Prisma Glitterdust's Arc

Chapter 10 of 9

Mossback left with the ribbon. Prisma stayed behind with a school that worked and still felt hollow. The trolls curtsied. They sat on the mud-and-glitter bench. Then, most afternoons, they wandered back to their bogs. A real school held its students. Hers only borrowed them. She walked from the schoolroom into her house to think. The front room smelled of cake and woodsmoke. A purple couch sat by the fire, its feather pillows soft as clouds. Prisma had bought it for herself, for quiet evenings. The trolls had never been inside. They stopped at the schoolroom door and no farther. That was the problem. She saw it now. The schoolroom was a place they visited. It was not a place they belonged. A curtsy was a trick you performed and left behind. She had taught them to do things. She had not given them a reason to stay. A scaly tail dragged across her floor. One of the striped gnat-hunters had wandered in from the schoolroom pool. Long, low, with a lizard's green scales and a pup's soft ears. It flopped onto the couch and curled into a feather pillow like it owned the house. Prisma watched it settle. The trolls loved these creatures. They went still when the pups hunted. And here one lay, warm and happy, on her softest seat. An idea took hold. She dragged the bark-and-glitter bench out of the empty schoolroom. She pushed it beside the fire, next to the purple couch. Then she set a shaded, baited bowl by the hearth, the way Mossback had taught her, so gnats and their hunters would follow. When the trolls arrived the next morning, she did not open the schoolroom. She opened her house. The smallest troll stopped in the doorway. She stared at the fire, the couch, the bench she knew, all in one warm room. The lizard pup lifted its head and yawned at her. "Sit," Prisma said. "Anywhere you like." The small troll crept to the couch. She touched a feather pillow. She pressed it to her muddy cheek. Then she sat, and the pup climbed into her lap, and she did not move for fear of waking it. One by one the others came in. They took the bench, the floor, the rug by the hearth. Nobody curtsied. Nobody performed. They just stayed, warm and quiet, in a house that let them. By dusk, none had drifted home. The small troll fell asleep with the pup on her chest. Prisma sat on the arm of her couch and understood. The school was never the schoolroom. It was the welcome. But a full house held a new worry. Mossback's pool was theirs alone, his quiet corner. Now six trolls and a lizard pup crowded toward the water he owned. She had promised to protect that quiet. She had just filled his room with noise.