“This place reminds me of our old room,” Linh mumbled. “We weren’t allowed to decorate it either.”

“You guys shared a room?” Fitz asked.

“It was our punishment for telling people we were twins.” Tam rolled his eyes.

Linh hooked her arm around him. “Too bad I liked sharing a room better.”

“And yet you ditched me the first second we got to Alluveterre.”

“Hey, what girl is going to pass up her own private tree house?” Linh asked.

“Definitely not me,” Sophie said, trying to figure out where to start their search. Everything seemed so un-Keefe, it was hard to imagine him touching any of it.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Tam asked. “Keefe doesn’t hit me as the Dear Diary type—though if we find one, I call dibs.”

“No you don’t,” Sophie told him. “We’re not here to snoop. I just figured we should look around and make sure there’s nothing important.”

“Well, this place is huge,” Fitz said. “So maybe we should split up—some of us upstairs and some of us downstairs and meet in the middle?”

“New game!” Grizel jumped in. “Girls versus boys. Losers owe the others a favor. GO!”

“Bring it on!” Fitz said, sprinting for the stairs.

Grizel beat him there and bolted downstairs, so Fitz raced up.

“Looks like we have closet and bathroom duty, guys!” he shouted.

“I’m going on record right now and saying I’m not getting within ten feet of Keefe’s underwear!” Tam shouted back.

Sandor heaved a sigh as he turned to follow the boys. “If you care about me at all, Miss Foster, lose this silly game. Do whatever you have to do.”

Sophie and Linh shared a look before they made their way downstairs, where Grizel was already busy flipping though one of the notebooks piled on an enormous gilded desk. “Either of you want to give me a hand with these?”

Linh grabbed one. “Wow. The whole first page is just ‘bored bored bored’ written over and over.”

“He also makes some rather entertaining notes about his Mentors in the margins,” Grizel said. “But none of that is particularly useful, so we’d better get moving. We’re winning this thing! And when we do, Sandor is taking me dancing.”

“Dancing?” Sophie repeated, trying to picture that.

Nope.

Her brain couldn’t compute.

“Does dancing mean something else to goblins?” Linh asked.

“I don’t know—does it mean this?” Grizel hummed a silky beat and shook her hips in a move that reminded Sophie of belly dancing, only with less arm waving and more head bopping.

“You really think Sandor’s going to do that?” Sophie asked.

“He will if you help me force him. Think of the favor you could demand from that pretty boy up there. And I bet our little Linh would love to force her brother to do something especially embarrassing.”

Linh grinned. “How do we win? You never explained the rules.”

“Of course I didn’t. How else can I change them? Now get to work!” Grizel pointed across the room—which seemed to be some sort of study, complete with oversize armchairs and walls of bookshelves. From a distance, anyone would think a model student lived there—or maybe a snooty professor. But as Sophie looked closer, she could spot glimmers of Keefe in the details. Like the subtitles he’d scrawled on the spines of the books:

688 pages that don’t actually tell you anything.

Does anyone honestly care this much about fungus?

I tore a page out of the middle somewhere—good luck trying to find it!

“Think this is significant?” Grizel asked, pulling a silver Imparter from one of the desk drawers.

“I’m betting he left that so no one could track him down,” Sophie said “But you’re welcome to compare it to mine to see if there’s something unique.”

She handed over her Imparter, and Grizel studied them from every angle. “Ugh, I guess you’re right. These look identical—oh, what’s that?”

Linh showed them the notebook she’d been flipping through, where Keefe had drawn a detailed map of Foxfire and marked several places with “Hide gulon here.”

Grizel snorted. “I’ll give the boy this—he’s definitely creative.”

“That’s true,” Sophie realized, trying to see the room through Keefe’s eyes. “We need to search beyond the obvious places. He’d want to be clever—hiding stuff in plain sight where no one would suspect. He’d also enjoy damaging things his father cared about, like the walls or the floor or . . .”

Sophie squatted to find the S section on the bookshelf. Specifically: The Heart of the Matter by Lord Cassius Sencen.

Keefe’s father had published his theory that elves generated emotions in both their minds and their hearts, and believed the heart was where the purer emotions lived. Sophie actually found the idea fascinating—and it synced with certain things she’d experienced during her inflicting training. But Keefe’s subtitle was: I’d rather gouge my eyes out with a Prattles pin.

She flipped back the cover and found that Keefe had glued all the pages together, then cut out their center, creating a hollow space he’d packed with vials of elixirs.

“Victory is ours!” Grizel shouted, handing Sophie back her Imparter.

“It’s not about who finds something first—it’s about who finds the most!” Sandor snapped back. But Sophie could hear him yelling at Fitz and Tam to work faster.

“I’m not sure this stuff is actually important,” Sophie warned, holding up two of the vials—Burp Blaster and Pus Powder. “I think it’s Keefe’s pranking supplies.”

“Maybe some of it,” Grizel said, fishing out a silver forklike gadget from the bottom. “But this is an effluxer—also known as an ogre repeller. One of my favorite inventions you guys make, by the way.”

“Yeah, but Keefe uses those for pranks,” Sophie argued. “One time he tried hiding them in the grounds at Foxfire, so they’d go off right as the principal walked by.”

“No wonder he and my brother don’t get along,” Linh said. “They’re basically the same person.”