Brooke ‘Bookeeper’'s Arc

Chapter 32 of 32

Brooke woke before dawn and walked out to check the tent. The candles had burned down past their tin cups. One wick lay sideways in a puddle of wax, still smoldering against the edge of an open book. She pinched it dead with her fingers. The page was scorched brown in a half circle. She stood there a long time looking at the canvas walls and the dry paper stacked along every bench. One gust through the flap, one sleeper turning over, and the whole tent would go up. The library beside it would follow. She pulled the clerk and his daughter out of bed at first light. She told them what she had found and what would happen if she did not fix it. They walked the tent together. Books sat fanned open beside tin cups. A stack near the back leaned against a lantern wire. Loose paper from the chalkboard ledger had drifted under the table where two candles still guttered. Brooke counted nine places a fire could start before breakfast. She told the clerk to wake every sleeper and clear them out by noon. By afternoon she had a new system on the long table. She traded the bearded merchant four more cookbooks for two sheets of tin and a coil of wire. The clerk's daughter cut the tin into squares and bent the edges up. Brooke set each candle in a square, then set each square inside a wider pan of sand scooped from the lot. She moved every book three hand-widths back from the flames and roped off the center of the table with twine. She wrote the rules on the chalkboard in block letters. No book within reach of a wick. No candle left burning when the reader stood up. No sleeping in the tent with a flame lit. She hired two of the survivors to walk the rows from dusk to dawn with a bucket of sand and a wet rag, paid in bread and a place on the bench. She called them the wick watch and wrote their names at the top of a new column in the ledger. By nightfall the tent looked different. The candles still burned, but each one sat in its pan of sand inside a tin square, and the books stayed back from the light. Forty readers came in and found the new rope and read the rules on the board. The two watchers walked the rows with their buckets. Brooke stood at the flap and counted them past her. The library would not burn tonight. But the wax was still running out faster than the trade list could replace it, and the watchers would want paying past the week. She went back inside to write the next problem down.