Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  Louise abandoned the photographs. They only raised more questions. She opened up the PDF file named Dufae Codex, hoping for answers. The scanned pages of the file were from a book, handwritten in Elvish. Page after page of runes. There wasn’t a single French or English word in sight. The source material had to be a thick bound journal, as there were over a thousand pages. She checked random pages to verify that it was entirely in Elvish. After the first dozen pages, though, the text changed from handwritten notes to elaborate symbols and circles and glyphs. She recognized the format from the only scientific paper they’d ever found on spell-casting.

  “This. This,” she whispered, having to force the words out one at a time. “The Dufae Codex is a book of spells!”

  Jillian squealed with excitement. “Oh! Oh! Lou!” Jillian went speechless as she scrolled through the book, and when she finally could talk again, she sounded like she could barely breathe. “This is so awesome! We can learn magic!”

  “There’s no magic on Earth,” Louise pointed out despite the giddy feeling that was racing through her. An entire spell book of Elf magic. This was better than Christmas. It couldn’t be real. She didn’t want to get all excited only to be disappointed.

  “Well, the elves were getting to Earth somehow if the Dufae were in . . . oh! Oh!”

  “What?”

  “Leonardo was an elf!”

  “Barely. And?”

  “No one knows how the gate works!” Jillian jumped up and started to pace, words tumbling out with her excitement. “That’s the reason Pittsburgh goes back and forth between the two worlds. If someone could come up with another way of doing it, they’d do that instead. All the scientists on Earth have tried, but they can’t figure out what Leonardo did. It’s not based on any science that they understand. Because it’s not science, it’s magic!”

  Louise nodded along with the deductions. It made sense, but she was missing why Jillian was so excited by this. “So?”

  “We can’t figure out how to save our little brother and baby sisters using science—so maybe we can use magic.”

  “Magic?”

  “We know what science can do. There’s no artificial womb yet. We’re not going to be able to implant our brother and sisters into—say—a pig.”

  “Ewww! Why would you say that?”

  “I’m just thinking outside the box.”

  “Too outside!”

  “And we’re not going to be able to talk a woman into doing it!” Jillian nearly shouted to override Louise. “Not without lots of money.”

  “There’s the money from YourStore.”

  “Yeah, with that we could get the babies born, but then what? We need enough money to raise them. We can’t make enough to do both—not legally—in a few months. And if we do it illegally, we could get taken away from Mom and Dad.”

  Louise wasn’t completely sure about the last one. Their parents had explained—several times—in the past that parents who couldn’t stop their kids from breaking the law lost custody of them. She had tried to research this claim, but most kids who made the news had done something really horrible—like torturing cats or killing another child. There wasn’t any data on nine-year-old bank robbers. Louise wasn’t sure if this was because other nine-year-olds hadn’t attempted it, or had their identities protected because they were minors or simply too smart to get caught. Still, the risks were too high to explain her doubts. Jillian was always sure they could get away with everything but was sometimes painfully wrong.

  “But if we focus all our time on learning magic and it turns out we’re wrong . . .” Louise started to argue her sister’s logic.

  “If we don’t figure it out, we’ll track down Mrs. Shenske and tell her.”

  “What? No, no, that’s bad, we talked about that. Esme’s mother might have Mom and Dad arrested.”

  “We do it anonymously. First we fiddle with Dad’s company’s records. It’d be easy. We change the number of embryos so no one can tell any are missing, and we wipe out Dad accessing the racks on our conception date. Boom. Everything that ties us to Esme goes away—”

  “We should do it anyhow—just in case,” Louise said.

  “Okay.” Jillian sat down and picked up her tablet. “But we wipe out everything that links us to Esme and then send some secret message to her mother telling her about the embryos. Last-ditch plan.”

  “Do you think she’ll actually do anything with the information?”

  Jillian shrugged. “I don’t know. She might not. That’s why it’s a last-ditch plan. A better plan is to see if the codex has a spell that will let us save our baby brother and sisters.”

