For some days thereafter there was peace. Then a snow-whisper came, and the inland hills and the peaked summits of the isles were white. The cold grew deeper day by day; at each dawn the frost bit with a keener grip. The bitter hardships of the children of Lir were now more almost than they could bear. Nevertheless, they had a yet more dreadful trial to endure: for at mid-winter there came a tempest of whirling snow and icy wind so fierce and terrible, that for a day and a night the waves were strewn with the dead bodies of sea-mews and terns. Nothing the four swans had ever suffered was like unto what they suffered at this time. But when Fionula had again found and sheltered her dear ones, and mothered them with her great love, she knew that whatever their sufferings they would now surely endure until the end. Had they been subject to the mortal law, they could not have survived that dreadful day, and still more awful night. And so another year passed. The worst sorrow of the children of Lir was their great loneliness, a thing more bitter than hunger or thirst or any privation. They longed for their kind as the first white flowers of the year long for the sun. When mid-winter came again a terrible frost arose. All the north isles were like black bosses in a gleaming shield, for sheets of ice covered the seas, and each island was gripped as in an iron vice. Day by day the cold grew more terrible. On the morrow of the ninth day the four children of Lir thought that the end of their misery was at hand. The whole sea was one solid floor of ice; the isle of Carrick-na-ron, where they were, was like a black iceberg; into ice lapsed each faint failing breath that they drew with ever greater pain. Each morning they had waked to find their feet frozen to the rock, and even the edges of their wings; and a bitter thing it was to tear themselves free, and to leave clinging to the rock the soft feathers of their breasts and the outer quills of their wings and the skin of their feet. How fain each was of death! How gladly they would have passed away from the world of the living, though in exile, and longing with aching hearts to see once more their own dear land and the faces of those whom they loved! But their doom was on them, and they could not leave the sea of Moyle, nor could they win death. The brave heart of Fionula knew this. She knew too what cruel pain it would give her and her brothers to swim through the salt seas with their bleeding wounds, for the brine would enter them and cause agony. Nevertheless, she led them forth towards the coast of the mainland. There they found a fjord and a haven amid the pine-clad shores, and before long their wounds were healed, and the feathers on their wings and breasts grew again.