Love & Sprites

Chapter Two - Breaker of boats.

I stood outside with my back against the cracked mud wall with the Mage, who held his staff as a resting pole; in silence. He had demanded that Sola be taken to his hut instead for close monitoring hoping his medicines and spells could keep her alive for as long as they could till something miraculous happened. Even though he didn't believe in such.

"Isn't there a spell or incantation you can try?" I asked, knowing there wasn't one.

"Don't be stupid Gahiji." He retorted. "If there was one, do you think we'd be standing here like night owls watching out for preys?"

"And the sprite merchant?" I asked, suddenly remembering him. "Maybe we could get a j'ba fofi from him."

"He lives on the other side of the continent. It would take a couple of moons to get there and back with a cure."

Mage Utaka often sold strays he caught to a man named Phorisa whenever he came to the nine villages with a good sum of cowries. The merchant would tame them and then turn them into circus animals. Often for sports and absurd pleasures. But the mage stopped selling to him at a point for there had been no strays until now. First, a girl went missing. Now, Sola was bitten.

My heart ached. I was out of options.

"So what then" I sobbed. "Is the purpose of the stupid curse I carry when I can't even use it for a difficult cause like you've always said? What's the purpose of everything I get shamed for, smacked for, hated for. What's even my purpose in this world?"

"Beheadal isn't the cure for headaches, Gahiji." He said. "Don't go loathing yourself because of your inabilities. Your ancestors acknowledged that the magic they stole from the azizas couldn't solve all their problems but only fuelled its flames like firewood. So they accepted the fact that there are some things that are better..."

Left undone.

He feigned rattling his throat, careful from completing the proverb. Careful from showing his heartlessness in the open.

All the while I'd been an apprentice to him, it wasn't every one he saved from death. The handwork of destiny, he had said. Same thing he'd told her. Same thing she said to me.

Resigning to fate, I slid down on my back till I sat on my behind and buried my face in my hands with a sigh. Sola would die.

And I could do absolutely nothing to save her. I sobbed.

I remembered when we had absconded from home when we were six. What did we know? We were only kids; I, a cursed boy put under the wing of a difficult mage and she, daughter to a father who only paid attention to the fishes in the river and a late mother. At age twelve, we planned on exploring the world and starting a new life together. We couldn't fulfil those then, so we kept them in our hearts and dreamed them every night. Now, at age seventeen, we planned to get married. She wanted to have children but I refused. I retched at the thought of having to bear children or grandchildren with my curse. We had fought over the discussion that day and we refused to talk to eachother for some days. We reconciled eventually and chose to keep the matter for the future to decide. Our future.

If she died with our hopes and dreams, where's the future?

"There is a cure."

My ears stiffened like a fox's at the sound of the words. I slowly lifted my face and watched the mage unsure he was the one who spoke or it was just my mind.

"A cure for the poison." He said again.

"So there is a cure all this while?" I said. "Why haven't you said a thing about it before? Where?"

He hesitated, avoiding my eyes. "Deep in the land of the sprites—"

"The Umdlebe." We said in a unison of whispers as I realized.