He came back and gave his face to the way, and he ran so near to the place where the king’s daughter was to be swallowed that she caught the boot from the foot of the man who was riding on the pony. He came home and attended to his horses, and no one knew who was the man who was mounted on the pony that killed the piast. She proclaimed a gathering of all the men in the three islands, that she might see who the man was whom the shoe fitted. There was not a man at all coming whom the shoe would fit, and she was not going to marry any man but the one whom the shoe fitted. The old man said it was right for him to go to her to see if the shoe would fit him. He called for the suit of clothes that he wore on the day when the pony killed the piast, and he went to her (the king’s daughter). She knew him at once. The shoe was in her hand, and it leaped from her hand till it went on his foot.
“You are the man that was on the pony on the day that he killed the piast, and you are the man whom I will marry.”
He was seven nights and seven days at feast and festival, and they were married on the eighth day. They spent that night part in talking and part in story-telling; till the early day came and the clear brightness on the morrow morning.
He said to her that he would be riding in the morning on the pony; and he was going, and he came on an apple of gold upon the strand, and the pony told him not to take up the apple or it would give him abundance of trouble.
“Whatever trouble it may give me I will take it up!”
He went home and the pearl of gold with him. In the morning he went to the old druid, and the old druid told him that it was the daughter of a king of the eastern world, who lost it from her hair;—that there was a pearl of gold on every rib of hair upon her head, and that she and her twelve attendant women were bathing in such a place the day she lost it.
“I will never stop,” said he, “till I see the woman who lost it.”
“There are seven miles of hill on fire to cross before you come to where she is, and there are seven miles of steel thistles, and seven miles of sea for you to go over. I told you to have nothing to do with the apple. All the same it is as good for you to go riding on me till we try to go to her place.”