I’d overslept that morning and had run from the house with wet hair and an outfit only one oatmeal-colored cardigan away from being everyone’s mental image of librarian-chic. My mad dash screeched to a halt only a few miles down the highway. And now I sat, trying not to let my frustration at the stalled hover-carts bobbing all around get the best of me.
Somewhere up ahead, the dwarves had gone to work in the night, ripping up half the road. Knowing the dwarvish sense of humor, they’d probably done every other lane.
I looked at the fields on either side of the road, wistful, and wondered how large a fine would be levied against me if I were caught hovering sneakily through some farmer’s corn crop instead of sticking to the roads, but I gave this dream only a passing caress before I discarded it. The scarecrows knew their business, and almost no one got away with taking such shortcuts. I doubted I’d be the one in a million.
The dominion map lay open on the passenger seat, tossed aside during a futile examination earlier in the week when a dragon had jackknifed on the overpass, backing up traffic for miles. The trip from my cottage on the far side of the woods to the library where I worked usually took no time at all, but when something went wrong…
“You can’t get there from here!”
I glared at the Sybil looming outside my window. “I don’t need any prophecies today, thank you.” But she’d already wandered off through the stalled traffic to read the next vehicle’s fate to its trapped driver.
The map gave a little bleep, and I turned to find a new alternate route outlined in blinking green dots. Volunteering to be an official beta-tester for the upgrade package seemed to be paying off at last! Wasting no time for fear other early adopters lurked in the crush, I nudged the cart ever-so-slightly to the right, listing a bit as I leaned way over in my seat to see around the massive eighteen-winger ahead of me.
The way clear for as far as I could see, I flew over to the shoulder and zipped toward the exit which was still invisible around the next bend.
“Take exit 321.” The map chirruped out its directions, and I followed, hovering along the sweeping arc of the exit ramp, committing to adventure over slow, painful certainty. “Turn left onto Route 62.”
The road was as close to dirt as it could be while still being paved. The edges were worn down and sprinkled with tufts of grass and wildflowers; the shoulder remained as a faint outline between weathered tarmac and fields.
“Use caution at the crossroads fifty meters ahead,” the map advised. An understatement, for at the crossroads stood Old Scratch, a fiddle tucked under his chin. His pinstriped suit, neatly trimmed beard, and waxed, pencil-thin mustache were unmistakable.
I checked the intersection, barely slowing down since nothing was visible coming from any other direction, then sped up and zipped by Old Scratch. Just to be safe, I gave him a quick little salute as he half-heartedly waved his fiddle at me.
In the rear-view mirror, I saw him tuck the fiddle back under his chin and resume playing.
After another quiet stretch, the map piped up, “Reduce speed. Prepare to stop.” We were still in the woods, but I could see the cause of the slowdown coming into view ahead of me: a stone bridge, very tall and imposing while at the same time too narrow to allow more than one cart to cross at a time. A fragile-looking red and white-striped arm barred the entrance to the bridge.
In front of the bridge, wearing neat-as-a-pin, forest-green coveralls and with her mud-colored hair painstakingly braided into pigtails secured by incongruous pink bows, stood the most enormous troll I had ever seen. Not that I had seen many. They’d only begun to mainstream Mythicals when I was in high school.
“Hello!” she cried. A flipper-like hand flew up and flailed back and forth in what I realized was meant to be a wave.
“Uh– Hi,” I replied. I slowed to a stop, the cart’s humming dropping down from high to middle C.
“You are my very first customer!” The troll girl hurried over to the cart, each step she took shaking the ground. Fluttering sounds filled the air as a small flock of birds took wing en masse from the surrounding trees, a few screeching out warnings. The disembodied, glowing eyes winking all around from the undergrowth didn’t seem fazed by the birds’ alarums, nor did the fairies moving busily along from flower to flower.
“Wow!” I managed. She seemed so thrilled. And friendly… and I’ll admit that even though I knew trolls didn’t eat people anymore, knew about the protests, the marches, the union movement, and hoped for the day we might finally see the first troll elected to… something…faced with a real-live troll? It was hard not to flinch a little as she towered over my cart.
She stood close enough that I could read the patch sewn slightly crooked onto the breast pocket of her coveralls: “Troll Local 157.”
“I hadn’t heard the union had moved in.” I also hadn’t heard of any devourings lately…
Enthusiastic nodding answered this. “Yep! Lots of new bridges going up, and I got this one! All mine. Just opened two days ago. No one comes along this road, I guess.” She sounded a bit wistful. “It’s been real quiet. I was starting to worry I wouldn’t make my quota.”
