One day she went on a visit to her father’s court, and when she returned to her lessons she found that her twelve tutors had been murdered, and there was nothing to tell who had killed them.
From that moment her nature changed. She put on the dress of a female warrior, gathered a company about her, and went marauding and plundering in every direction. She was no longer called Assa (the Gentle), but Nessa, or the Ungentle, was her name thenceforth.
Cathfa, the son of Ross, was then a young, powerful, and ambitious man, learning magic, or practising what he had learned, and it was he had slain the tutors, but Nessa did not know this. It may be that Cathfa had visited the tutors during her absence, and, for young magicians do not love argument, he may have killed them after a dispute.
Once, on one of her marauding expeditions, she went questing in a wilderness. At a distance there was a spring of clear water, and, while her people were preparing food, Nessa went to this spring to bathe. She was in the water when Cathfa passed, for he also was in that wilderness, and when he saw the girl’s body he loved her, for she was young and lovely. He approached, and placed himself between the girl and her dress and weapons, and he held a sword over her head.
“Spare me,” she pleaded.
“If you will be my wife I will spare you,” said Cathfa.
She agreed to that, for no other course was open to her, and they rejoined her party.
They were married, and Nessa’s father gave them a bride-gift of land, called afterwards Rath Cathfa, in the country of the Picts in Crí Ross. In time a son was born to those two, namely, Conachúr mac Nessa, for it was by his mother’s name he was known, and it was for him that Cathfa made the poem beginning:
Welcome to the stranger that has come here.
There are some who say, however, that Fachtna the Mighty had been the leman of Nessa, and that it was he was the father of Conachúr instead of Cathfa. If so, as Fachtna was the son of Maga, who was daughter of Anger mac an Og of the Brugh, then Conachúr had the blood of a god in his veins as well as the blood of a mortal, and much of his great success and of his terrible failure can be accounted for; for the gods are unlucky in love, so, too, the son of a wise mother is unlucky in love, as is also the man who is fortunate in war.