She Cried Abuse. It Was a Lie. They All Died.

Before Dawn

A woman walks barefoot through freezing darkness, dew soaking through her husband's cloak. She moves silently toward a house where people lie sleeping--people she sailed to this new world with, people who trusted her. By sunrise, she will do something so brutal that her own men will refuse to help her finish. She'll finish it herself.

What set this in motion? A single lie, told in the dark, to a husband too weak to question it.

---

The Wolf and the Sheep

Greenland, 1009 AD. The great hall at Brattahlid blazed with firelight and ambition. A ship had recently arrived from Norway, commanded by two brothers named Helgi and Finnbogi--men descended from an Icelandic family of the East Fjords, seeking fortune in this harsh colony at the edge of the known world.

Freydis watched them from across the hall. Not the way a host watches guests. The way a wolf watches sheep that haven't noticed the treeline.

She was Erik the Red's daughter--the only daughter--and she had inherited her father's ruthless drive without his fame. Her brothers had claimed the glory: Leif had discovered Vinland, that rich land across the western sea. Thorvald had died there heroically, an arrow through his chest. Even Thorstein, though he perished of sickness before reaching those shores, was remembered fondly.

But Freydis? The saga writers would call her "a very haughty woman," married to Thorvard, "a man of little force of character," wedded to him "chiefly because of his wealth." She lived in his shadow at Gardar, watching ships come and go, hearing stories of the riches Karlsefni had brought back from Vinland--grapes, timber, furs worth a fortune. While her brothers' names echoed across Greenland, hers was barely a whisper.

That was about to change.

She studied the brothers all evening. Noted how they laughed too easily. How they shook hands on deals without counting the teeth in the other person's smile. How they believed what they were told. By the time the fire burned low, she had made a decision: these men would fund her expedition to Vinland. And when it was over, she would have everything they brought with them.

She approached them with a proposition. They would sail together to Vinland. They would split everything equally--the lumber, the furs, the grapes. They would share Leif's house, which he had built years ago and still owned. Her voice was warm. Her handshake was firm. Her eyes never stopped calculating.

Helgi and Finnbogi agreed. What merchant wouldn't?

Freydis shook their hands. And before the warmth of their palms had faded from hers, she was already planning how to cheat them.

---

The Hidden Five

That same summer, the expedition took shape. They agreed that each party would bring thirty able-bodied men on their ships, besides the women.

Freydis smiled and agreed.

Then she went home and recruited thirty-five.

She hid the extra five where nobody would discover them until they reached the New World. Five more swords. Five more axes. Five men who would tip the balance when the time came. The brothers were still counting their supplies, dreaming of honest profit. Freydis was counting weapons.

The expedition set sail with two ships cutting through gray northern waters--Freydis's vessel and the brothers'. They had agreed to travel together, to stay within sight of each other. But the seas separated them. The brothers' ship proved faster, and they arrived first at Leif's booths in Vinland.

When Freydis finally arrived and climbed the path from shore, she found them already unpacking in the house that--by any reasonable interpretation of their agreement--they had every right to use.

She stood in the doorway and let her face harden.

"Why did you carry your baggage in here?"

The brothers looked at each other. "Since we believed that all promises made to us would be kept."

"It was to me that Leif loaned the house," Freydis said, her voice cold as the wind off the glacier. "And not to you."

Helgi stared at her. This wasn't what they'd agreed. This wasn't the partnership they'd been promised. But something in her eyes--something flat and final--made him hesitate to argue.

"We can't compete with you when it comes to breaking promises," he said quietly.

They carried their belongings back out and built their own shelter from scratch--a hut above the sea, on the bank of the lake, smaller and colder than the house Freydis now occupied alone. She watched them work through the window, and she smiled. Winter was coming to this new world, and the foundation of their alliance had already cracked exactly as she'd planned.

---

A Winter of Poison

The months that followed were poison.

At first, there were games--competitions between the two camps to pass the long darkness. Vikings played board games, wrestling matches, tests of strength. But what begins as sport can curdle into something else when resentment festers underneath.

The games stopped. The visits between houses stopped. Two groups of Greenlanders sat in the same foreign wilderness, a stone's throw apart, and pretended the other didn't exist. The brothers' people cut their own wood, caught their own fish, nursed their own grievances.

Freydis watched it all with satisfaction. Discord was useful. Isolated people are easier to destroy.

All winter, she waited. All winter, she planned.

The brothers had a larger ship. That was the problem. When spring came, whoever had the bigger vessel could carry more cargo home--more timber, more furs, more wealth. Freydis had cheated her way to extra men, but Helgi and Finnbogi had the superior ship.

