Wood Sprites

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’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.”

“Yes, they’re a wonderfully creative and knowledgeable production company.” Nigel dodged around gender, age, and number of people involved, probably because he didn’t know any of it.

“How in the world did you make contact with—” Whatever she was going to ask was cut short by the kuesi fondling her under her dress. She jumped, squeaking loudly, and the clip ended.

The comments under it exploded with speculations on what work he’d be doing with Lemon-Lime. The thread quickly grew ugly as the Jello Shot fans decided that Nigel was merely trying to capitalize on Lemon-Lime’s fame and that he was lying about the entire thing.

“Holy shit,” Louise whispered as she realized that despite being posted just an hour before, there were twenty pages of comments already.

“What are you doing with Nigel?” Zahara asked.

Louise stared at her, full of horror. It had never occurred to her that anyone who knew the truth about them would connect them up to Nigel. “You can’t tell anyone about this! We’d get into so much trouble if our parents knew!”

“They don’t know?”

“No! They think the Internet is full of pedophiles, and we’re not allowed on any adult site until we’re at least fourteen.”

“Wow. That’s like really fossil-age thinking.”

“My mom knew one person that got into trouble like that, so she’s super protective. If they found out that we’ve posted our videos online and are commenting on filmmaking sites and set up the YourStore—”

Louise stopped being able to talk, because she was completely breathless at the idea of how much trouble they’d be in. They’d be grounded for months without Internet, and they might never get their video equipment back.

“I won’t tell,” Zahara promised. “And I’ll tell everyone else not to say anything. But this was on television. Does anyone else know that you’re Lemon-Lime?”

Their Aunt Kitty had helped them pick the name, but she didn’t know about their videos. Also she didn’t watch morning shows. She wasn’t a morning person. Any time they did see her in the mornings, it was usually because she’d been up all night and hadn’t gone to bed yet. It was part of the reason she often babysat in emergencies.

“So what are you doing with Nigel Reid — that your parents know nothing about?”

It sounded horrible when Zahara said it that way.

“He wants to ask us questions about the gossamer call.”

Zahara’s eyes went wide. “But didn’t you just make that up as a joke?”

“Yes. I mean, no. We know there is a whistle for the gossamers, but we haven’t found any references to what it looks like or how it works.” Louise pulled at her hair at the sudden realization that they didn’t have anything concrete to tell Nigel. Her research had been detoured by everything else.

“So what are you going to do?”

Louise stared at Zahara as her mind raced. Was it possible that the codex had some information on it? Once they had a magic generator, they could experiment with any spells that the elves might have embedded into a whistle, but they didn’t have any gossamers to test them on. They could build a virtual simulator of a gossamer if they could find anything about their physiology. So far they hadn’t found any studies on the massive living airships. The fact that the creatures were translucent made all pictures of them blurry and difficult to figure out where the flying jellyfishlike animal ended and the sky began.

“Louise?”

“Um. .”

“You should at least thank him for the shout-out,” Zahara said.

“You think so?”

The bell rang for homeroom. There was a sudden and massive movement of bodies as everyone in the hall headed to their classroom.

“My mom always thanks anyone that says something nice about her to the media.”

Louise nearly protested that they weren’t on the same level as Zahara’s fashion-model mother, but then remembered the Today Show host’s reaction to the name Lemon-Lime. They might have been unaware of it, but apparently they were famous. “Okay, I’ll thank him.”

There were hundreds of messages under Nigel’s original post. The first was “Seriously? Nigel Reid? THE Lemon-Lime? I don’t know which one to disbelieve the most.” The second stated, “Dude, Lemon-Lime talks to no one. They’re like ghosts!” A random reply on the next page showed that the comments turned ugly as fans decided that the shout-out was just a way to steal Lemon-Lime’s fame.

Louise winced. Poor Nigel. Zahara was right; for all the grief he was getting, he deserved a thank-you. She opened up a private message and gave it a subject line of “Thank you for the great shout-out.” After that, she didn’t know what to say.

