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“You are the one to do it, Colum,” said this king, “as heroes have before you.”

Colum, who had blushed with relief, and pride, changed over again in his mood.

“What would that be, that you want doing by me, your honor?”

“Why, that you rid the land of the threefold bane that’s on it. For only through a song can it be done.”

Colum gazed round wildly.

The Speir-Bhan poised at his elbow, cool as Sunday lettuce.

“What do I say now?” he asked her. “Tell me, quick.”

“Say yes.”

Colum cleared his throat. She was his muse, but he knew some of the old tales, in one of which he seemed presently to be snared. A “bane” could only be something bad, some fiendly thing, and it was “threefold” as well. And he was to tackle it?

Before he could speak, either way, the noise in the hall, which was still coming and going like waves, died again in an instant. The hall doors shot open, and in trudged a group of men, and they too were patched in bloodred, but now it was not any dye, and it was wet.

“They are out again,” cried one.

Another shouted, “My wife they have killed! My lovely wife, and my child in her body!”

“And my living son!” cried another.

Then all the group roared out examples of death, even of whole villages laid waste, doors and roofs torn away, and babies dragged out on the track, rent and devoured.

“No pity, they have none.”

Shadow fell in the gleaming hall of Seanaibh. The candles faded. Colum stood in the dimness, and the fey woman he had sung to, she with the hair of golden shackles, she stood there before him, one last torch that blazed.

“Those they speak of are three uncanny women, Colum, that with every full moon become three black foxes, each large as a boar. They roam the hills and do as you have heard, killing and eating humankind. The one geas on them they must obey, makes them love the music and song. If any goes where they are that has great skill in these things, he will live. Oh, warriors have gone out against them, with swords, and been brought home in joints, what was left. But you are the harper. Once they were slain before, in this way, this sort of way. Listen, Colum, if you will do this, I will gift you a sip of Immortality from under the hills.You shall live a happy hundred full years in the world of men, and die soft and peaceful in your bed.”

IT WAS AT THIS POINT in my great-grandfather’s story that I had to turn a page of his book.What should I find on the other side, but this:

“I woke at the roadside in the dusk before the dawn.My head was sore and the road looked as you would expect. So I knew I had dreamed it.”

And then; “Next week, in the town, I noted a very taking girl.Her name is Mairi O’Connell.”

There follows the list of young women I mentioned before.

WHEN I READ THIS, over the page, I thought at first other pages had been torn out. But there was no evidence of that.

Then I thought, Well, he spun his tale but had no idea of how to go on with it. So he leaves it in this unsatisfying way—as if someone had set a rare old meal in front of you, with meat and fruit and cakes and cream, tea in the pot, wine in the glass, and a little something stronger on the side, but as you pull up your chair, the feast is carried off, a door closes on it, and there you are, hungry and thirsty, the wrong side.

Madly I thought, If it was a dream, still he did it.

For she promised him a hundred years of life, and he wrote of that in the faded ink of his youth, as of the promise of a soft death—and both of them he had.

Then, that night when I had my own dream that I met Colum in Ireland, in the stone house, he told me this, the very matters that should have been there on the following pages.

He said, once the fey woman had spoken, the castle faded like its light, and all the people with it, human and un, and there instead he was, on the savage hills that ran behind the cliff. The moon had put off her handkerchief, and was round, and pale as a dollar.

Up from the ancient woods of oak and thorn there ran three shapes, which cast their