Free The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick Page B

continued.
    Sigurd stared wildly about him. Why had no one told him this was possible? Surely someone other than Longshank knew the law.
    Mouse felt her heart quicken.
    Sif jumped to her feet.
    The room quieted a little.
    “Assuming,” said Longshank, taking the opportunity to finish, “that no one wishes to challenge the boy?”
    He looked around the room, at all the grown men who had grumbled about Horn and about how he had ruled. But they all were quiet.
    “No one challenges?” asked Longshank scornfully.
    “Yes! I do!”
    Everyone turned and stared at Sif.
    “Yes,” she cried, “I do!”

3

    And so we fought. Sif and I. No one could stop her; no one could challenge her right to fight me for the position of Lawspeaker. Though a few people tried to point out that she was a girl and that a girl could not be Lawspeaker, Longshank had to admit that this was not actually recorded in the law. It was no more than tradition.
    And me?
    After the shock, the shock of finding out I would be Lawspeaker, a desire began to grow in me.
    It grew rapidly, and as I thought about my father, my
dead
father, and Horn, it grew even more. A desire to shake this tribe of stupid men and make something of them, despite it all.
    So when Sif insisted, as the days passed, that she wanted to fight me, and as all the strong men of the village stared at me when I walked by, I became more and more determined to take her on.
    Mouse didn’t want me to do it. I couldn’t find out exactly why she was so against it.
    “Why?” she asked again and again.
    I would look at her and shrug.
    “No one else wants to do it,” I would say weakly.
    But there was more to it than that.
    “Why don’t you want me to?” I asked her.
    Now it was her turn to be evasive.
    “You said you’d be my brother,” she said. “Always.”
    “But I’ll still be your brother,” I protested.
    “You’ll be Lawspeaker,” she said, and then, when I pressed her, “There is danger with it.”
    But she would say no more.
    But before Sif and I fought, there was more disposing of dead to be done.
    Ragnald’s body had lain under some sacking in the grain store, where he had fallen with Horn’s broken blade in his back. The sword that I had put there. Now it was time to do something about it.
    This reminds me that a strange thing had happened when we covered Ragnald’s body with the sacking.
    For the first time since Ragnald’s attack, I thought about the box. We had left it lying on the floor of the grain barn, where it had fallen from the stranger’s hands. It filled me with fear, and I wanted, if it was possible, to destroy it. It seemed to me that it must be full of evil magic. But while Freya was covering Ragnald’s body, I looked for the box. It was gone. I asked round the village, but no one claimed to have it.
    And I seemed to be the only one bothered by this.
    “A piece of magic like that,” people said, “so strong. It will have died with its owner. It must have vanished when Ragnald perished.”
    I forgot about it; there was other work to do.
    It was decided that the most fitting fate for a stranger who had come to try to harm us was to feed his body to the fish. So we prepared to take Ragnald’s body out into the bay in a boat.
    An interesting thing had started to happen. Since it had been announced that I might be Lawspeaker, people had taken more notice of me. And of Freya and Mouse, too. But mostly of me.
    Maybe because I had been the one to stick the sword into Ragnald. Maybe that had made people take notice of me. I had displayed bravery and strength, and those things were supposed to be important to us.
    And now the men who had supported my father and me stood around and asked me what to do, while those who had ridiculed him seemed lost. As indeed they were, leaderless without Horn. There was no way these men would support Sif, a girl, in her claim to be Lawspeaker.
    “Roll him up in the cloth,” I said, pointing at Ragnald’s corpse, “and