“Sudden is your desire to die since you come to me so early, and haven’t given me leave to eat my breakfast; but that is the thing that will make your own life shorter. Stretch out your hand that I may see if it was you were here yesterday.”
She stretched out her two hands and he found the tips of her two little fingers were cut off, and he said she must have got advice from the smith when she did that. She took up from the ground the sword the smith gave her. When he saw the sword he begged for quarter for his life, for he knew the sword was equal to half the world, and that it was no good for him to fight against it. He said he would give her all he ever saw upon the earth, but would not face that sword she had.
“I am asking nothing of you except your sword of light and the divided stone of your druidism.”
“Those are the two things that it is worst for me to part from.”
He went in and brought them out to her, and she went with herself to the smith, and she spent that night at the smith’s house, and gave him a good hansel of gold for the sword he gave her. “Now,” said the smith, “though he put you under bonds to bring the sword to him, you did not promise more than to bring it to him. When you come to him and the things with you, and you take them up in your two hands and show them to him, you will say, though you promised to bring them to him, you did not promise to bring them for him and you will let them go, and they will be with me here in the winking of your eye. Unless they come back to me, the King of Rye will put me to death, as he knows I gave you my sword; and there will be peace made between him and me, and the quarrel between us will be at an end.”[17]
And when the first wife saw the second wife with her own eyes, she could esteem herself no longer, and she died of a broken heart.
[14] It must be supposed that the druid gave him further directions for his conduct as appears by the sequel.
[15] Piast is a Gaelic monster, not exactly equivalent to either serpent or dragon.