Every night, lying awake in Leif's house, she stared at the ceiling and thought about that ship. About what she would have to do to get it.

She decided what she would have to do. And she felt nothing.

---

The Performance

One morning, when frost still clung to the grass, Freydis rose before dawn. She dressed quietly, but not completely--no shoes, no stockings. She wrapped herself in her husband's cloak and slipped out into the gray half-light.

This was the performance of her life, and every detail had to be perfect.

The brothers' hut stood by the lake, its door left ajar by a man who'd stepped out moments before. She pushed it open and stood in the doorway, silent, watching.

Finnbogi lay awake. In the dim light, he could make out her shape--barefoot, hair loose, her husband's cloak dark with dew. She looked like a woman who had fled something.

"What do you want, Freydis?"

"Come outside with me. I need to talk to you."

He followed her to a fallen tree near the house. The morning was cold and quiet. Whatever she wanted, it was important enough to drag her out here half-dressed in the dark.

"How do you like it here?" she asked.

A strange question. Finnbogi answered carefully. "The land is good. Rich. But I'm not happy about this rift between us. There's been no reason for it."

"You're right," Freydis agreed, her voice soft and reasonable. "I feel the same way." She paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough. "Here's why I came: I want to trade ships with you. Yours is larger than mine, and I want to leave this place."

Finnbogi considered. It was an unusual request--her ship was perfectly seaworthy--but if it would mend the breach, perhaps it was worth it.

"If that's what you want," he said, "then I agree."

"Then we have a deal."

They parted. Freydis walked back through the wet grass, and as soon as her back was turned, she let the mask drop. Her face settled into something hard and cold. Finnbogi had just given her the larger ship. He had just believed her one final time.

Now she needed to make sure he never told anyone what had actually happened in this conversation.

---

The Lie

Freydis climbed back into bed beside her husband. Thorvard woke to the shock of her ice-cold feet against his legs.

"Why are you so cold and wet?"

What came next was a lie so deliberate, so perfectly performed, that it would condemn thirty people to death.

"I went to see the brothers." Her voice shook--not with rage, but with a tremor she'd practiced in her head a dozen times. "I tried to buy their ship. And they treated me so badly--" She let her voice crack. "They hit me. Shoved me around. Called me things I won't repeat."

She turned to face him in the dark, and though he couldn't see her eyes clearly, he could hear the steel beneath the tears.

"And you, you coward. You won't lift a finger to defend your own wife." She sat up, letting her voice harden. "If we were back in Greenland, this would never stand. Every man in your family would ride down on them. But you'll just lie here, won't you? While your wife is beaten and humiliated."

She paused, knowing exactly where the knife needed to go.

"I'll leave you. I swear it. I'll leave you unless you make them pay for this. And everyone will know why."

Thorvard had never been a forceful man. The sagas tell us he married Freydis for her father's name, and she married him for his silver. Their union was a transaction, not a partnership. But even weak men have pride, and Freydis had spent years learning exactly where her husband's breaking points were.

She had given him no choice that left his honor intact. Either he proved himself a man capable of defending his wife--or she would leave him, and everyone would know he was too much of a coward to avenge her.

Thorvard's hands were shaking as he dressed.

"Wake the men," he said.

Freydis lay back in the dark, and she smiled.

---

The Slaughter

They came in the gray dawn, armed with swords and axes. The brothers' household was still asleep--thirty people who had done nothing but trust a handshake made months ago in a Greenland hall.

Freydis led the way.

Her men dragged them out one by one. The brothers--bleary, confused, asking what was happening--were bound first. Then their crew. Every man who had sailed with them to this new world, seeking fortune.

"What is this?" Helgi shouted, struggling against the ropes. "Freydis, we made a deal--we agreed--"

"You struck my wife," Thorvard said. "You beat her."

"We did no such--"

"Enough talking." Freydis's voice was flat. "Kill them."

The saga is blunt about what happened next: "as they came out, Freydis caused each one to be slain." One by one. Methodically. The brothers died staring at the woman who had smiled at them in the hall at Brattahlid. Their crew died without ever understanding why.

But then the killing stopped.

Five women remained--the wives and servants who had accompanied the expedition. Freydis's men stood over them, weapons in hand, and would not strike.

There were lines even Vikings wouldn't cross. Killing unarmed women violated every code they knew. These weren't shieldmaidens. They weren't enemy combatants. They were women who cooked meals and mended clothes, and no man there would add their blood to what had already been spilled.

