Leif Frond and Quickfingers by Joan Lennon Page A

little brother, not laundry.” Thorhalla purred. “I couldn’t ask a hero-in-the-making like you to do anything so lowly.” She was enjoying this. (She also had a good hold on my sleeve by now, so I couldn’t run away. She has an unfairly enormous set of fists. When Thorhalla grips something, it stays gripped.) I was just wondering how on earth she knew about me wanting to be a hero, when she went on to say, “Not exactly laundry, anyway. More like… dyeing!” and my heart sank.
    I should have realised. There’d been a pretty horrible smell hanging over the settlement for a couple of days now, which should have alerted me to the fact that my granny was making dye. The recipe involved stewing up crushed plants in the big vat behind the stable and making a horrible smell. Come to think of it, this was probably her blue lot, because we’d all been out harvesting wild woad leaves not that long ago.
    As Thorhalla dragged me round the corner of the stables, the stink really hit. The other poor souls she’d recruited were all holding their noses and making faces. Except for my granny, whose nose barely works any more.
    â€œRun!” I cried to them all, gesturing wildly towards the mountains with my free hand. “Save yourselves! I will do battle with the Oppressor!”
    You’d think they’d take advantage of my heroic offer, but all they did was giggle. Thorhalla glared at me, just like the troll woman I knew her to be. I crossed my eyes, and dug in my heels. She turned, took hold of both my sleeves and started to drag me towards the vat of dye.
    Slick as an eel, I ducked my head, straightened my arms and slithered out of my sister’s grasp. The effect on my sister was, well, dramatic. Flapping and flailing, she staggered backwards, desperately trying to regain her balance, every second getting closer and closer to that great big vat of smelly blue dye.
    For a moment, time slowed down, just the way it did in my daydream. Then it speeded up again – my sister, shrieking, fell backwards. As her bottom landed in the vat, a lovely stinky fountain of blueness sploshed, up and up, and then down again, all over her head – and, well, I had to admit it. It was even better than my daydream.
    â€œLeif!”
shrieked Thorhalla.
“I am going to kill you!” Followed by, “Get me out of here!”

    No one was particularly keen to get close to her at that moment. She was sat in a vat, dripping blue and smelling really strongly of plants that had been rotting for just that bit too long. Her hair hung down around her face like weird evil seaweed and the expression in her eyes would have frightened even our ancestor Headbasher Smorgasbord – and he fought ogres for fun.
    Nobody
was heroic enough to go near that.
    Fortunately, my granny took charge.
    â€œRight, girl – get out of my vat and off with you to the bathhouse. The rest of you, what are you gawking at? The show’s over. Go and find yourself some other work to do before I find some for you.”
    My granny can put a lot of oomph behind her voice when she wants to, and pretty soon everyone had scattered, including a furious Thorhalla, and there was only the two of us left surveying the mess.
    â€œI… I’m sorry about all that,” I said cautiously.
    My granny shrugged. “Never mind. We’ll just have to dye another day.”
    â€œBut all the work of making another batch – I really am sorry,” I said. “I know it took you ages, Granny.”
    At which point, she grabbed my sleeve, dragged my ear down to her level and pointed to my sister. As we both watched her squelching her way to the bathhouse, dripping blue goo and looking like a monster’s nightmare, my granny whispered gleefully, “It was worth it, boy! By Odin’s toenails, it was absolutely worth it!”
    And in the days that followed, I decided that even though a stinky,