On that afternoon, Lewis and I were sitting out of doors, and white thorn blossoms were dropping on the calfskin from the bush above me, so I kept having to brush them away as I took down Lewis' account of the Daughter of the King Under the Waves. Suddenly he stopped; and a second later the birds, who had been singing delightfully, stopped too. "Liath is coming," Lewis announced, raising one eyebrow, "and something's wrong--"
When she came into view I saw he was right, for her face was dark with unhappiness. She wasted no time, but came straight to Lewis, and in blunt Gaelic addressed him: "Pagan man, have you any knowledge of the ways of the sidhe?"
His mouth hung open a second in surprise. "I have," he admitted.
"Good, for we have need of it. Brother Crimthann has been stolen away from us by the sidhe of Dun Govaun, and must be rescued."
If Finn and all his host had suddenly leaped alive from my page, I could not have been more bewildered. Fairy folk? Fairy folk kidnapping one of us? But the sidhe were mere heathen fables, they didn't exist! And I saw that Lewis was no less amazed, though courteously he asked her to explain.
It seemed that Brother Crimthann, who was one of the younger members of our community, had been troubled lately with bad dreams. In his dreams, the sidhe came into the cell where he slept as easily as if they walked through smoke, and bore him away with them to their palace under Dun Govaun. There he suffered torments of fleshly temptation, but by morning woke in his cell again with no sign of the ordeal of his dreams: not even the guilty emission of a young man so tempted. He had sworn that the sidhe were not beautiful, either, but pale and small, hairless, silent.
At this I saw Lewis start forward, like a hound catching a scent. "Now that is a strange thing, truly," he told the Abbess.
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