Beyond Orrin the road went up, and kept going up after the mountains had stopped. It climbed a stair of cloud to an island of white stone floating in the sky, ringed with seven arches, and under each arch a guardian waited.

They had kept watch over the Library since before it broke. They had not had a visitor in four thousand years, and they did not seem pleased to have one now.

Hush was an enormous grey owl in a veil of moth-wings, guardian of silence, of the pause between one word and the next. Every word she spoke cost her a feather, so she spoke very rarely. She could stop the world for the length of one held breath. Long ago she had been a town crier who shouted a secret in the wrong square, and a war came of it. She had not raised her voice since.

Brannoch, the Ember-Stag, was her opposite: loud, kind and impossible to shush. His antlers burned like a candelabrum, and by their light you could see whatever you most feared, standing politely in the corner. He was the guardian of courage. He had carried the first fire out of the first burning tale, and he liked to mention it.

Madame Orrery was a tortoise whose shell was a clockwork of brass rings, turning slowly, one ring for each century. She kept the order of events: the guardian of and then. Fussy and precise, she could turn back a single moment for each visitor, and never twice. She had been built, she said, by someone who wanted time to be gentle with her stories.

Sister Vell was a heron whose every feather was a tiny mirror, the guardian of truth. She showed each moment from every other pair of eyes that had seen it. She was not cruel, only honest, which most people find worse. When Mihao bowed to her, a hundred small Mihaos bowed back from her feathers, and one of them, he noticed, was holding something silver.

Grumbold was a bear of moss and stone, the guardian of places. He remembered every hill, every river, every kitchen anyone had ever loved, and could raise any of them out of the ground for an afternoon. He was homesick for all of them at once, and tended to fall asleep mid-sentence.

Twice was a two-headed raven, guardian of secrets and twists. One head always lied and one always told the truth, and nobody, including Twice, knew which was which. Lady Ink was a cuttlefish who swam through the air in a slow violet cloud, the guardian of words. Whatever she wrote stayed real until the ink dried, and she was terribly vain about her handwriting.

“A leaf for a story,” said Madame Orrery, ticking. “That is the rule. Tell us one true thing about yourself, Keeper, and you may have what we guard.” Mihao opened his mouth. He knew so little: sand, a book, a fox. Everything before the desert was a closed door.

It was Pell who stepped forward. She told them about an old cat who woke in a desert and gave a lost boy his name back. Who stitched a forest with his own beard. Who wrote a princess back into her kingdom. When she finished, the guardians were silent a long while. Then Hush, who never spoke, spent a single feather.

The guardians did not explain Hush’s words. Instead each laid one thread of light in Mihao’s paws, and the seven threads wove themselves into a leaf. “A keeper,” said Brannoch gruffly, “is someone whose story others will tell for him.”

As they left, Vell called after him. “When you find the drawer, Keeper, open it yourself. Do not let the fox open it for you.” Mihao did not know what drawer she meant. But his paws, he noticed, had begun to shake.