Famous people are all just normal people at their core, Zahara had said. It was certainly true for her and Jillian. Well, they were normal if one ignored them being elves, conceived after their male genetic donor was dead, and smarter than just about everyone else. .

She stared at the blank screen for a while as the cursor blinked. They had nothing to give Nigel right now. All they had was a handful of observations that anyone could make. They should be sure before they told him anything, and that would take time. Meanwhile the poor man was going to get dragged through dirt. In public.

If they released a Lemon-Lime video acknowledging Nigel, then they could clear his name. They had planned on doing filler anyhow.

“Oh, great idea!” Jillian reacted to the news with wide-eyed amazement. “A video reply will confirm we’re really Lemon-Lime. We could crank a filler out in a few hours.”

By the end of homeroom, they had a short storyboard laid out. Normally, they did stop-motion with Barbie dolls on green screen; it gave their work a distinctive style. Unfortunately, they’d blown up their entire cast. Louise always thought they should acknowledge the accident by having Queen Soulful Ember blast the royal court to cinders. The addition of Nigel to the mix gave them the idea of changing who got vaporized. In the new video, the queen lets loose a series of blasts, aiming at one precious treasure after another. Her court barely manages to deflect her spells’ damage onto what seems to be unoccupied space. After the court leaves the area, however, ninja scientists rain out of their smoldering hiding spaces.

The second act was solely a shot of the Cathedral of Learning to symbolize the University of Pittsburgh. Jillian was writing the dialogue for the first section, but Louise had an inspiration for the middle section. She typed dialogue that would later need to be read in. The first male would say, “Good God, not again. And those were the last of the anthologists, archeologists, biologists, and botanists. What’s next on the list? Ah, entomologist. Yes, we do need to learn more Elvish. This dictionary we have sucks.”

“I do not think that word means what you think it means,” some unseen male says with a slight Spanish accent.

“Get me entomologists!”

The third act was a shot of a crude box trap baited with ants. Nigel Reid and his cameraman stumble into the trap and ninjas hammer it shut and cover it with mailing stickers, addressing it to Elfhome. They could use sound bites from Nigel’s documentary on fire ants — painfully short to stay within fair use limits — specifically the discussion on the queen, since applying the factoids to Soulful Ember would be funny. Once Nigel was trapped inside the box with the ants, she could use a slightly muffled version of the section where he was cheerfully describing the pain of being stung. Repeatedly.

Louise pulled old backgrounds from their home computer to build the needed sets. Giggling, Jillian told her between first and second period that the “precious treasures” would be various plot McGuffins from earlier videos. They could get around not showing the queen and her court and use only dialogue to progress the story. They spent the break between second and third period recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.

After a great deal of consideration, Louise decided to insert one frame of the raw footage from their playhouse explosion as an Easter egg with each fire strike. The first would be subtitled, “We decided to experiment with special effects on the fire strike.” The second would state, “We blew up our studio.” The third would end with, “There will be a short hiatus in production until we manage to replace our equipment.”

They had always operated on the assumption that they had at least one die-hard fan that liked finding the Easter eggs. They’d even given the fan a name: Harvey. It was weird to know that they had thousands of Harveys and one of them was sure to analyze the video frame by frame for Easter eggs. This hidden message would definitely be read. Maybe by hundreds of people.

Louise was just adding various Foley effects, like hammering nails, out of the copyright-free archive when Jillian suddenly kicked her. She looked up, aware for the first time that the room had gone completely silent.

“Louise!” Mr. Kessler, their computer literacy teacher, was bearing down on her.

She blinked up at him, surprised. She and Jillian sat in the back of all their classes and rarely drew the attention of any of their teachers. Up to this moment, she wasn’t even sure that Mr. Kessler knew their names, since the few times he’d called on them, he addressed them as Twin One and Twin Two.

