Where the story fell short for me, however, is the plot. Specifically, I had two major problems with it. The first is that I didn't understand how the murder took place. It was established that you cannot enter the town without passing a guarded gate. But yet, the lord seemed to be able to be able to enter town, get a ring from his wife, and leave town dying without anyone seeing him. Or did she somehow kill him on the way to town? But if so, why did she do it so close to the town? And if he was riding to town, why tie the spell to his signet ring, which I assume he wouldn't be wearing on the road? I'm either missing something here, or the murder itself makes no sense whatsoever.
I
think it went like this:
1) Dude comes home, expecting cheer and nookie. Keeps on the down-low on account of being all tired what with war and such.
2) Dude puts on cursed ring, gets all sick-feeling.
3) Wife gets pissed her spell didn't work right.
4) Wife sends Dude away, probably under some concealment.
5) Dude dies on the road, unable to remove the cursed ring and probably considerably bummed.
6) Random guards at the gate don't know any of this due to being about as close to the bottom of the totem pole as can be, not to mention the Wife's lover seemed to be a guard-type person who likely had some of his guardsmen in on the conspiracy.
The second problem I had was the behavior of the birds, especially at the end. The narrator gets the power to talk to birds, but he also seems to have the superpower of letting birds around him act non-bird like.
Well, it's a fairy-magic gift. Maybe compulsion to obey is part of it (or maybe just a tendency for them to feel very protective/friendly toward him. Like Aquaman.) I dunno. Maybe the evil magic pissed the birds off.
Not gonna argue that the character is way stronger than the plot, here, but I'm willing to shrug away magic as being, well, magic.