  “We’ll need magic for a spell to work.” Louise picked up her tablet.

  Jillian paused in the middle of hacking their dad’s work account. “You have an idea?”

  “If Dufae’s hyperphase gate uses magic, then it’s generating its own magical power source. I’m going to see if anyone else has realized that and found a way to re-create his method.”

  * * *

  “We’re elves. We’re elves! We’re elves and we have a spell book!” The words wanted to leap right out of Louise’s mouth as they set the table for dinner. Jillian obviously wasn’t having the same problem. Only the speed with which Jillian put out dishes and silverware betrayed that she was impatient to get back to their room and work at translating the spell book.

  Their mother, however, had brought home Ethiopian takeout from Queen of Sheba. It was a sure sign that she was very upset about something. Another indication of their mother’s mood was that she’d bought more than they could possibly eat. There was dabo bread with awaze dip, menchet abesh wot, gored gored, gomen besega, ater kik alecha, shiro, and cabbage wot. She cranked up Rob Zombie in a declaration that she was not to be talked to until she’d had time to calm down. She moved through the kitchen, stripping off the uncomfortable work shoes and jewelry, head bobbing in time with the music, eyes angry.

  Certainly it was all the more reason for Louise not to blurt out their secret. She fought the urge, filling up glasses.

  Their father came home, stood in the dim foyer a moment, eyes wide, listening to the loud heavy metal music. After a visible “did I do something wrong” mental check, he came cautiously into the kitchen. He opened his mouth several times, reconsidered what he was about to say, and closed it each time. He settled at the table and asked with a glance, Do you know what’s wrong?

  Jillian shook her head, looking innocent.

  Louise bit down on We’re elves and we’ve got a spell book and shook her head, too.

  Following her own rule on quiet for meals together, their mother turned off the music and sat down for dinner in silence.

  After several minutes of furious eating, she sat back and sighed. “Anna Desmarais is a raving loon.”

  Their father braved a comment. “I thought you were done with the Forest Forever event.”

  “She’s also on the board of trustees for the Stars Align Gala in June. Part of being filthy rich and having a guilty conscience means she’s connected to a dozen different charities.”

  “You’ve worked with some whack jobs before.”

  “She implied at the meeting today that I embezzled from Forest Forever.”

  “You’re kidding!” their father cried as the twins gasped.

  “She didn’t call me a liar and thief, at least not in so many words.” Their mother growled. “She danced all around actually accusing me, but she made it fairly clear what she thought. She wants all the books checked for Forest Forever before releasing the next round of funds for the Stars Align Gala.”

  “You’re not going to lose your job, are you?” Jillian asked.

  “Taliaferro and I butt heads, but he trusts me. He knows how careful I am with the expense accounts. You have to be to avoid this kind of finger-pointing with charity work. He thinks Desmarais might be a racist because she made it clear from the first time she laid eyes on me that she didn’t like me.”

 
“That totally sucks,” Louise said.

  Their dad reached out and took their mother’s hand. “It’s going to be okay.”

  “Of course it is,” she snapped but squeezed his hand tightly. “We’re being audited on Monday. Taliaferro wants me to come in Saturday and Sunday to get ready for it.”

  “So . . . we don’t have to go to Elle’s stupid birthday party?” Jillian smiled at the idea that they’d have all of Saturday to work undisturbed on the spell book.

  Louise glared at her sister; this was not the time to push their mother.

  “You’re going if I have to FedEx you there. This is exactly what I was talking about. You have to learn how to deal with these rich bitches while it’s just the school play up for grabs and not your job. You’re going to this party, smile until it hurts, and make friends.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” Louise said, and Jillian echoed her.

  “How is Plan Invade-and-Conquer going at school?” their mother asked.

  “Okay.” Louise wasn’t sure what was safe to talk about since everything was kind of tangled together with the secret of the bank account and flash drive and codex and them being elves.

  Jillian tried to work her way around their mother’s edict. “We’ve got all the boys on our side since we showed them our music video. If two girls back us, or come up with another play, we’ll win. We vote on Monday.”