“What are you doing?” He came to loom over her. He held out his hand for her tablet.

As Louise hesitated, hands covering her screen, she saw Jillian quickly copy everything off her tablet. “I was just watching the new Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo video.”

There was a murmur of excitement from the other kids in their class. She cringed slightly as she realized that Elle could and probably would fully explain how she had the new video. Then again, maybe Mr. Kessler was a fan.

“That stupid tripe?” Mr. Kessler snapped his fingers, demanding her tablet immediately. “Those videos are nothing but a glorification of the rich and selfish elf royalty.”

“They are not!” both Louise and Jillian cried.

“It’s believed that there are fewer than ten thousand elves on the whole North American continent, and yet the queen lays claim to all of it. Nine point five four million square miles for just ten thousand selfish bastards. That’s over nine hundred square miles per elf. Alaska’s population density is less than two square miles per human.”

“Mr. Kessler.” Elle waved her hand, making Louise shrink. When he didn’t acknowledge her, Elle pressed on without lowering her hand. “Mr. Kessler, you shouldn’t use the b-word in class. It’s very rude. And what you’re saying is very bigoted. Can we stay on topic?”

Mr. Kessler snorted and handed back Louise’s tablet. He’d deleted all her work and purged her cache. She gasped at the hours of work she might have lost. “I want you to solve the problem on the board, Louise.”

She took a deep breath against the anger boiling in her. He had no right to delete work off her tablet. Yell at her, yes, but not destroy her work, much of which she’d done before his class started. They were only five minutes into class, too; it wasn’t like she’d spent a long time ignoring him.

“Sometime soon.” He pointed at the board.

She glanced to the front of the room. The wall screen had a quadratic equation. She locked her jaw against the first two things that wanted to come out. “I don’t understand.”

“Oh, then you agree that this is a class and I am a teacher and if you were paying attention to me you would understand—”

“I don’t understand why you’re asking me to solve that equation. This isn’t math class, and we’re not up to quadratic formulas yet. We’re still doing pre-algebra work.”

“Yes, this is computer literacy class, and if you were listening, you would know—”

“That x is negative four and one?”

“Huh?” Obviously, he wasn’t expecting her to be able to solve the problem since he didn’t recognize the correct answer when she gave it.

“You’re asking me to solve y equals x squared plus three x minus four. The solution is negative four and one.”

He glanced at the board and then at her. “What?”

Did he even know how to solve the problem himself?

“Quadratic equations with two variables have countless solutions,” Louise explained because she suspected he didn’t know. “The answers create a continuous line in the shape of a parabola. The ‘correct’ answer to this equation is the two points where that parabola hits the x-axis: negative four and one. What I don’t understand is why you’re asking us to deal with an equation like this. Our class has just started to graph straight lines. How do you expect anyone to use a computer to calculate this if they don’t know how to check the result? They could get a nonsense answer like ‘forty-two’ and think it’s right.”

He stared at her, slack-jawed, for a moment and then said angrily, “My point is that you should be paying attention to me.”

“I will when you start teaching something I don’t already know.”

He scanned the room, taking in the hostile stares of the other kids. “Fine.” He went back to his desk, deleted the equation from the wall display and typed in a simple addition function. “Reed, can you set up a four-column, four-row spreadsheet that uses this to produce totals in the fourth row?”

At lunch, the entire fifth grade gathered around their table, worried that Kessler had deleted all their work.

“We saved it.” Jillian pulled it up on her tablet and played what they had finished.

“Wow!” Iggy said when it came to the end. “You did this all during class this morning?”

“It’s only five minutes long, and we’re using a lot of old stuff,” Louise said. “Hopefully people won’t think that someone forged this since it’s all rehash.”

“If we use the new song for Black Willow Wicker, the music would establish the video as one of ours.”

