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Deep in the snow, in the middle of a windswept moorland, a small band of traveling librarians sat around their cooling stove and wondered what to burn next.

Tiffany had never been able to find out much about the librarians. They were a bit like the wandering priests and teachers who went even into the smallest, loneliest villages to deliver those things—prayers, medicine, facts—that people could do without for weeks at a time but sometimes needed a lot of all at once. The librarians would loan you a book for a penny, although they often would take food or good secondhand clothes. If you gave them a book, you got ten free loans.

Sometimes you’d see two of three of their wagons parked in some clearing and could smell the glues they boiled up to repair the oldest books. Some of the books they loaned were so old that the printing had been worn gray by the pressure of people’s eyeballs reading it.

The librarians were mysterious. It was said they could tell what book you needed just by looking at you, and they could take your voice away with a word.