The Dark Horse Read Free Page A

the matter, Lawspeaker?” he said. “Is it beyond your powers to feed a tiny girl like this?”
    Horn must have sensed that the mood was against him, because though he spat on the ground at my father’s feet, he gave in.
    “Very well. But the child will belong to your family, Olaf. It will be on your head.”
    And I do also remember that though we had decided the girl was coming with us, the girl herself had not.
    She had not spoken a word, and then she struggled and fought.
    “She’s out of her mind.”
    “She’s just scared.”
    “Who knows how long she’s been here!”
    But she came with us in the end. The caves were empty, the wolves had gone. It was time to get down off the hill. Before we got home, we had stopped calling her the mouse and just called her Mouse instead.
    That was that.
    We put a cloak around her and left the hill.
    About halfway down the stillness of the evening air was suddenly broken. There was a cry from a wolf high above us. A single long, piercing howl that stopped us in our tracks. It was a sad sound, it seemed to me.
    I looked at Mouse, to see her reaction, but she was still crying. Crying tears of relief, I assumed. But then she held back her tears, sucked in a huge breath, and let out a long, heartbreaking wolf howl.
    We looked at one another, hesitating for a moment, and then we set off again down the hill, a little faster than before.
    Olaf, my father, carried Mouse all the way back to the village on his back.
    I was so proud. And not just of my father, for some reason.
    No one knew then what Mouse was. What she could
do.
    Horn thought he was giving us an extra mouth to feed and nothing more, but he was wrong.
    We began to understand when we found her sleeping with the hounds.
    But wait—I am telling this the wrong way round.
    It was hard at first for Mouse.
    Weeks went by. She hadn’t spoken a single word. We thought she was mute. We had cleaned her up. Washed and cut her hair. Found that there was a girl underneath all the dirt, though a strange-looking girl she was. She was small and delicate; she had a small, round, delicate face, with huge and beautiful eyes. She tried to hide behind the hair we had left straggling down in front of her face.
    She didn’t seem to know where she was at first. What she was doing with us. Though she hadn’t spoken, she seemed to understand what we told her. Food, sleep, things like that.
    She would nod her head, or tip it to one side if she wasn’t sure.
    But if anyone tried, and they
did
try, to ask her anything more complicated, she would just stare blankly through them.
    “When did the wolves capture you, Mouse?” asked Freya, my mother.
    “What’s your name?” asked Olaf, my father.
    “Where are you from? Really?” I asked.
    Any of these questions brought the same response from Mouse. She would stare through you as if she were looking at something in the distance.
    We decided she was simple. Stupid. Perhaps as a result of being caught by those wolves, we thought. Perhaps it had scared her out of her mind.
    And then one day we lost her.
    She’d been kept in our own broch since we found her. If she went outside, it was with my mother, and only for a short time. She had nothing to do; we’d given her no work, and she would just sit in the darkness of the broch, blinking from time to time. Outside she seemed even more timid.
    “She likes the darkness,” my mother said to my father.
    He nodded.
    “Like the cave,” he said. “Now, why should that be?”
    So we’d grown used to her sitting in the darkest corner of our dark little broch, saying nothing, taking food when offered, sleeping when we did.
    But then, as I say, we lost her.
    My mother said she thought she was still in the broch, but when Father and I came back from fishing, we saw she was not there.
    “But I never saw her leave!” Mother cried. “She was here!”
    We searched all over the village, trying not to attract attention. But it was a busy time of day, with men