Louise tugged at her hair as she considered the pros and cons. Their soundtracks were heavily influenced by the fusion music of garage bands in Pittsburgh. The groups combined guitar-heavy rock and roll with Elvish musicians playing traditional instruments. When the twins started writing their own songs three years ago, the fusion music was insanely hard to find. They had stumbled across a handful of tracks during a research raid on the Pittsburgh Internet during Shutdown. With their Aunt Kitty being a composer, they knew better than to use the songs without permission. To create their own version of it, though, they had to digitally recreate the off-world instruments. It had taken them months to dig up enough information and code it all in. Since then, fusion music had been discovered by the masses, unfortunately fueled by mass piracy and pale imitations. None of the groups based on Earth could match the twins’ music, because no one else had the right instruments.

The new song for Black Willow Wicker had been written for the humorous battle between Queen Soulful Ember and an army of black willows protesting Hairbrush’s attempts at magical topiary that created a roving flock of boxwood penguins. (“They had to be flightless birds. Flying topiary would have been simply ridiculous.”) Louise used a series of bugle calls starting with reveille to mirror the trees’ strategies. It was bit of geek humor they didn’t expect Harvey to get.

It didn’t quite match the feel of the filler video, but everything from the zalituus horn to the olianuni marked it as one of their pieces. To write and record something else would take days. Louise wanted to get their reply video posted as quickly as possible.

“Yes, let’s use it.” Louise ported in the song and started to fiddle with the video’s story beats to match up with the music. Because the battlefield scene had been punctuated with explosions as the new storyboard, it actually wasn’t as hard as she had thought to make the two mesh together.

“What do we call this one?” Jillian asked. “Thank You for the Shout-Out?”

There was a groaning outcry against the title from the kids around them.

“It’s a Trap!” Ava suggested.

“Where in the World is Nigel Reid?” Iggy said.

“Missing Treasures,” Zahara shouted to be heard over the sudden loud flood of possible video titles.

“Missing Treasures,” Louise repeated. There was a nice double meaning that the queen was missing her original targets, the various treasures, but also that Nigel Reid was going to go missing. “I like that.” Louise glanced to Jillian, who nodded. She quickly created a title screen. The only ending credits that they did were to claim copyright to everything in the video, from the art down to the music, and assigned them to Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo. “We’re ready to load.”

A cheer went up from the other kids. As the boring part of waiting for the video to upload wore on, the other kids scattered to get food and claim tables.

Since they needed to hide their data trail while loading, normally they only loaded their videos to one site, Filmcraft. They never were staff pick, had more than a hundred comments, and never reached the thousand mark of “likes.” The low response was why they never thought they were widely popular. While Jillian uploaded the new video to Filmcraft, Louise did a search for The Queen’s Pantaloons. Where were all these people seeing their videos if not on Filmcraft? The search term brought back over two million hits. Filmcraft wasn’t even on the top page of results. The first hit was YouTube, a site that Jillian considered the ghetto of video sites and they never used and rarely visited. Unlike Filmcraft, YouTube listed the number of times the video was actually viewed. The number made her squeak.

“What?” Jillian asked.

“Five hundred million views!” Louise cried.

“For what?”

“The Queen’s Pantaloons!” Someone using the screen name of JelloShot01 had copied their video from Filmcraft. He had all their other videos, too. In the “recommended videos” on the side was Culotte de la Reine, which was their title translated into French. When she clicked on it, their video started to play with French subtitles.

“You really didn’t know how famous you were?” Iggy asked.

Dumbstruck, Louise shook her head. This explained all the money in the YourStore account. How much more could they make if they advertised? How did they go about advertising?

Zahara returned with three sandwiches and drinks. “Here. I figured you’d want to see it uploaded.”

“Thanks!” Louise wasn’t sure if she should offer money to Zahara. If the food was a gift, it would be kind of insulting to offer it. They had, however, all that money from YourStore. They weren’t the poorest kids in school anymore.

Once it was uploaded, they posted a link at the Pittsburgh Forum under the heading “For Nigel from Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo.”