  “Good! Never let your guard down until the fight is over.” Their mother tapped hard on the table to drive home her point. “You keep your guard up. You watch for an attack and you take every opening that you’re given.”

  “Yes, Mommy,” they said together.

  Elle had a kitten.

  She also had a huge brownstone townhouse filled with gleaming hardwood floors and crystal chandeliers and oil paintings, but none of that mattered to Louise. A kitten beat everything Louise had, even being part elf and in possession of a spell book. Louise wasn’t pretty like an elf. Without magic, there was no point to being able to cast spells.

  The emotional minefield of keeping so many big secrets from their parents had put Louise off-balance the entire week. On top of it all, yesterday had been Shutdown and they’d failed to contact Alexander. Even on the Pittsburgh Internet, they hadn’t been able to find a phone directory.

  The last thing Louise wanted to do was engage in social warfare. Besides, with a real living pet, Elle had already won. While the rest of the party giggled and shrieked somewhere downstairs, Louise curled up on the second floor landing with the chocolate tortoiseshell kitten.

  About an hour later, Zahara came creeping up the stairs. She was still in her silk tribal wrap dress with thick gold bracelets that gleamed rich against her dark skin. While nothing had been done to tame her curly hair, someone had carefully applied glitter to her face, rich blue makeup to her eyes, and lip gloss to her quiet smile.

  “You’re not going to be made up?” Zahara asked.

  “I don’t feel like I’m seeing myself when I put on makeup,” Louise said. “I feel like I’ve put on a mask and am trying to fool people.”

  Zahara settled on the stair just below her. “It’s not like a mask. It’s like a bracelet.” She slid off her thick gold band and twirled it so it caught the light. “This is beautiful as a piece of art. My arm is beautiful as part of my body.” She held up her arm, slim and graceful, as dark chocolate as the tortoiseshell. “Gold does not make you beautiful. Your arm does not make gold beautiful.” She slid on the bracelet and twisted her hand to show off the band in all its golden wonder against her warm darkness. “The two come together in a celebration of beauty. We exist. We are. One does not detract from the other. So you cannot claim that they add to each other.”

  “But they do add to each other. I don’t think that would be nearly as pretty on Elle.”

  Zahara giggled, and her quiet smile broke into something younger and joyous. “Everyone has been talking about your videos all week, but I don’t think anyone has been talking to you.”

  “No, they’ve been just staring.” If the twins hadn’t been so wrapped up with decoding the spell book and finding a method for generating magic, it would have been very upsetting. As it was, it was embarrassing and annoying.

  “My mom is a model; she’s really famous. She meets all these amazingly talented people, and they all act like it’s a big deal to talk with her. But really, she’s a normal mom that gets up in the morning hoping that there’s enough milk for everyone’s cereal and nobody overflows the toilet before she has to go to work.”

  It so wasn’t where Louise thought the conversation was going that she laughed. “Your toilet overflows a lot?”

  “Constantly. It’s an old building, and my little brother is an idiot with toilet paper. When you meet enough ‘famous’ people, you start to realize that at the core, everyone is the same.”

  “So—you’re not impressed with us being Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?”

  Zahara giggled. “I am impressed! I could fangirl all over you about how funny your videos are, how amazing the costumes are, how beautiful the sets are and everything. According to my mom, though, having someone suddenly gush all over you is a little creepy.”

  “Yeah, it is. A little.”

  “Is that why you’ve kept such a low profile? Every time you’d release a video, people would start trying to guess who you are.”

  Louise shook her head. “We just thought our lives wouldn’t be interesting to anyone. We just go to school.” And school was so boring that they made up games like pretending not to know French in order to make it bearable. After several attempts to write up biographies, including one that ironically claimed that they were elves living in secret in New York City, they’d decided to leave off all information about themselves.

  “Most people think you must live in Pittsburgh because everything is so detailed and accurate. Also because you always post your new video during Shutdown.”

