Leif Frond and the Viking Games Read Online Free Page A

down. Nobody shoots their best when they’re all fussed and twitchy.”
    â€œBut… but…” I spluttered. “I was the one who hit the right place. On the target. I was the one who made the boar flame.”
    â€œThat
wasn’t magic,” grunted Queue.
    â€œWell, what was it then?” I squeaked.
    â€œThat? Oh, that was just Fate!” And with a nod, the Artificer turned on his heel and walked away.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The Rough and the (Very) Smooth
    N ow, the thing about Viking Games is – they can get a bit rough. Well, actually, they can get
very
rough. And the roughest event of all is the wrestling. In a normal match you can confidently expect damage to be done to one or both of the contestants. And with the prize of a place in Blogfeld’s ship for the season dangling before them, the young men obviously thought this wasn’t the day to start being delicate with each other. That (and Granny’s laxative-lacedmead) was having a big impact on the number of casualties.
    My sisters were up to their eyeballs in wounded contestants and it was only by shifting ground constantly that I managed to avoid having to help them dust the losers down and patch them up. I hadn’t time for anything like that –
I
had to keep my eyes on the
unofficial
contestants.
    Where were they all? As I skirted the edge of the wrestling ring I could see my father, with Blogfeld beside him. And powering up the hill towards them both, I could also see the Widow. (She’d obviously been making use of our bathhouse to wash off the worst of the soot from Queue’s target, and she was still dripping round the edges.) There was a predatory gleam in her eyes as she parted the crowd the way the prow of a ship parts the waves.
    I had to head her off.
    Have you ever had one of those nightmares where you want to run but your legs go all treacle-y? This was exactly like that. I tried my hardest to push past all the people but I couldn’t get them to let me through. I poked and pinched and elbowed and got precisely nowhere. It was only when I dropped to my hands and knees and started
crawling
through the crowd that I made some headway.
    Unfortunately it was while I was doing that, down on all fours, that my path and the Widow’s converged.
    It was like a mighty oak toppling over in the forest, only with added screeching.
    I watched, helpless, terrified the Widow would crush the life out of any poor soul she landed on. Even my father wouldn’t have been able to withstand the equivalent of half a mountain falling on top of him. But there was one man there that day who could
–
and luckily for the Widow, that was the man who caught her. Harald Blogfeld gave a great grunt and his knees buckled with the effort of breaking her fall, but he didn’t let her hit the ground.
    â€œOh. Oh! Thank you, kind sir,” simpered the Widow as he hauled her upright again.
    â€œNnnn… nurgle… er…” The Champion of the Waves seemed oddly tongue-tied, but that was probably because he’d just had all the breath forcibly knocked out of him.
    I staggered to my feet, grabbed my father by the arm and dragged him away from the giant couple.
    â€œThanks, lad!” murmured my father. “Now just see what your granny’s up to, would you? You know what she’s like about the wrestling!”
    I did know.
    She wasn’t hard to find. There she was, as I’d expected, right at the front. Granny is
always
in the front row at wrestling matches. The fact is, she’s not so much interested in wrestling as she is in commenting on how the contestants look in just their shorts. As each pair of young men came into the ring she got louder and louder.
    â€œWould you just look at those muscles?! Ooo, come on gorgeous give us a ripple! My, he does strip off nicely, doesn’t he? His father had a lovely body too, as I remember…”
    I kept trying to shush her but it