The Extremely Epic Viking Tale of Yondersaay by Aoife Lennon-Ritchie Read Free Book Online

down, transforming into a waterfall for a moment, splashing into a wide, deep whirlpool, eventually flattening out, becoming a river again, and opening out to meet the sea.
    “Dans?” Ruairi said.
    “Yip?” Dani soldiered on at speed through the soft snow.
    “Are they getting divorced?” He kicked some stones with his shoe.
    Dani stopped walking and hung back until she was level with her brother. She flung her arm over his shoulder. “Come on,” she said, pulling him on. She waited a moment, “I didn’t think so before today.”
    “And now?” Ruairi looked up at her.
    “She really wanted him to come with us.” She thought for a minute again. “And he said he wanted to come but couldn’t because of work. That’s something, right?”
    “It is?” Ruairi said as they came up on the whirlpool.
    “I think we should be more worried when they don’t fight, Ruairi. When they’re both okay that he can’t come with us.”
    “I suppo—” Ruairi heard a noise that made him stop in his tracks. He grabbed Dani’s arm and pulled her down to a crouch.
    “I think there’s somebody there,” Dani whispered.
    Ruairi was petrified. “A murdered body?”
    “Don’t be silly. Murdered bodies are dead bodies—they don’t make noise. Let’s go closer and see who it is.”
    “Or we could go back? Maybe we should go back; I think we should go back,” Ruairi shot out, rapid-fire. Dani was already moving closer. She got down on all fours and crawled to the edge of the river. She could see all around the pool from there.
    “Look, can you see that?” she said to Ruairi when he joined her. It was very dark, and they were far away from the few lights that were still on in the village. After a second or two of looking hard, Ruairi could make out two dark shapes on the other side of the water.
    One was a massive, hulking man, slowly weaving up and down the pool banks with what looked like an upright vacuum cleaner. Closer to the edge was another man. He was dreadfully thin, and perhaps it was the way he was standing, but he was uncommonly crooked-looking and a bit stooped. He had a very pointy nose and a very pointy chin, and he watched while the massive person heaved himself backward and forward waving his vacuum cleaner from side to side. A voice came from farther back, and Dani and Ruairi saw two more people.
    “With all due respect, it’s past two a.m., and we’ve been looking for a solid year now. I think it’s time to call it a night,” one of the two men said.
    “It must be a metal detector. They’re looking for something,” Dani whispered to Ruairi.
    “But why are they looking now? They’ll never find anything in the dark.”
    “I don’t know.”
    The pointy man turned to face the man who spoke; he addressed him sharply. “Enough! I know it is here somewhere. I can feel it. The proximity of it simmers the marrow of my bones. We will continue our search here until daybreak, and tomorrow we will go back through the Crimson Forest one more time and we’ll comb through every branch, every leaf, literally every—”
    “ Shh !”
    He was interrupted by the huge man with the metal detector.
    “Shh!” the massive man said again and took a step toward the edge of the pool. He looked through the darkness across the river toward the spot on the ground where Dani and Ruairi lay. “What’s that?” He pointed in their direction.
    Dani and Ruairi looked at each other accusingly.
    “I didn’t say anything,” Ruairi said.
    “Well neither did I!”
    “There’s something glowing,” the man said. The other three came close to the edge to have a look.
    Dani and Ruairi slowly looked down at themselves, and they saw, all along the bottoms of their jackets and all around the necks and around the cuffs and even in places on their hats and scarves—a glow in the dark.
    “Mum!” they whispered together.
    Ruairi and Dani scrambled as fast as they could out of sight of the men and ducked behind a boulder.
    “I