“The map didn’t tell me I could take this route before.”
She looked a little confused, then her expression lightened. “Oh, yeah! I guess if there was no bridge.” She pointed a thick, gnarled finger at her head and whirled it around. “Duh!”
I smiled, nodded, waited. At last, I decided to prompt her. “So… I’m on my way to work…?”
Her grin stretched her enormous mouth wide, and I could see she was wearing pink-tinted lip gloss. “Oh, yeah! Thanks for reminding me!” She pulled out a scrap of paper—also pink—from a pocket of her coveralls and squinted her tiny, bead-like eyes at it. “Okay, so… you have a choice of tolls.” She looked up, expectant, and I realized she was waiting for me to indicate that I understood.
I nodded as my mouth went dry. I hoped one of the choices involved money.
“There’s the toll of strength,” she read, sounding out the word as “streeen-guh-tuh-hhhuh.”
“The toll of courage.” Which she pronounced, “Cooo-ray-geh.” She glanced at me again. I nodded, crossing my fingers for number three. “And the toll of wits.”
Close enough. “I’ll try wits, but what if I don’t get it?”
She shrugged her sloped shoulders. “We can do two out of three, I guess. If you fail that, you can’t cross.”
“That’s it? No penalty?” This seemed fair, even though it meant I would be so late for work that it might be a better idea to go home and call in sick.
The troll grinned again, teeth showing as she hissed a bit. I guessed this was a laugh and smiled back. “Not crossing the bridge is the penalty!”
The unspoken, “Silly!” rang in my ears. She straightened, her sloping shoulders taking on a very slight bit of squareness, as she prepared to recite whatever went with the toll of wits.
“Where do fish keep their money?” She stared straight ahead at nothing and barked out the question as if she were standing in a line of children being quizzed and this was her answer.
No, the answer is mine… I glanced at her, confused. Surely it couldn’t be this easy. I expected a trick, but a first failure would be educational at least to see how the questions were set up. Two out of three, then.
“A riverbank?” I guessed.
Her tiny eyes grew slightly larger and her wide, horse-like mouth dropped open. “That’s right!” she cried. “Good for you!” And she stepped back, making elaborate gestures toward the bridge as the barrier arm lifted. “Have a good day at work!”
“Thanks!” I put the cart in gear and zipped away as quickly as I could without being rude.
The bridge crossed an especially wide part of the river, and it took several moments to make it to the other side. No other troll stood guarding this side of the bridge, but, glancing back, I saw the twin red-and-white barrier arm drop slowly back into place as I drove away.
The new route proved to be so much faster, I was actually on time to work, and I saw no reason not to take the troll bridge route home that evening. As I approached the bridge from this opposite side, I again saw the troll waving wildly at me.
“You’re back!” Her contagious enthusiasm had me grinning.
“I am!” I agreed. “You’re on this side.”
“I have the gate down on the other side. Someone else came along only five hours after you did.” She beamed.
“That’s great.” I felt a bit guilty about my earlier nervousness, but I’d had no idea trolls were so friendly. I decided right then that this would be my new way to work. If nothing else, it seemed much faster than the highway even when it wasn’t torn up by dwarves. An offering was in order as penance for my misplaced fears. “My name’s Maggie.” I held my hand out the window.
“Oh!” Trolls apparently didn’t turn pink when they blushed, but her earthen-colored skin changed to a warmer, loamy shade for a moment, and she took my hand very carefully in her flipperish fingers. “I’m Troll.”
“Very pleased to meet you, Troll.”
Flustered, her smile turned little girlish, and she looked away, consulting her bit of pink paper. “Okay. Wits again?”
I nodded, and she stood as straight as she’d done that morning. “What’s black and white and read all over?”
If Troll had asked me that for my first toll of wit, I would have been certain it was a trick question. I was a bit disappointed that this riddle was even easier than the morning’s had been. “A newspaper?”
Troll was again deeply impressed by my knowledge. I drove away, looking forward for the first time to my next morning’s commute.
As weeks passed, traffic across Troll’s bridge grew from an erratic trickle to a steady stream. Our conversations grew shorter, and sometimes we barely had time to wave at each other for fear the queue of waiting carts would begin honking in irritation at any delay. As far as I could tell, no one ever picked the tolls of courage or strength.