Louise had left her tablet on the JelloShot01 YouTube channel as they ate. Before lunch was over, Missing Treasures was added to his list and already had fifty thousand views. She stared at it in surprise and dismay. How had they missed that they were this famous?

Louise spent the rest of the day searching through the rough translation of the codex for some references to the gossamer call while watching the numbers soar on JelloShot01’s channel. Debate broke out on the fan website as to whether this was a real video or a fake created by Nigel. The doubters pointed to the odd posting time, insisting that Lemon-Lime was based on Elfhome and wouldn’t be able to upload during any period other than Shutdown. Others pointed out that if Nigel was working with Lemon-Lime, then he could have arranged for work visas for Pittsburghers. This triggered a spirited debate between people who thought the twins had to be elves and those who believed that they were Elfhome “natives”—Pittsburghers born after the first Startup.

Fifty-three minutes after JelloShot01 copied their video, the first report of the frame-by-frame analysis hit the boards. Louise imagined that she could hear the massive wails of dismay as they discovered the hidden messages. Another twenty-eight minutes and their fans had decided that Lemon-Lime had sought Nigel out in order to raise money to replace their equipment. This completely ignored the fact that Nigel had posted a very public message seeking Lemon-Lime. Another theory surfaced after someone decided to take the video’s storyboard as gospel truth. Obviously, this new camp stated, Lemon-Lime was trying to warn Nigel that he was about to be tricked into a one-way trip to Elfhome. This was quickly refuted by fans that were also followers of Nigel’s work. Apparently Nigel had been fairly public in his attempts to get to Elfhome; the production company that handled his nature documentaries had been denied travel visas by the EIA for several years. His fans also pointed out that Nigel was in New York for the Today Show as part of his pitch to NBC to do a series on Elfhome. Nigel had reached out to Lemon-Lime before the April Shutdown. Lemon-Lime, they theorized, could have left Pittsburgh last month and joined Nigel in New York.

This triggered a furious reexamination of Nigel’s appearance on the NBC morning show and the phrase “hope to be working.” Some stated that this and the video indicated that Lemon-Lime hadn’t agreed to anything. Others claimed that the “hope” meant that Nigel hadn’t locked in the NBC backing yet, and Lemon-Lime was only defending Nigel from the backlash of his shout-out. Yet another group suggested that NBC was waffling on their decision, and Lemon-Lime’s video was an attempt to sway the network by adding their fanbase to Nigel’s.

“Wow, they really overthink everything.” Louise closed the window on the seemingly endless debate. “They’re making it all more complicated than it really was.”

“Maybe,” Jillian said. “We had no idea if it was really Nigel Reid trying to make contact with us and we don’t know why he’s in New York and we didn’t expect such a huge shout-out from him. Face it, we didn’t even know we were famous, and from what I can tell, we’re up there with blockbuster movie stars. Some of what the fans are saying might be right.”

Louise didn’t want to believe that Nigel had used them. He always seemed so genuinely nice on camera. She wanted it to honestly be what it be appeared to be — Nigel had only contacted them to learn something interesting to him. She had to admit that she could be wrong.

“Do you know what really sucks?” Jillian sighed. “If we could go public, then everything would work out. We could sign a movie deal with some big studio and use the money to save the babies.”

Louise’s stomach sunk at the idea of so many people focused on them. “No one is going to offer us a deal. Even if they did, as soon as the studios found out we’re nine-year-olds, they’d back out.”

“I don’t know,” Jillian said. “People in Hollywood make some pretty crazy decisions.”

“We’re still minors. We can’t sign contracts on our own. Mom and Dad would have to agree to anything, and you know what they’ll say.”

“That we should have as normal a childhood as possible,” Jillian growled with frustration. “Alexander was so lucky. Her grandfather didn’t make her be normal.”

“He must know what it was like, growing up and being like us. Mom and Dad are doing the best they can, but they can’t know how boring it is to try to keep at everyone else’s speed.”

