When the song had died out, the crone who had first spoken, said: 'We
have nothing more to do but to mix a drop of our blood into his
blood.' And she scratched her arm with the sharp point of a spindle,
which she had made the nurse bring to her, and let a drop of blood,
grey as the mist, fall upon the lips of the child; and passed out
into the darkness. Then the others passed out in silence one by one;
and all the while the child had not opened his pink eyelids or the
fire ceased to dance, for the one was too ignorant and the other too
full of gaiety to know what great beings had bent over the cradle.
When the crones were gone, the nurse came to her courage again, and
hurried to the dun of the High-King, and cried out in the midst of
the assembly hall that the Sidhe, whether for good or evil she knew
not, had bent over the child that night; and the king and his poets
and men of law, and his huntsmen, and his cooks, and his chief
warriors went with her to the hut and gathered about the cradle, and
were as noisy as magpies, and the child sat up and looked at them.
Two years passed over, and the king died fighting against the Fer
Bolg; and the poets and the men of law ruled in the name of the
child, but looked to see him become the master himself before long,
for no one had seen so wise a child, and tales of his endless
questions about the household of the gods and the making of the world
went hither and thither among the wicker houses of the poor.
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