I answered riddles I hadn’t heard since first grade, I named dominion capitals, and once I even told her my favorite color. As time passed, her enthusiasm began to fade, until, on the morning of the second month’s anniversary of my first encounter with Troll, I arrived during a lull and found her staring sadly at the bridge. She didn’t even notice when I pulled all the way up to the gate and stopped.
“Troll? Are you okay?”
She whipped around, startled. Her usually tidy hair hung in frazzled braids on either side of her kind face. “Hi, Maggie,” she sighed. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“You look kind of down.”
She shrugged. “Yeah… I’m not doing too well on my quota.”
This seemed impossible, considering the number of carts that took this route every day. “I can’t believe that! You’re so busy.”
Troll’s earnest little eyes met mine. “Everybody crosses.”
“Oh. And that’s not good?”
She shook her head. “If I don’t make the quota, I can’t keep the bridge.” Another cart came humming up behind me, but I didn’t push her to give me my toll.
“I think my questions are too easy,” she continued. “They seem so hard to me, but everybody gets them right. Or even if they get one wrong, they get two out of three.”
“Well, how about starting with that?” I suggested. “Don’t do two out of three anymore!”
Troll perked up a little. “You think that might help?”
“Worth a try, isn’t it? Just tell people it’s a new policy.”
Troll gave me a brave little smile, and I had another idea to help. “When you get off work, come over to the library. We can help you look up some new questions.”
Confusion wrinkled up Troll’s forehead. “Off work? But who would watch the bridge?”
“What about the night shift?” I suggested. “We’re open late during the week.”
“It’s just me,” Troll said. She seemed puzzled by the idea of it being some other way. “We trolls never leave our bridges. It wouldn’t be right.”
“But Troll Local 157—?” I began.
“That’s me!” she exclaimed. “It means that I’m official, and I have my very own bridge.”
I swallowed another brilliant utterance of “Oh,” and felt my determination gain strength. I had to help Troll beat this quota. Anyone who could turn a commute from a misery to a high point deserved my support, and it would break my heart if she lost her bridge.
The driver behind me, his patience tested to the limit, gave a timid tap on his cart-horn. Troll and I both jumped, and she scrambled to consult the day’s bit of paper. “Okay. If a farmer has five haystacks in one field and four haystacks in another field, how many haystacks would he have if he combined them all in a third field?”
“One big haystack.” This seemed a pretty good question to me, since the answer went against the immediately “obvious” math solution.
Troll stared at me, shocked. “Oh, no, Maggie!” she exclaimed. “You can’t cross the bridge!”
I blinked at her for a moment before understanding dawned. “But Troll… if you combine the haystacks–”
Her eyes widened until they could no longer be described as beady. “Ooooh… I get it.” She wadded up her paper. “I let three people go already for the wrong answer.”
Her face crumpled, and I wished she weren’t so much bigger than I was. I would have liked to have climbed out and given her a hug, but that would probably be going too far.
“You can go, Maggie.” She sighed, dejected, and a flipperish hand waved me on.
I zipped off in my cart, barely paying attention to the road while my thoughts worried over Troll’s problem. Even if it meant I’d be stuck on the wrong side of the bridge sometimes, I had to find some way to help Troll make her quota.
In between telling people where the restroom was, wrestling the OtherWhere Post Gazette onto the newspaper stick without getting hexed, pulling all the information we had on the Great Eastern Dominion for a bemused group of high-schoolers sent over by their teacher for a project, and putting holds on the latest best-seller promising the secret for attracting brownies, I thought about what I dubbed “Troll’s reference question.” She needed information in order to do her job better, and gathering information was my job.
I pulled riddle and trivia collections and sorted through them looking for toll fodder. By the end of the day, I had a small stack of books bristling with little sticky-note page markers, and I drove back to the bridge, excited to show Troll what I’d found for her.
She didn’t look as dejected as she had that morning, but something was still not right. “How was your day?” I asked as she stepped up my cart.
“Better, I think. My boss sent me another message, though.” She looked a bit embarrassed. “There’ve been complaints.”
This confused me, but Troll went on. “I guess the highway’s all fixed up, now, but lots of people are still going this way.” Troll looked at me, sheepish. “Like you.”
“So you need to figure out how to get people to go back to using the highway?” I asked.
She nodded. “That’ll help the quota, too. The fewer people who cross, the better my numbers overall.”
At some point, I was going to have to find out all about how this quota system worked if I was going to really help Troll. This evening, though, more carts were approaching, their headlamps reflecting in the rearview mirror.
