Chapter 10: The love spell

 

  

The fish are dead.

Bratko held the end of the net with his blistered fingers, staring down into the dead eyes of dead fish that stared back, lifeless, tinged with a pale color he had never seen before.

How can he bring back dead fish to market, he wondered, his small boat swaying in the rough current of Sea Gate, after he had sailed out too far from his normal route.

He had not found fish further in, thinking that strange in itself, only to find when he and his son pulled in the net, all the fish were dead.

The early morning air chilled him. Yet the fish he saw in the net looked cooked, as if something from the depths had boiled them, sending their lifeless bodies to the surface where they became ensnared in his net.

“What do we do father?” his son asked, his fingers holding the other side of the net full of dead fish.

“We cannot bring them back like this,” Bratko said.

Already the stench rose from their dead bodies, stirring up vomit in him, like a bad morning after a long night drinking in the pub.

“What do we do father?” his son asked again.

“We throw them back,” Bratko said.

“And then?”

“We look for live fish,” he said, lifting his half of the net so that the dead bodied plopped back into the deep sea, his son doing the same on his side.

And then, staring down at their floating bodies, Bratko thought he saw something moving, something dark, something that seemed to breathe fire.

But what kind of being breathes fire underwater, he wondered.

“Hurry,” he told his son when they had finished. “We must be gone from this place.”

 

**************

 

“It is no spell,” the wizard told the King. “At least, none cast by witches or demons.”

“Then what it is?” the king asked, looking more bent than usual, an unnatural age coming upon him that Blyord did not trust.

He does not have the strength to defend Amlor it attacked, he thought.

“A spell as old as time itself,” Blyord said. “The boy is in love.”

“Love?” the king growled with dismissive wave of his hand. “What nonsense.”

“You must have felt love once,” the wizard said. “For the bribe who bore you sons.”

“Who killed her at their birth,” the king said.

“It was the second son that killed her.”

“Don’t disparage Ajax for something fate decreed.”

“You could have married again,” Blyord said.

“It would not have changed who my heir was.”

“No,” Blyord admitted, standing a step down from the king, his eyebrows folded in deep thought he did not divulge.

“So, how do we cure my son so he acts like my heir and not some pathetic fool?”

“To the best of my knowledge, time is the only cure – if indeed, even that.”

“Then, we shall keep him here until time decides to dissuade him of this – love.”

“We cannot keep him if he chooses to leave,” Blyord said. “He is too powerful a warrior.”

“If he chooses to leave, then he breaks his oath and relinquishes his claim on the throne,” the king said, again with the curiously hopeful look in his eyes.

“They are all fools,” Blyord thought, wondering further if perhaps his assessment of Ely’s condition was mistaken after all. “There are spells that can be cast to lure a man.”

Love was only a word, he thought. But so were oaths, and it was Blyord’s hope that the oaths Ely swore might prove more powerful than the spells cast from afar. Yet, if this is a spell of the heart cast upon himself, no oath might hold.

To bind him with oaths might well break him, Blyord thought, and that is far from the outcome we need. It seems even my influence has lessened in the light of his new found love.

“You have great influence on my son,” the king said. “Reason with him; remind him of his duties, if not to me then to this kingdom – which he would inherit from me.”

“It would seem my influence has lessened under the light of love,” Blyord said.

“Then there are other words that might have power over him, words shaped by the law of the land,” the king said. “He shall obey me or suffer the consequences.”

Blyord fell silent for a long moment. The wind outside the castle howled, filling the space now empty of words.

A faint call came from the watch tower guards, announcing the passing of the hour, and more, the passing of day into night.

How long would peace prevail?

“Not long,” Blyord thought. “The storm will come slowly at first, then burst on the land in a gush”

The king coughed. Blyord glanced up.

“I will do my best to convey your wished to him, sire,” Blyord said, bowing before the king then making his way back out of the throne room.

The king would not be moved; perhaps, Ely still could be, the wizard thought.

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