“For,” he said, “if my father were alive he would have been with me this day, or, if peradventure that were not possible, would have sent me a sign. Howsoever this may be, something within me tells that my father is no longer among the living. And now, ye who hear me, listen, for by the Sun and the Moon and the Wind I swear that I shall not slake this bitter thirst of mine, nor rest this over-weary head, until I have found how and where and when an evil fate came upon my father, whom I loved as I have loved and love none other.”
That night Lu Ildanna, with a hundred chosen men, rode swiftly to Tara, but there found no word of Kian.
On the morrow he set forth at dawn, alone; for in a dream it had come to him that his father lay moaning beneath the thistle-strewn grass on the stony plain of Moy Murhenna. And there, in truth, Lu came upon the end of his quest; for as he rode slowly and sadly across the plain, whereon he could not discern a living being save a vast herd of swine, he heard, as one may hear in a shell, a plaintive sighing.
“What is that sighing?” he cried. “Is it the death-sigh of thee, Kian my father?”
There was no answer save the strange sighing, that was not of the wind or any moving thing, but seemed now to come from above, now from around, now from beneath. But at the third asking, a voice answered, thin and feeble:
“It is the death-sighing of me, Kian thy father, O Lu my son.”
“And who put death upon thee, thou who liest there in the darkness of the shadow of death?”
“The three sons of Turenn slew me here in this waste place. And because that they slew me in no fair strife, and because that they finished their slaying by crushing me with great stones till there was not left of me one bone alive, I cry to thee, O Lu my son, whom men now call Lu the Ildanna, because of thy craft and wisdom, to see that a greater eric be exacted for me than has ever yet been exacted in Erin for any slain man. And in the end see that thou sparest not, for otherwise there shall be a greater bloodshed still; and ill it befits us, who are noble, that we should bring a tide of blood over Erin, for no worthier cause than the wiping out of that which lies between the clan of Kian and the clan of Turenn.”
“As thou sayest, O Kian my father, so shall it be, and even unto the end. And this I swear by the Sun and by the Moon and by the Wind.”
Nevertheless, Lu showed no grief till he saw his father’s bruised body before him, and then he bewailed bitterly that he had not been nigh when the sons of Turenn drove Kian the Noble to his fate; and bitterly he lamented that one of the noble Dedannan race should be slain by Dedannans; and bitterly he swore that an eric should be exacted such as never before had been heard of in Erin, and that in the end, even were it fulfilled, he should not spare, because of what Kian had foreseen.