I had an idea for the meantime. “How about having a day where it’s all tolls of courage?”
“You mean, like this?” And with no more warning, Troll leaned over so her face filled the driver’s half of the windscreen and roared out a noise like a pack of hounds baying for blood. It nearly made me pee my pants. All the nearby birds shot into the sky as if launched from cannons and were joined this time by flights of scolding flower fairies and the noise of unseen creatures scuffling away.
My heart galloped in my chest as I loosened my white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. “Ye-yes,” I managed. “Like that.”
“Wow, okay!” Troll beamed at me. “You did really great. You didn’t even yell a little.”
I regained enough of my shattered composure to gather up the books. “I got these for you to look at since you can’t come into the library. You can just give them back to me when you’re done.”
Troll took the books as carefully as if they were made of glass. They looked tiny in her enormous hands, and I hoped she’d be able to turn the pages. “Thank you, Maggie.” She tucked them into one of her coverall pockets. “See you tomorrow?”
“But my toll—” I began.
“You paid it already,” she reminded me. “My first toll of courage.”
This made me feel oddly proud, for unlike Troll’s attempts at riddles and stumpers, her toll of courage was a truly scary—or at least very, very startling—thing.
I drove home that evening deep in thought. Old Scratch gave me what had become our habitual exchange: from me a little wave; from him a salute with the fiddle bow.
In the aftermath of Troll’s Toll of Courage Day, traffic across the bridge thinned out considerably. Many who either failed or didn’t want to find out what the next Toll of Courage Day might bring went back to the reliable highway and commuters stopped recommending the route to their friends. Those of us who liked the challenge of the tolls, preferred the scenic route, or just liked Troll herself remained, and Troll and I once more had a few moments to talk when I stopped to pay my own toll.
Troll returned the first batch of books to me with effusive thanks and all the sticky-note bookmarks removed. Her riddles became more difficult. For awhile, I tried to leave earlier for work so if I did fail to solve my morning’s riddle, I’d still have time to double back and take the highway route, but my memory—stuffed with trivia after years of reference questions—saved me over and over, and my morning departure time drifted closer and closer to last-minute until, inevitably, there came a morning when I overslept again.
I ran around the apartment, getting dressed, gathering up my things, scrambling for my keys, and dashing out the door to my hover-cart. I sped down the short span of highway connecting the road from my apartment to route 62, swooping up the exit ramp at a speed likely to get me ticketed if anyone caught me.
I barely slowed at the crossroads, my wave to Old Scratch bearing more resemblance to a salute than his return greeting. He was busy with someone who’d taken him up on his offer, though, and only managed a slight chin-lift as I zoomed past.
I should have known that something was wrong when several carts went whooshing past me going the opposite direction. Passing a cart or two was not an uncommon occurrence these days, since Troll’s tolls had become so much more difficult, and, of course, there were a few people whose morning commutes took them away from the city instead of toward it, but the number of carts flying by and at such high speeds should have tipped me off.
When I saw the reason the others had fled, I nearly turned around myself, but Troll had seen me and her friendly, flipper-wave beckoned me forward. I drove up to the bridge and slowed to a stop between Troll and her companion, a much larger and clearly older troll whose expression made me recall my fears of being devoured.
“Hi, Maggie,” Troll said, oblivious. “This is my union federation representative, Troll.”
“Pleased to meet—”
“So you’re the librarian, eh?” Troll’s boss—whom I mentally dubbed Mr. Troll to keep things clear in my head—rumbled over my greeting.
I gulped, nearly choking, and a hysterical thought—Is this the new Toll of Courage? —skittered through my head. “Yes, I am,” I confessed, my voice strangled.
He blew out his breath like an enormous, disgusted horse, and growled, “I have a bone to pick with you.”
My eyes went wide, and I swallowed back most of a scream, only the odd end of it escaping my lips. “Geegh.”
Mr. Troll stared at me for a moment as if waiting for me to expand on this, then continued. “157, here, was given her own bridge even though she’s only a pup. She was top of her class, so we took a chance.”
I swallowed again. “T– Troll is a very good bridge…uh, keeper.”
Her little eyes darted from me to her boss, but Troll didn’t interject anything.
“Yes, well,” Mr. Troll harrumphed. “She’s improved, I’ll admit, but that doesn’t seem to be entirely due to her own efforts.”
“I just brought her some books!” I blurted. “I’m a librarian. We help people.”
