Freyas Saga Ch. 02

Then, she quietly took his sword and his sword belt, and rose to her feet. She leaned over him, looking at him, looking at what had been done to him.

Her face a bloody mask, she walked out of the stable and went back into the castle. She walked up the stairs, naked and blood-streaked, back to the room she had shared with her brother.

In the room, she looked around and saw her own jerkin and breeches and boots, and his armour. She dressed in her clothes, and donned his armour.

Then she looked at herself in the glass, and took a knife, and cut her hair short to match his.

Then, when she resembled her brother as best she could, she put on his sword belt, and put his sword in his scabbard, with his blood still on it, and she went back down to the stables.

She ignored the lifeless body of her brother on the ground, and woke her own horse, and mounted him, and rode out into the night.

***

The old sagas record that, some days after the return of the party from Casman, one of its number, Siegfa, a young knight, was found murdered in Baron Hargest's stable. His throat had been cut. To add the luridness of the crime, he was naked when he was found. His sister, to whom he was devoted, was nowhere to be found. As Hargest's men searched the castle for the culprit, they found the naked corpse of a serving girl in the cesspit. She had been drowned; marks were found on her neck to show that she'd been held down, and it was also evident that she had been intimate with a man relatively recently.

Suspicion immediately feel upon Siegfa's sister. It was rumoured that her feelings for her brother were unhealthy, and that she had found him in the stable with the girl. The court of inquiry found in the sister's absence that she had killed her brother on the spot and then chased the unfortunate girl, found her hiding in the cesspit, had murdered her too, then fled. It was well known that Siegfa's sister could withstand the fumes of the cesspit because it was part of the legend of how she and her brother had been found.

The sagas end without further mention of Siegfa's sister, but as far as they were concerned, that's what she was: the jealous, murderous, tormented, incest-obsessed sister of a brave, handsome youth who had been having robust, manly fun with a willing wench.

The sagas were wrong.