That night the King’s foster-daughters kept awake for long, and after
Baun had sung to them they asked her to tell them what had happened in
the Castle. Then Baun remembered the tumult in the kitchen that had come
from the name given to Breas. She told the King’s foster-daughters that
Morag had come back. “She was reared in the same house with us,” said
Baun, “but she is not of the same parents.” And then she said; “If your
Fair Finenesses can remember, tell the Queen that Morag has come back.”
The next day when they were walking with the Queen one of the King’s
foster-daughters said, “Did you know of a maid named Morag? I have heard
that she has been away and has come back.”
“How did she fare?” said the Queen.
“We have not heard that,” said the maiden who spoke.
The Queen went to where Baun and Deelish were and from them she heard
that Morag had been put into the Stone House on the charge that she had
broken the King’s dish when she had been in the Castle before. Now the
Queen knew that the dish had been safe after Morag had left. She went
to the King’s Steward and accused him of having broken it and Breas
admitted that it was so. Thereupon he lost his rank and became the
meanest and the most despised servant in the Castle.
The Queen went to the Stone House and took Morag out. She asked her how
she had fared and thereupon Morag put the Rowan Berry in the Queen’s
hand. She hastened to her own chamber and ate it, and her youth and
beauty came back to her, and the King who had grown solitary, loved the
Queen again.
Then Morag came to great honor in the Castle and the Queen asked her
to name the greatest favor she could think of. And the favor that Morag
named was marriages for her foster-sisters with the two youths they
loved, Downal and Dermott from the court of the King of Ireland.
The Queen, when she heard this, brought fine clothes out of her chests
and gave them to Baun and Deelish. When they had dressed in these
clothes the Queen made them known to the two youths. Downal and Dermott
fell in love with Morag’s foster-sisters, and the King named a day for
the pairs to marry.
Morag waited to see the marriages, and the King and Queen made it a
grand affair. There were seven hundred guests at the short table,
eight hundred at the long table, nine hundred at the round table, and
a thousand in the great hall. I was there, and I heard the whole story.
But I got no present save shoes of paper and stockings of butter-milk
and these a herdsman stole from me as I crossed the mountains.
But Morag got better presents, for the Queen gave her three gifts--a
scissors that cut cloth of itself, a ball of thread that went into the
needle of itself, and a needle that sewed of itself.
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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