The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick Page A

affair. If not, then I would prosper.
    I walked under the low arch made of a single thick sod of grass curved up into the air. It held, and it was over.
    I raised my hands.
    “What now, Lawspeaker?” asked Longshank.
    I remember how strange it felt to be called by my title.
    I pointed at Bird Rock.
    “To the hill,” I said. “We have bones to burn.”
    We went to make the bone fire.

6

    Dusk on Bird Rock.
    All day under Sigurd’s direction the village had dragged long, neat logs up to the top of the hill to the circle of rock fingers. Now night had started to fall, and they would have liked to be safely back in the village. But there was work to be done still; the final episode in Horn’s life.
    Their first arrival at the site had not been pleasant.
    Horn’s body was not what it had been. The crows had been at their work and had stripped much flesh from the bones, but they had worked messily. The picked and pulled remains of Horn lay both on and around the central table rock of the circle.
    In theory the body should have been left until the bones were clean, but in practice that never happened.
    So Sigurd directed men twice his age and more to build a funeral pyre around the base of the table rock. It was a massive pyre, but it would take a lot of heat to burn the bones.
    It would also take all night.
    As night fell a select few of the villagers gathered around the stack of wood and bone.
    There was Sigurd, obviously. Sif was there. She was silent. She neither spoke nor even met anyone’s gaze. Gudrun, who had come up at dusk, hovered first near Sigurd, then near Sif, then withdrew to the shadows. She waited while the final preparations were made. There was Herda, to sing a lament, and Longshank, to instruct in the procedure. There were one or two who had been Horn’s favorites.
    Finally all was ready.
    “Do it, then,” said a weary voice.
    “Yes,” said Sigurd, and he shoved a firebrand into the base of the wood.
    Before long the fire crackled and flames leaped up into the air around the circle.
    Gudrun stepped forward and began to say final words for Horn.
    Night fell, and the small group watched the fire, till one by one they fell asleep. In the morning the breeze would blow the ashes into the air, and Horn’s life would have been properly respected.

7

    They were strange times, those first days after I became Lawspeaker. The world moved like a dream that I was watching, and not even my own dream. It seemed like someone else’s life that I was stealing a part in.
    We sat at the top of the hill and watched Horn’s bones burn.
    Longshank fell asleep first. Then Herda.
    Sif and I watched each other across the fire, brooding on our own thoughts. Then she fell asleep, too.
    I was alone at the top of Bird Rock. All other minds had left me.
    And then Mouse appeared.
    I wasn’t aware of her coming. But then she was beside me.
    “Mouse,” I said, “you shouldn’t be here.”
    “Are you going to make me go away, Lawspeaker?” she asked.
    I was silent.
    “No,” I said after a while. “No, of course not.”
    We sat there in silence for a long time. I think I fell asleep. I know I did, because I woke to witness the beginning of the storm.

8

    Mouse sat with eyes staring past the bone fire, out to the sea. She alone was awake, all the others having long ago drifted to sleep, even Sigurd.
    She looked at her brother, and fear began to grow in her. She did not know why, but something about the firelit scene before her nagged at her memory.
    For Mouse, memory was something to be feared, something not to be trusted. She could remember her life with the Storn, and she could remember the time with the wolves, though she had forgotten some. Besides, she didn’t like remembering that time—it only brought pain. The pain that comes with loss.
    Of the time that lay before that, she could remember nothing. But now, sitting on the hill, only an eyelid’s distance away from sleep, she recognized something. People