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I stand up straighter. Phyllis clicks the stopwatch.

“I’ve said everything I have to say about this library to the county board, so I will just remind everyone what it says above the door.” I take my glasses off, and I stop, the way I stop every Thursday. I let the room wait a few moments before I continue. “You’ve all heard it. It’s free to all, and it’s yours. Vote.”

I sit down.

Nobody says anything for a second. Phyllis clicks the stopwatch and says, “Fifty-one seconds.” Somewhere in the back Elsie laughs quietly. She’s won the bet since I talked for less than three minutes.

Fran looks at me for a long moment. Then she looks at the front row.

“Ms. Hayes. You said the agency had something.”

Carol Hayes stands up in the front row and opens her leather folder. There’s more than one sheet in it this time.

“Mr. Reyes sent my office Ms. Sutton’s transcribed stories. She has fourteen years of Emberhold history written down now. It’s the first written record of that clan on either world, and the program wants an archive.” She turns a page. “The regional office proposes to make the Venn’s Crossing library that archive. The program would fund an archivist’s position and the building’s operations for the life of the pilot. The condition is that the building stays a public library and open to all.”

Fran puts the gavel down, and nobody speaks. An archivist’s position with a salary. There’s money for me after all. I’m not going to cry in front of everybody, so I stare at Harold until my eyes stop burning.

“That’s the proposal,” Carol says. “We’ve asked the resident to speak before the town votes.”

She sits. Two hundred people turn their heads to the end of my table.

Yorrel doesn’t move for a moment. The mark tells me he’s nervous. Under the nerves, he loves me. I’m not going to say it for the first time in front of the whole town. I push it through the bond instead, as hard as I can.

He puts his hands at his sides. He doesn’t raise his voice, but every corner of the room hears him.

“In my clan, one person stands at the fire every night and says what happened that day, so it is not lost. We call that person the keeper. When the telling is done, everyone goes home. The keeper banks the fire alone.”

He lets that sit.

“Paige has written down fourteen years of my clan. She did it in letters I cannot read. She is a keeper. If this town has the building, it should keep her in it.”

That’s all of it. His point took less than two minutes. I’d have taken twelve.

He turns his head and looks at me.

“Now your story.”

I know what’s coming, and I sit there with my glasses in my hand and let him. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked at saying nothing.

His voice changes. It goes slow and even, the way it did at the foot of my ladder the first day, and two hundred people hear the storyteller start a story about me.

“‘No,’ said the keeper of eleven thousand stories, from the fourth rung of her ladder. ‘Absolutely not.’ And the orc who could not read one of them said yes.”

Somebody in the back laughs. Yorrel doesn’t stop.

He tells them about the county board, and how they gave me three minutes and I took eleven. The legal pads get a part too, and so does the ink on my fingers. He ends with yesterday morning on the front steps, when I sat down in the cold and told him everything I was choosing until I ran out of words.

Then he looks at me, and the rest of it is just for me.

“Your glasses come off when you stop holding back. I have known that since the first afternoon. I never told you. It was the one thing about you I kept for myself.”

Nobody in the room makes a sound.

“I have been calling you a word you did not ask me to translate. Mora’vol. It means the voice I keep.” His ears go down, soft. “Every night I have been the keeper, the hall listened and then went home. You are the first one who stayed after the telling. That is how it will be told.”

My face is burning, and nobody in the room is looking at anything but him. I put my glasses back on. I don’t have anything left to say. He said all of it.

Fran picks the gavel back up. She has to clear her throat first.