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To be parted from my dear children, it is that is tormenting my heart. "It is a bad net I put over you, bringing Aoife, daughter of Oilell of Aran, to the house. I would never have followed that advice if I had known what it would bring upon me.
And then the four children of Lir turned toward Aoife, and this is what Fionnuala said: "It is a bad deed you have done, Aoife, and it is a bad fulfilling of friendship, you to destroy us without cause; and vengeance for it will come upon you, and you will fall in satisfaction for it, for your power for our destruction is not greater than the power of our friends to avenge it on you; and put some bounds now," she said, "to the time this enchantment is to stop on us."
And when the boy had learnt all and was the perfect warrior, Aoifé sent him out to Ireland under a pledge to refuse his name to any that should ask it, well knowing how the wardens of the coast would stop him on the shore. It fell out as she purposed. The young Connlaoch defeated champion after champion till Cuchulain himself went down, and was recognised by his son.
The child born was a son, and Aoifé reared him and taught him all feats of arms that could be taught to a mortal, except one only, and of that feat only Cuchulain was master: "the way," said James Kelly, prefacing his ballad with such an explanation as I am now giving, "there would be none could kill him but his own father."
But all the same she was not able to escape from what was before her. And when they were on their way Aoife said to her people: "Let you kill now," she said, "the four children of Lir, for whose sake their father has given up my love, and I will give you your own choice of a reward out of all the good things of the world."
It is downhearted and sorrowful Lir was at that news, for he understood well it was Aoife had destroyed or made an end of his children. And early in the morning of the morrow his horses were caught, and he set out on the road to the Southwest.
But the pledge tied Connlaoch's tongue, and only when he lay dying, slain by the magic throw which Aoifé had withheld from his knowledge, could he reveal himself to his father, the great and childless hero, whose lament for his lost son is written in the song that I set out to secure, on a day of sun and rain, last summer, when great soft clouds drove full sail through the moist atmosphere, their shadows sweeping over brown moor and green valley, while far away towards the sea, mountain peaks rose purple and amethystine in the distance.
And after they had keened her it is what Bodb Dearg said: "It is a fret to us our daughter to have died, for her own sake and for the sake of the good man we gave her to, for we are thankful for his friendship and his faithfulness. However," he said, "our friendship with one another will not be broken, for I will give him for a wife her sister Aoife."
There was no trial that Cuchulain could not support, and the fame of him drew on a combat with another Amazonian warrior, Aoifé, who, in the story that I heard, was Sgathach's daughter, though Lady Gregory in her fine book Cuchulain of Muirthemne gives another version.
Bodb Dearg gave a great start when he heard that, and he knew what Lir said was true, and he gave a very sharp reproach to Aoife, and he said: "This treachery will be worse for yourself in the end, Aoife, than to the children of Lir. And what shape would you yourself think worst of being in?" he said. "I would think worst of being a witch of the air," she said.
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