“This might be the perfect way to nail a Hollywood deal, and it’s going to just slip away. Everyone loves us now, but how long is that going to last? A year? Two? It’s not going to last until we’re eighteen.”

Louise liked doing the videos, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to do them another eight years. Hollywood was Jillian’s dream. If Louise had a dream that included Hollywood, it’d be doing nature documentaries like Nigel. “Well, maybe not The Adventures of Queen Soulful Ember, but that doesn’t mean we can’t come up with something just as cool.”

Jillian harrumphed. Being a Hollywood director had been her dream for years. It had to be hard to see the possibility dangle within reach and yet know that she couldn’t claim it. She probably didn’t realize, though, that it made Louise feel so small and unsure beside her. Louise didn’t know what she wanted to be when they got old enough to do anything and everything. She did know she didn’t want to be in front of a camera, having everyone watch her, and she didn’t want to be behind the camera, having to tell everyone what to do. And that knowledge made her feel even smaller.

Hating how she felt, she focused back on searching the codex for information on the gossamer call. There was nothing on gossamers. Not on how they were controlled. Not on how they were created. She flipped through the book, pausing here and there to study the spells traced on the pages. So much to learn, so little time.

They knew that the gossamers were called with whistles. The domana triggered their magic with different words. Every written spell had an activation phrase. Sound seemed to be a basic part of magic. Each domana spell required a different finger position. Using motions and words, the elves operated their bodies like a human did a computer, selecting a spell and running it. No, not like a computer, like an instrument. The finger positions were like the fingering of a flute or guitar. The domana were producing a unique chord with each new gesture and word. Given two hands, ten fingers, two joints on the thumb, three joints on the other fingers, there was a staggering number of possible finger positions.

The written spells in the codex required phrases to trigger them. The phrases worked much like spell locks in that the main function was to keep the spell from activating until the caster wished it to activate. That each spell required a different phrase, though, seemed to indicate that there was more to it than a simple key turning in a lock. Perhaps the sound set up important resonance within the spell components. .

So much they didn’t know. Louise sighed and focused on what she did know.

The elves didn’t have slides or valves on their instruments. A whistle with multiple tones then would be fixed and played like a flute or boatswain’s call. The samples of gossamer calls they could find had featured only four tones that they’d already mapped out sine waves for. One was in the high ultrasonic range, but the others stepped down the hertz range to something audible to humans. It seemed to indicate that the gossamer’s hearing was similar to whales and open-water species of dolphins. The Earth sea mammals used low-pitched tones in the seventy-five hertz range to communicate because those sounds traveled farther. They used frequencies in the one hundred to hundred-fifty kilohertz range for echolocation. Humans could only hear up to twenty kilohertz, so it would explain why three of the tones were audible. The twins had noticed that “turn” commands used the ultrasonic tone while the other three sounds triggered “docking” and “wait” activities. Obviously the elves were using instinctual behavior for their commands.

The question remained whether the commands were actually spells printed on the whistle itself or were like the domana-caste, genetically keyed within the gossamer. Considering the limited tones of the whistle and the wide range of words used as commands for both written spells and domana spell-casting, it seemed likely that it was the latter. If that was the case, then the “magic” of the whistle was that it needed to cross great distances in order to trigger the gossamer’s genetically coded spells. Dufae actually discussed in length how the magic “jumped” distances via resonance, which allowed the domana-caste to channel the massive amounts of power from a distant location to where they needed it. He also took great care in determining the exact distance between the mouth and the hands to trigger the domana spells.

Louise flipped back to that section of the codex. Since Dufae was cut off from the Spell Stones, he had developed a set of spells to help him carry out his experiments. The twins needed a whistle that could hit all four tones with a magical spell that could amplify the reach of the instrument.

An hour later, she thought she knew how to build a gossamer call. They wouldn’t even need to use the school’s printer. Of course, until they got a working generator, there’d be no way to test it.