Toad with coins, ink line drawing

On the third evening she found her father's ledger under the lock-house floorboards. Beside each name was a sum that had never been collected, debts run up by boatmen who had paid their tolls in coin and then been cheated of their change. Every one of those coins had gone into the water, and the toad, she realised, had been keeping the accounts for everyone. Its back was crusted with discs, each stamped with a bone-shaped mark she recognised from the old toll tokens her father used to show her.

She carried the ledger down to the water at dusk. The toad watched her with slow, unimpressed eyes, and she read the names aloud one after another. At each name a disc slid from its flanks and dropped into the reeds with a small bright chime, until the creature had shrunk to the size of a loaf and the boatmen were wading out with their hands cupped to catch what was theirs.

By morning the beam was bare. Mara found one token caught in the lock gate, bone side up, and at the foot of the page she wrote her own name. Then she pressed the coin into the gatepost where the wood had gone soft. It was the first debt she had ever chosen to owe.