  It was a little bit creepy that people had figured out their posting schedule. Since the date floated, they didn’t think anyone would make a connection. “We make a lot up.”

  “There’s scientists saying that you’re getting most of it right. How do you know everything that you don’t make up?”

  Real scientists had seen their videos? Did any of them recognize themselves? “Remember the paper we had to do in first grade about Elfhome? While we were doing research for it, we ran across this funny article.”

  Their classmates had been happy to regurgitate commonly known facts like how Elfhome was a mirror Earth in a parallel universe complete with identical continents. The twins, however, realized that there was too little known about the elves themselves. It was easier to find out information on ancient kings of Babylon on Earth than the current royal court on Elfhome. Even though there were big communities of scientists in Pittsburgh, there was nothing publicly available about their findings. Obviously the information was being hidden someplace. The twins rose to the challenge and started to hack university e-mails, looking for clues to what the scientists were doing with the data they were collecting.

  What they found was ripe for parody.

  Apparently elves knew that the humans would view them as lab rats. There was an entire section of the treaty forbidding the collection of genetic material from elves. It went so far as to specifying “stray DNA” of dandruff, fingernail cuttings, and stray hairs. Because the elves were immortal, most questions about ancient history were viewed as personal and rude. While the enclaves had public areas open to the humans, a bulk of the compounds were deemed private and off-limits to close study. The elves were also reluctant to talk about private issues to anyone outside of their household.

  It forced researchers to become super-secret spy scientists that the twins parodied by making them ninjas in their videos. In every scene, they had one or more ninja anthropologists, sometimes well hidden, sometimes badly. It made every video an Easter egg hunt for scientists.

  The true trigger for their videos was an “eyes only�
� paper on elf names and why they were taking English nicknames.

  “When elves are born, they’re taken to Summer Court and the royal fortune-tellers give them these amazing, lyrical names with great deep meaning. Their real names are really like ‘Pavana Gali Vento Ceyandalo Nagi Taeli,’ which kind of means ‘bare branches swaying in night wind.’ There are rich layers of meaning to the entire name, since most of the words don’t really have matching English words. Like ‘Ceyandalo’ means the ‘alive but not in foliage’ kind of ‘bare,’ not the ‘naked’ kind of ‘bare.’ Then the word order is different, so the name really is ‘moving back and forth to brush dark hair, branches that are bare from winter, in the night wind.’ All the elves in Pittsburgh are Wind Clan, so their ‘last name’ is always some form of ‘wind.’ Humans, being humans, started to shorten the elves’ names, chopping off the wind part and such like. Since most humans didn’t understand the nuances of Elvish, they were really butchering names and pissing off the elves. Like they accidently called that elf ‘Hairbrush.’ The elves started taking English nicknames to stop that.”

  Zahara giggled just like they had when they’d first read the paper. But then she gasped as she followed back the implication. “Wait. You mean there’s a real Hairbrush and Umbrella?”

  “Kind of. Hairbrush actually uses the name ‘Winter’ and Umbrella is ‘Sunny.’”

  “Really?” She laughed. “What about ‘Suppository’?”

  “We made that one up.”

  “Prince Yardstick?”

  “That’s Viceroy Windwolf. His real name is Wolf Who Rules Wind. Ruler. One-third of a yardstick?”

  Zahara giggled again. “That’s so funny. My sister loves Prince Windwolf. She’s got this poster of him on her wall. But she thinks Prince Yardstick is a stick-in-the-mud.”

  Technically Windwolf wasn’t a prince even though he was a cousin to Queen Soulful Ember. All the reports on him stated that he was unflappable and resolute. The twins translated that into a character who was completely unfazed by the madness that they unleashed around him. Usually he didn’t appear until the video hit maximum insanity, which he would then view with mild confusion but utter calmness. Often he also was the person that put the world back in order—usually with a massive show of magic. She found it odd that anyone would consider him as dull, fussy, or old-fashioned. Maybe Zahara’s sister didn’t know what “stick-in-the-mud” really meant.