Wood Sprites(49)
On the next page was English done in careful precise lettering, nearly as if printed by a machine. “My beloved grandchildren, Leo was killed by his efforts to build a gateway to Elfhome. Dufae’s enemies have been on Earth all this time. It is possible that they already have the contents of Dufae’s lost box. Stay hidden. Trust only each other and no one else. Keep yourself safe.”
* * *
How do you find a box that was lost three hundred years ago on another continent? Once upon a time, it might have been impossible, but the data age put cameras into the hands of billions of humans, all with the curiosity of monkeys and a weird drive to share what they knew. Louise created a rendering of the box based on Dufae’s sketches and tied it to a spider to crawl through the web, comparing the image to the trillions of pictures stored on the Internet. Someone, somewhere, had to have seen the box.
13: THE QUEEN’S PARTING GIFT
May first was Alexander’s birthday. She turned eighteen, a full and legal adult. Louise and Jillian celebrated alongside her and yet a universe apart, with cupcakes they bought on the way home. They risked a birthday candle because their mother was working late, stuck at work because her company needed to counterbalance growing protests with more security measures at upcoming events. The lone candle, though, reminded Louise that their baby siblings might never see a single birthday, and it made her cry.
“Make a wish, then blow it out,” Jillian choked out.
Louise wiped away tears, thinking how stupid “wishing” magic sounded. She didn’t even know what it was she needed to wish. For more time? For everyone to forget that they were supposed to be doing a play at school or that Jillian and she were shouldering a monster-load of the work? That they could find a nactka that had been lost for hundreds of years tucked away in their parents’ basement?
Somehow they needed to save their sisters and brother.
She blew out the candle and they ate their cupcakes while searching the world for Dufae’s lost box.
* * *
“Jillian! Louise!” Zahara had bounced up beside Louise at the twins’ locker. Since Jillian had cut her hair Peter Pan-short, their classmates couldn’t tell them apart from behind. Jillian had already been sucked away to deal with some play-related emergency. It left Louise feeling horribly aware that she rarely dealt with the world without Jillian beside her. It nearly felt like she had lost her right hand. “Did you see the Today Show this morning?”
Louise gasped as she realized that it was the day that Nigel was going to be a guest. She’d forgotten in the search for the nactka. “No!”
“Nigel Reid did a shout-out to Lemon-Lime.”
“He did?” Louise cried, at once crushed that she had missed seeing him, and yet excited at the idea that the real Nigel Reid had mentioned her and Jillian.
“He said he was a big fan. And he had Wembley with him.”
“What?” Wembley was one of their running jokes in The Queen’s Parting Gift. The Court had told the humans that the queen was giving them a “Wembley” as a gift and meant at first a beautiful songbird. After the bird dies, they come up with a series of increasingly uglier animals to offer up as a wembley, that all meet bizarre deaths, until they get to a woolly mammothlike kuesi, which are so ugly that they’ve crossed the line to cute.
“Well, the two kuesi at the Bronx Zoo had a baby, and they’ve named it Wembley.”
“They did?” It had been the gift of the two kuesi that the twins were making fun about. It nearly seemed like a joke that of all the possible animals that the elves could have given the humans that they chose two kuesi. The reason, though, was because most Elfhome animals required magic to function normally. Apparently the kuesi had been bred to be indifferent to the levels of magic around it.
“He’s so cute!” Zahara cried and pulled up a video clip on her tablet.
The video started with Nigel already onstage with Wembley. The baby kuesi looked vaguely like a very hairy elephant with nubs of tusks. Its trunk was in hyperactive overdrive and developed a fixation on exploring up and under the host’s dress. The first time the woman squealed and jumped. She spent much of the video circling Nigel with the trunk in chase while the man explained about how the kuesi had been used to build the first railroad on Elfhome. Nigel seemed torn between amusement and confusion to what could possibly be attracting the animal so strongly.
“Do you have some peanuts hidden down there?” Nigel asked.
The host glared at him for a moment, which unfortunately distracted her long enough for the trunk to find its target again. The video clip ended with the host squealing a second time.