The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick Read Free Book Online Page A

bread dough with the herb stew from the pot and a little oat flour. Gudrun was able to help press this dough straight onto her wound. A clean cloth to cover it.
    “We’re done,” said Gudrun.
    “Don’t we . . . you have to say some magic?” asked Mouse.
    “No. That’s it. Same again tomorrow.”
    Mouse started to leave.
    “Mouse,” Gudrun said, stopping her.
    “What is it?”
    “Tell me something,” Gudrun said. Sif was not the only one who had thought about what had happened just before Gudrun’s accident.
    “How did you open the box?” she asked.
    Mouse said nothing.
    “Horn tried to open it. He got
me
to try to open it.
No one
could open it until you just lifted the lid. How?”
    But Mouse shook her head. “I must go. You must rest.”
    “How?” asked Gudrun again.
    “I don’t know,” Mouse said, and left.

24

    Mouse. Olaf and Herda. Sif. All of them and many others ran from their brochs the moment they heard the cry. More soon joined them, including Freya.
    “Stranger coming!”
    It was true. A tall, thin, white-haired man had just walked openly into the center of the cluster of brochs. There was something slung over his shoulders. Then he stumbled and fell. He slumped to the ground, and his burden tumbled to the turf and rolled a foot or so.
    “Sigurd!” cried Mouse.
    She ran to him. Freya knelt down beside him, too.
    Olaf took a step forward, then hesitated. He looked to the sky.
    “Sigurd?” mouthed Freya.
    Mouse felt his chest with her tiny hand. “He’s breathing!”
    “Thank you,” said Olaf under his breath. He strode over to where his son lay and scooped him off the springy turf.
    “Where’s Horn?” he barked at the people standing around.
    No one answered.
    “Well, until he shows up, lock that man in the grain barn.”
    He nodded at the white-haired man, who hadn’t moved since he’d fallen, then he carried Sigurd inside. Only Mouse saw the tear roll down Olaf ’s rough cheek. She smiled.
    There was a moment when no one did anything. Then Freya stood.
    “You heard what Olaf said,” she murmured, and followed her husband. Mouse watched as a couple of men carried the stranger into the grain barn. Then she hurried after Freya.

25

    Ragnald. The man with the white hair and the black palms. He was a mystery from the start, and he stayed that way.
    His hair had gone white from the frost, he said, and the frost had blackened his palms. He’d been traveling for years, through the cold lands of the north, slowly coming south. And he knew about the box. He said that it was his and that it contained magic of all sorts. (Except we knew it was empty.)
    I don’t know which of this was true, nor does it matter much now.

26

    Sigurd was unconscious. The man with white hair was not.
    “Hey!” he called from the grain barn. “Let me out!”
    Someone was sent to find Horn.
    “I won’t hurt you! Won’t you even talk to me?”
    After a while Horn came out to see what was going on. He staggered a little, as if he’d been drinking.
    “Well, where is he?”
    “In the barn, Horn,” one of his men said.
    “Well, get him out. Let’s see him. Have your weapons ready, mind.”
    Mouse, who had come to the door of the broch to watch, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as she saw Horn’s finest warriors gird their loins, and their swords, in the face of a single stranger.
    The man stepped out cautiously. He looked around him, and he looked different. The villagers, almost all light brown or blond haired, had never seen pure white hair before. And he was nearly a foot taller than their tallest man.
    He looked from one face to another, then approached Horn, apparently having worked out that he was the leader.
    “Mighty Chief, I mean no harm, I simply—”
    “No farther, stranger!”
    Horn drew his own sword but remembered too late that he had broken Cold Lightning on the box. He waved the stump at the man, pretending it was what he had meant to do. Mouse saw Herda shaking his head