Wood Sprites

Luckily Dufae obsessed about the box. He drew pictures of it. He considered changing the keyword of the lock spell and made elaborate notes on how to make lock spells and then decided that the magic of Earth was too “dirty” to guarantee a success.

And then they made an amazing discovery. The last few pages weren’t in Elvish but French. The hand that made the letters was more impatient, gone was the elegant perfection.

Today my wife has born me a son, and we named him Roland Dufae. His ears are as pointed as mine. I was born fifty-some years ago, but I still look like a youth. I realize that my father would have lived forever on his native world and could not imagine that his life would be cut so short in such a tragic way. I have no idea how long I will live, but I must be sure that my child knows of his heritage, for it is stamped upon his face and determines how fast or slow he may grow. I will teach him to read and speak my father’s tongue. When he is old enough to understand, I will tell him of how my father traveled to Earth from the world of elves and why. When the crown of France fell, taking my father with it, I was still an infant. I was carried to safety in America. The codex and many of my father’s things were brought with me, but the nactka that were his whole reason for fleeing his homeworld were not among them. I do not know what happened to the box containing the nactka. For his soul, I pray that they were smashed by ignorant fools, but from what I know of the box’s construction, this is unlikely. Protected as it was, it was virtually indestructible. It must exist somewhere in France along with all the crown jewels looted from the palaces. The fools will not be able to open the box, so it will continue to be, until I or one of my children search it out.”

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 had 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.