A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

he stood, and greeted him in the glad voices of his own dear children.
All that night he stayed beside them, and when they had told him their
piteous tale and he knew that no power could free them till the years of
their doom were accomplished, Lîr's heart was like to break with
pitying love and infinite sorrow. At dawn he took a tender leave of
them and drove to the house of Bodb the Red. Terrible were the words
of Lîr, and dark was his face as he told the king the evil thing that Eva
had done. And Eva, who had thought in the madness of her jealousy
that Lîr would give her all his love when he was a childless man,
shrank, white and trembling, away from him when she saw the furious
hatred in his eyes. Then said the king, and his anger was even as the
anger of Lîr:
"The suffering of the little children who are dear to our souls shall
come to an end at last. Thine shall be an eternal doom."
And he put her on oath to tell him "what shape of all others, on the
earth, or above the earth, or beneath the earth, she most abhorred, and
into which she most dreaded to be transformed."
"A demon of the air," answered the cowering woman.
"A demon of the air shalt thou be until time shall cease!" said her
foster-father. Thereupon he smote her with his druidical wand, and a
creature too hideous for men's eyes to look upon, gave a great scream
of anguish, and flapped its black wings as it flew away to join the other
demons of the air.
Then the king of the Dedannans and all his people went with Lîr to
Lake Darvra, and listened to the honey-sweet melodies that were sung
to them by the white swans that had been the children of their hearts.
And such magic was in the music that it could lull away all sorrow and
pain, and give rest to the grief-stricken and sleep to the toil-worn and
the heavy at heart. And the Dedannans made a great encampment on
the shores of the lake that they might never be far from them. There,
too, as the centuries went by, came the Milesians, who succeeded the
Dedannans in Erin, and so for the children of Lîr three hundred years
passed happily away.