Free The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick

can’t,” said Sif, choking against the pain.
    “We have to find him!” I cried.
    She nodded.
    “All right,” she gasped. “All . . . right.”
    She staggered to her feet.
    We stumbled out into the darkness. The cold wind felt good against the screaming, burning pain.
    “What do we do? Where is he?” Sif cried
    I felt I might panic. I tried to think calmly, to decide what was the best thing to do. “You go to the great broch. Get as much help as you can!” I said.
    Immediately she ran toward the great broch.
    There she would find Olaf and Thorbjorn, and as fate had it, Horn, too.
    “I’ll start looking for him,” I called after her.
    I think I sounded braver than I felt.
    I looked around in the darkness.
    Where was Ragnald?
    We didn’t even know what he was doing. I just knew it was something terrible. It had to be, to attack us so brutally, so coldly.
    He had some purpose; I did not know what, but it was my belief it involved Mouse.
    I was right, though it was the others who found her first.

40

    When Horn and Olaf and Thorbjorn and Sif burst into the grain barn, they did not understand what they saw there. They did not understand what they saw, but it looked like evil.
    By the dim light of a small candle they saw Mouse and the stranger, Ragnald.
    Mouse was on her knees, writhing like a sick dog. Her feet scrabbled in the grain and dust, but her arms were rigid. Each of her hands was placed palm down against the inside of one half of the box, which was being held by Ragnald. Mouse’s hands were held fast, as thought they were stuck to the inside of the box.
    Ragnald stood above her, holding the box, whispering unknown words. Mouse was sobbing, her eyes closed, her body trembling.
    “What is this?” Horn yelled as they broke in.
    For just a moment there was a strange pause as each side regarded the other. Ragnald looked irritated for a moment, but then a smile spread across his face.
    “So,” he said, dropping the box.
    Mouse fell beside it in the dirt, moaning as if in pain.
    Ragnald pulled his long, toothed knife from his belt.
    “So!” Horn said, and stepped forward with intent.
    But as he drew his sword he remembered that all he had was the broken stump of Cold Lightning.
    He looked at it blankly, and as he did so Ragnald took the chance to cut his throat.
    Sif screamed.
    Olaf stepped forward. He had come unarmed. They had not expected this. Ragnald opened Olaf ’s belly with a single sweep of his knife, and Olaf fell dying in the dirt.
    Thorbjorn, who had a moment to gather his wits, shoved the burning flare he was carrying at the stranger’s face, but Ragnald was fast and sidestepped. The torch fell to the ground.
    “Ha!” he cried.
    He stepped past the burning brand and circled Thorbjorn until his back was to the door of the barn.
    He grinned and advanced on the now defenseless Thorbjorn.
    Then there was a slight scuffling, the sound of someone entering the barn.
    Ragnald began to turn, but before his face was even half toward the light, he was dead.
    He slumped forward on the ground, falling onto the flare, putting out its light.
    Behind him Sigurd knelt, staring at the broken stump of Horn’s sword, which he had thrust into the stranger.
    So, in about six seconds, it was over.

Part Two
THE DARK HORSE

1

    To accord Horn the honor due him as Lawspeaker, we left his body on the hillside for the crows to eat.
    My father was not so lucky—we buried his body under a single slab of rock on the low hills behind the village.
    The death of a Lawspeaker is never a simple matter, but things were more complicated than normal. There was no obvious successor to Horn, just as there hadn’t been when he and my father fought. The difference was that no one really wanted the job this time. No man, that is.
    But before the tribe could even think of these things, there was the business of the departing dead to see to.
    We took Horn’s body on a wooden stretcher to the circle of rock fingers on the hill