Wood Sprites

Jillian suddenly squealed loudly in pure excitement and leapt up to spring around the room, shouting and flailing her tablet.

“What? What?” Louise started to flick open photographs, trying to find the one that had gotten Jillian excited.

“We’re elves!” Jillian shoved her tablet out to show Louise.

The female in the black and white photo could have been Jillian; she looked more her twin than Louise did. Only the female was an elf. With her dark long hair coiled like a crown on her head, there was no mistaking the point of her ears or the almond shape of her eyes. She sat in the high-back chair like a queen on a throne. From the Victrola beside her chair to the newspaper on her lap, everything said “Earth,” while she remained wholly elf.

“That’s — that’s not possible,” Louise stammered.

“She’s an elf and she looks like me and she’s a Dufae. Josephina Dufae.”

Louise stared at the picture as her insides went all fluttery with excitement. This couldn’t be real. It had to be like the Danish king comment on the back of Neil Shenske’s photograph. She picked up her own tablet and started to open the other photographs for more proof. It was impossible to tell in the other pictures; the subjects all wore hats. Certainly, though, the earlier Dufaes had that elf look around the eyes.

One labeled simply “Dufae” proved to be a scanned copy of a handwritten document showing their family tree. The top branches were all in Elvish runes. The name that formed the trunk, merging all the Elvish bloodlines, was Guillaume Ruelle Dufae. Jillian was right in one regard; the Dufaes started out as elves. Somehow, though, they became Frenchmen. Guillaume had married a Bridget Dubois. There was no indication if she was human or elf; no information was given on her except the date of their marriage and her death. She apparently died giving birth to Etienne, because his birth date was the same day. For Guillaume’s death, it was given as only September 1792.

Elves claimed to be immortal. Windwolf hadn’t visibly aged during the last twenty-eight years. (At least once a year, a reporter would compare his appearance to a teenage pop idol. The twins parodied this by having Prince Yardstick enter American Idol.) According to anthropologists, elves were considered adult only after they were a hundred years old. Etienne was nearly sixty in his photograph, but he looked only seventeen. Was it proof he was full-blooded elf or did half-elves age equally slow? The Dufae family tree traced only the male bloodline. Wives were listed only by three dates: birth, marriage, and death. It gave no clue if the females were elves or not except by the fact that they seemed to live average human lifespans.

Etienne would father Roland and Josephina and die within ten years of when the picture was taken. Obviously he hadn’t died of old age. Etienne’s daughter never married and lived to be a hundred and fifty. The family tree stated that Roland died before he was fifty without explaining why. Was it because he inherited a human lifespan when his sister lucked into an elf’s? Or had he been murdered like Leonardo and Ada? Roland left behind a young son, Adrien, who had been Leonardo’s grandfather.

Which made the twins. . what? Elves? Half-elf? Quarter? One-eighth? How infinitely small did the amount have to be before it didn’t matter?

Jillian had found the family tree, too. “The note at the bottom says that Guillaume was beheaded during the French Revolution’s September Massacres. We’re French elves.” Jillian obviously loved the idea. “French noble elves.”

Louise refrained from pointing out that not everyone who was beheaded in the French Revolution was noble, at least not according to Charles Dickens, but he might not be an accurate reporter on the events. “We’re New Yorkers.”

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!”