Wood Sprites

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’d 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 of. It nearly seemed like a joke that of all the possible animals that the elves could give the humans, they had chosen 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.

“That’s the shout-out?” Louise managed to say after she stopped laughing.

“No, wait, it comes before. Let me see if I can find it.” Zahara went to a website that was labeled Lemon-Lime Love. “Ugh. No. No.” She changed sites to one called Jello Shots.

Louise’s stomach flipped weirdly at the site names. “Oh, tell me that those aren’t what I think they are.”

“Fan sites dedicated to your videos? Okay, I won’t tell you then. Here.”

The clip was labeled “Nigel Reid is a Jello Shot!”

The clips started with Nigel leading the baby kuesi out onto the stage. Despite being only a few months old, it was already as tall as the Scotsman. Its long hair was silky and unruly, making it look like a shambling mound of hair with a trunk.

“Thank you for having me. This little fellow is a six-month-old Elfhome kuesi. .”

“Kuesi? I thought he was a wembley.” The host double-checked her teleprompter. “I thought. . it looks like a wembley.”

Nigel laughed. “Yes, everyone thinks so because of the video The Queen’s Parting Gift. The people at the zoo have gotten so tired of having people insist that the sign is wrong that they’ve named this little guy Wembley. But he really is a kuesi, which is a cousin to Earth’s woolly mammoth.”

“Oh, he’s so cute,” the host said and then went wide-eyed as the beast beelined over to her and loomed above her. “And big!”

“I asked the Bronx Zoo to borrow him because I hope to be working with Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo in the near future.”

“Wow!” For a moment the host was more interested in the news than the animal standing beside her. “I love Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”