The Toll of Secrets

The first snow of November was drifting through the pines when Greta reached the old stone bridge, and the light was draining out of the forest far faster than she had anticipated. The city in the south, where she intended to spend the rest of her life, still lay two days away. Crossing the bridge would save her half a day; following the river around would cost her the last of her bread.

She was halfway across when something unfolded itself from beneath the arch. At first she took it for a heap of mossy boulders. Then the boulders hauled themselves over the low wall, and two eyes the color of wet slate blinked open in the middle of them. The troll, with lichen growing in the creases of its knuckles, settled itself in the center of the bridge. "Toll," it said.

Greta's grandmother used to say that the trolls of the north country could not be bribed, only satisfied. Hoping the old woman had been wrong, Greta held out three copper coins. The troll did not so much as glance at them. In a voice like gravel being poured into a bucket, it explained that the price of crossing was a secret: one true thing that she had never told another living soul. If she lied, it would know, and she would go back the way she had come.

She considered lying anyway. Then, before she had quite decided to, she heard herself speaking. "Three summers ago, the granary in our village burned down. Everyone said my brother Tobias had done it, because he'd been drinking that night and somebody had seen him near the barn. He never denied it. He just went to work in the mines at Kessel, and my mother hasn't spoken his name since." The snow went on falling between them. "It was me. I knocked over a lantern in the hayloft. Tobias saw me running out, and he took the blame so that I wouldn't have to."

The troll remained silent for a long time. Then it asked her, quite gently for something made of stone, why she was going south. She told it that she had found work in the city and that she would be happy there. It asked her again. This time she admitted that she was leaving because she could no longer bear sitting at her mother's table, eating bread that her brother's silence had paid for. Not until she had said it aloud did she understand that she had never been traveling toward anything at all. She had simply been running away.

Without a word, the troll stepped aside, and the road to the south lay open in the blue dusk. Greta looked at it for a long moment. Then she turned around and walked back the way she had come, toward the fork in the road where the track to Kessel climbed north into the hills. The troll's voice followed her into the dark. "Keep your coins, girl. Coins are light, which is why people are forever losing them. Secrets are the heavy ones, and you've just put yours down."