“Well,” said she, “before I go with you, you must come under three conditions to me”; and he promised to come under the conditions.
“The first condition is, that you will not go to ask the King of Ireland or his great nobles for a day’s or a night’s entertainment without telling me. The next condition is, that you will not go to a change-house without putting it in my option; and the third thing, that you will never cast up to me that you found me an unwise animal (beathach mi-chéillidh) in the wood.”
They reached the old tumble-down black house, and the wife he had left there was a faggot-bundle of bones in a pool of rain-drip in the middle of the floor. They cut grass in clefts and ledges of the rocks, and made a bed, and laid down.
O’Cronicert’s wakening from sleep was the lowing of cattle, and the bleating of sheep, and the neighing of mares, while he himself was in a bed of gold on wheels of silver, going from end to end of the Tower of Castle Town, the finest eye had ever seen from the beginning of the universe till the end of eternity.
“It is no wonder,” he said, “the like of this should happen to me, when I found you an unwise animal in the wood.”
“As well as you broke that condition you will break the rest; rise, and drive the cattle away to pasture.”
When he went out, there was no number to the multitude of his flock, and on a day of the days after that, while looking at the flock, he thought he would go to ask the King of Ireland for a day and night’s entertainment. He sat on the back of the old lame white horse, and went through wood, and moss, and rugged ground, till he reached the King’s house.
The King said to him, “Do you at all intend, O’Cronicert, to take your flock with you? They are to-day so numerous that the herdsmen do not know them from my own.”
“No, I have no need of them. I have a larger stock than yourself, and what has brought me is to ask yourself and nobles for a day and night’s entertainment.”
The King said to him, “We are ready, my good fellow, to go”; and there were there, as men called them, Murdoch Mac Brian, and Duncan Mac Brian, and Torgill Mac Brian, and Brian Borr Mac Cimi, and his sixteen foster-brothers with every one of them. It was when they were near the house O’Cronicert remembered he had left without telling her. He told them to make their way slowly, and he himself would go before to tell they were coming.