“Trolls shouldn’t need help,” Mr. Troll rumbled. “Trolls are supposed to be tough and solitary. Our duty is to keep as many people as possible out of the woods and on the beaten tracks.”
I blinked. “Then why put up bridges at all?”
Mr. Troll glared at me as if I were stupid, and Troll rushed to explain. “The bridge would’ve been built whether we came in or not, but this is a vital area, so traffic control is very important.”
I thought about Old Scratch at the crossroads and the unseen causes of all the rustlings I heard in the trees as I waited to pay my toll. This swath of land had remained largely undeveloped, the woods very old and deep, the roads less traveled.
Now it had a useful road through it, which, if traffic increased, would lead to more trees being cut down, roads being widened… “I see.”
“I can’t let 157 maintain such an important post if she can’t do it on her own.” I wanted to climb out of the cart and stand eye to eye—or eye to waist, which would be the more likely scenario—and convince him that Troll deserved her bridge. She worked so hard for it. “She’s cut back on the traffic so much these past few weeks!”
“I think it’s more that you have, Miss Librarian. You brought her the books, you suggested tactics. And 157 can’t keep you from crossing the bridge.”
I threw my hands out in a helpless shrug, pleading. “I have a really good memory, and I don’t rattle easily.”
Mr. Troll shook his head, glowering. “Doesn’t matter. If 157 can’t prevent everyone from crossing at least once in awhile, she’s not the right troll for the job.”
“Then I’ll take the highway from now on,” I promised. I moved to put my cart into reverse.
“No,” Mr. Troll said. “She has to prove herself, and since you are partly responsible for the situation, you have to help her.”
I was going to be late for work, no matter what, but if I could help Troll one last time, then I would do it and damn the consequences. If my attempts to help ended up with her losing her bridge, I’d never be able to live with myself.
“Okay.” I met Troll’s miserable gaze and gave her a half-smile I hoped was encouraging.
“You have three chances, 157. You have to stump Miss Librarian—” and I saw Troll mouth my name, though she was too nervous to actually correct her boss out loud.
“We could do that toll of strength option,” I suggested, though I feared the outcome of any fight between Troll and myself.
“Nope.” Mr. Troll shook his head. “She has to prove she can outwit you. That’s where she seems to be needing help to do her job, so that’s where she needs to show she can stand on her own.”
Troll nodded and took her ramrod stance. I braced myself for the first question and hoped it wasn’t too easy. “What is—” she began, but Mr. Troll interrupted, his glare boring into me so that I felt my shoulders rise in a slow wince.
“You have to really try to answer. I’ll know if you pretend you don’t know, Miss Librarian.”
After waiting a moment to see if he had any more threats to deliver, Troll began again. “What is it that you break just by naming it?”
Damn it. It wasn’t a bad try, but I knew this one. Mr. Troll’s beady eyes pinned me in place; I knew I had to answer truthfully. “Silence.”
Troll nodded, a small smile escaping even at this failure to stump me. “What is my favorite color?”
Mr. Troll’s sloping brow furrowed, but he didn’t interrupt. I wasn’t certain I was right, but an answer popped into my head the moment she asked, so I said, “Pink,” and Troll’s smile widened until I could see her incongruous, tinted lip gloss again.
“That right?” Mr. Troll grunted.
Another nod preceded a longer silence. Troll appeared to be searching within for some question I would fail to answer. At last, she straightened for the final attempt.
“What song does Old Scratch play on his fiddle?”
I froze in surprise. I thought back to the dozens of times I’d zoomed past Old Scratch, exchanging silent greetings. I strained my memory’s ears to hear even a snippet of whatever song he played. I struggled to think of anything that might give me a hint.
Oh, my goodness, I thought. I really didn’t have the least idea.
“I don’t know,” I breathed, and Troll’s mouth stretched wide into an astonished grin.
“You can’t cross this morning, Maggie!” she exclaimed. If Mr. Troll hadn’t been there, I thought she might even have done a little dance.
I started to laugh in delight at the idea of Troll dancing. “No, I can’t!” I turned to Mr. Troll. “Well?”
He patted Troll on the shoulder and rumbled, “Keep up the good work, 157.”
I still helped Troll after that by bringing her books and discussing ideas, but I no longer added sticky notes or proposed tactics. We decided it would be safest that way.
When I passed Old Scratch, I slowed down to catch a few notes of his tune. It took me a few more passing listens to identify it, but I kept it to myself. That was a great riddle, and I didn’t want to spoil it for Troll.