The Dark Horse

The Dark Horse by Marcus Sedgwick is a cold, dark story for 11 year olds about a found child and a box that should have been left on the beach.

What happens

Mouse is walking the tide line with Sigurd, looking for sea cabbage, because the fishing has been bad again. She finds a small wooden box instead. Deep red wood, no hinges, no lock, and warm to the touch. It doesn't belong on that shore and she knows it before she can say why.

Twenty paces away a man is lying among the rocks. His hair is white and the palms of his hands are black. Neither child sees him.

They carry the box home to Storn, thirty stone houses with turf roofs on a coast that is slowly giving up on them. And that is the whole trouble, because every find belongs to Horn the Lawspeaker, who rules by fear and has despised Sigurd's family for years.

The story runs in two voices. Mouse's trouble happens now. Sigurd's happens four summers earlier, when a war party went up into the hills after wolves and came back with a small girl instead.

Sigurd's half is the one that got me. He's telling it long afterwards and he keeps admitting what he cannot remember. He knows a man died that day. He cannot recall which one, and he is ashamed of that.

Mouse has something of her own. She feels things before they happen, never clearly, and she is not sure herself whether it is a gift or just fright. Nobody in the book explains it, which is exactly why it works.

You should know that this is properly bleak in places. In the hills, wolves pour out of the cave and three men are killed, one of them by having his throat torn out. It is told in a few short lines and not dwelt on, but it is stated plainly and it happens early. The girl they find is naked, filthy and has clearly been on her own a long time.

There is cruelty from adults too. A leader who keeps his people afraid on purpose, and a father whose shame at his own son leaks into everything he says to him.

For an 11 year old who reads Norse myths and wants the cold version rather than the tidied one, that is the appeal. For a child still upset by animals or people dying, this is one to leave a year or two.

What to read next

For more of the same author in the same key, The Book of Dead Days follows a boy with no name and no past, assistant to a magician who has six days left to save his own life.