Fiercely he turned to Aoife, and said, "This treachery
will be worse, Aoife, for you than for them, for they shall be
released in the end of time, but thy punishment shall be for ever."
Then he smote her with a druid wand and she became a Demon of the Air,
and flew shrieking from the hall, and in that form she abides to this
day.
[Illustration: "They made an encampment and the swans sang to them"]
As for Bov the Red, he came with his nobles and attendants to the
shores of Loch Derryvaragh, and there they made an encampment, and the
swans conversed with them and sang to them. And as the thing became
known, other tribes and clans of the People of Dana would also come
from every part of Erinn and stay awhile to listen to the swans and
depart again to their homes; and most of all came their own friends
and fellow-pupils from the Hill of the White Field. No such music as
theirs, say the historians of ancient times, ever was heard in Erinn,
for foes who heard it were at peace, and men stricken with pain or
sickness felt their ills no more; and the memory of it remained with
them when they went away, so that a great peace and sweetness and
gentleness was in the land of Erinn for those three hundred years that
the swans abode in the waters of Derryvaragh.
But one day Fionnuala said to her brethren, "Do ye know, my dear
ones, that the end of our time here is come, all but this night only?"
Then great sorrow and distress overcame them, for in the converse with
their father and kinsfolk and friends they had half forgotten that
they were no longer men, and they loved their home on Loch
Derryvaragh, and feared the angry waves of the cold northern sea.
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