“I’ll have to search the place. The wood song isn’t giving me anything.”

He nodded. “I’ll keep watch.”

I followed him into the room on the left, which turned out to be a small sitting area dominated by the fireplace. He twitched the curtains open a fraction, then crossed his arms and stared out the small gap, his attention on the street, though I had no doubt he was very aware of my movements.

There were no bookcases, and little in the way of furniture aside from the old sofa that sat against the wall opposite the window and a well-padded chair close to the fireplace. There was a side table beside this, and on it lay a stack of old magazines. Novels sat on the floor underneath, but they were mostly paperback romances.

I made my way out of the room and headed past the front door. There were three rooms off the hall on the other side of the cottage. Two were bedrooms, and the third a rather small bathroom. Neither the first bedroom nor the bathroom yielded anything, and it was with fading hope that I approached the final room. It was the biggest of the three, with a window front and back, though the latter looked out onto the old shed’s wall and really wouldn’t have provided much light, even during the day. I paused in the doorway and glanced around, not seeing anything that twinged my instincts, then stepped inside.

The minute I did, the Eye burned to life.

The codex was here.

I drew in a deeper breath in a useless attempt to calm flaring excitement, then tugged the Eye out from my bra and wrapped my fingers around its silken bag. I could still feel its pulsing, but the material seemed to be keeping my second sight from responding. At least for now, anyway.

I slowly made my way around the room, using the Eye as a guide as to whether I was getting closer or going further away. It drew me toward the small, two-door wardrobe whose wood was so heavily covered by decades of paint that its music had been lost. I frowned and wondered why a pixie would hold such a lifeless piece in her room, then opened the door and swept the eye across the hanging space and the shelves. The book wasn’t inside; it was above.

I stepped back and looked up. There were a number of boxes sitting in the gap between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling, but the pulsing pulled me to the left. I rose onto my tippy-toes, pulled the small stack of boxes down, then carted them across to the bed. The first two held a collection of wooly hats and scarves, but in the third was a rather worn and very plain leather book the size of a notebook—and a small one at that.

It couldn’t be the codex. It simply didn’t look big enough to hold the sum of all knowledge.