pulling the blankets up to her chin. "The ones that died." She pauses. "Did you know them?"

"Not well." I remember the girl, whom I had grown up with. We used to play on the beach before her mother left for the mainland. After that, she was never the same. "The girl's name was Ione." An old name, not heard often on this island anymore.

There was a silence.

"Don't worry about Gabe and Finn," I said, and turned over to sleep, hoping she wouldn't continue the conversation.

A cold breeze blew through the walls, raising goosebumps on our skin, It smelled faintly of the sea.

She whispers, "It's almost October."

The words hang in the chilly air.

"It'll be the first time in years that you haven't raced, won't it?"

So many years. The blood singing in my veins. The screams of the capaill uisce and riders alike, all heard over the constant hush of the ocean. I can tell that beneath her simple question is a more deeper one, one much harder to answer.

The pummeling of hooves on sand, the death, the blood. All the worst things about the races, they have become as much a part of me as the island itself and the sea. Even now I can feel in my bones the capaill uisce climbing out of the waves. And yet, this year, I can't ride.

I know Corr longs to run. Sometimes, late on the nights Puck has stayed home, he sings his keening song, echoing over the landscape, and sometimes I wish I could join him.

Lying under my father's roof, with Puck in my bed and Corr outside the window, I am happy, happier and more content than I have ever been in my life. But I am not alive.

Puck narrowed her brows and looked out the window. "Sean, I think I hear something…"

That's when I heard the faintest of noises from outside. That's when I saw the outline of Corr's head jerk upright, ears pricked. That's when he started keening.

I was out of bed in less than a second, yanking on my shoes. "Capall," I hissed.