Freydis looked at her men. She looked at their hesitation, their weakness, their pathetic attachment to honor.

"Hand me an axe."

Someone--perhaps hoping she was bluffing, perhaps too terrified to refuse--placed a weapon in her hand.

---

The Axe

She killed all five herself.

The saga gives us no details about how. No last words, no pleas for mercy. Just the flat statement: "she fell upon the five women, and left them dead."

But here is what we know about killing with an axe: it is not quick, and it is not quiet. It requires strength, and commitment, and a willingness to keep swinging when what's in front of you stops looking human. Five times, Freydis raised that axe. Five times, she brought it down. Her men--men who had just slaughtered the brothers' entire crew--couldn't watch.

Freydis could.

When it was done, thirty people who had sailed to Vinland lay dead. None would sail home.

Freydis turned to her surviving companions--her husband's men, her hidden five, the people who had just watched Erik the Red's daughter do what none of them would do. Blood was still warm on her hands. Her voice was perfectly calm.

"If we make it back to Greenland," she said, "I will kill any man who breathes a word of what happened here. We tell everyone we left them alive. Understood?"

No one argued. No one met her eyes. They had followed her across an ocean. Now they understood who they had followed.

They loaded the brothers' larger ship with timber, furs, and grapes--all the wealth of Vinland. In early spring, they sailed east across waters that had seen Vikings come and go for years, carrying cargo and carrying a secret.

They arrived in Eriksfjord that summer to find Karlsefni preparing his own ship to depart, its hold already full with goods from his Vinland voyage. Two ships in the harbor, both heavy with New World riches. But only one carried the blood of thirty innocent people in its timbers.

---

The Secret Unravels

Freydis went home to Gardar and distributed gifts with an open hand. Silver for silence. Gold for forgetting. She was generous to everyone who had been there, everyone who knew.

She slept well. She always slept well.

But secrets have their own weight, and some men drink to forget.

Rumors began to spread. Whispers in the halls at Brattahlid. Questions about the brothers who never came home. Where were Helgi and Finnbogi? Why had none of their crew returned with them? Why did Freydis's men grow quiet and pale whenever anyone mentioned Vinland?

Eventually, the whispers reached Leif Eiriksson--Freydis's brother, the discoverer of Vinland, the most respected man in Greenland.

Leif seized three of Freydis's men and forced confessions from them all at the same time. He separated them, questioned them separately, compared their stories. They matched exactly. The false accusation. The dawn attack. The bound men, killed one by one. The five women, and the axe.

Leif stood in his hall with the truth finally spoken aloud, and faced an impossible choice. This was his sister. Erik the Red's daughter. Punishing her meant publicly destroying what remained of his father's legacy--admitting that the family who had discovered and settled Greenland, who had found the rich lands to the west, had produced a monster.

"I don't have it in me to punish my own sister the way she deserves," Leif said finally. His voice was hollow. "But mark my words: nothing good will come to her children."

It was both a curse and a surrender. Leif couldn't bring himself to execute his own blood. But he could make sure everyone knew what she had done--and what she truly was.

From that day forward, the saga tells us, no one thought Freydis or her family worthy of anything but contempt. She lived out her years at Gardar, wealthy from Vinland's plunder, surrounded by people who knew her crime and despised her for it. Her children inherited not prosperity but shame--the weight of thirty deaths that their mother had carried home across the sea.

And Freydis? By all accounts, she never showed a moment of remorse. She had gotten away with it. That was all that mattered.

---

Immortality

A thousand years later, we remember Leif Eiriksson as the man who found Vinland. We remember Gudrid, who bore the first European child in the Americas. We remember Karlsefni, the merchant who mapped these western shores.

But we also remember Freydis.

Not because she was strong--many Viking women were strong. Not because she was ambitious--ambition drove every ship that crossed the North Atlantic. We remember her because she showed us something true about human nature: that some people see others not as fellow humans, but as obstacles. Resources. Problems to be solved.

Freydis wanted what her brothers had--the glory, the fame, the legacy. She was willing to lie for it, to cheat for it, to manipulate, to scheme, and finally to butcher for it. She got her ship full of treasure. She got home safe. She got away with murder, legally speaking, because her own brother couldn't bear to condemn her.

But the sagas condemned her anyway. They preserved her story for a thousand years, not as a cautionary tale buried in footnotes, but as a central chapter in the discovery of the New World. Every time we tell the story of how Vikings reached America, we tell the story of what Freydis did there--and what she was willing to do.

In the end, the woman who murdered for Vinland got exactly what she deserves: immortality. Just not the kind she wanted.