Prisma Glitterdust's Arc

Chapter 8 of 9

The next morning, the six trolls curtsied in a clean row. Mossback stood behind them, unseen, holding the whole lesson up like a beam. Prisma watched him. He shifted his weight and winced. A mushroom on his back had bent. He rolled his shoulder and looked toward the door, the way a traveler looks at a road. After the students left, Prisma sat on the mud-and-glitter bench. "You're tired," she said. "I've slept here forty nights," Mossback said. "Frogs found the far pool. This one's quiet." He paused. "For now." Prisma's chest went tight. If he left, the trolls would freeze the moment his weight was gone. Her whole school stood on his back. So did something else she had not let herself name. She liked him there. She liked the quiet spine of him at the rear of the room. "Stay," she said, too fast. He grunted. "For the school." "No." The word surprised her. "For me." He said nothing. That was worse than a no. Prisma stood, brushed mud from her gown, and walked out to the old tree at the swamp's edge. Tara Deeproot opened her bark eyes. She measured people by the questions they asked twice, and Prisma had come twice now. "He wants to leave," Prisma said. "And I want him to stay for the wrong reason. Or the right one. I can't tell." Tara was quiet a long moment. "You built your school on his back," she said. "A thing built on one back falls when that back walks away." "Then how do I keep him?" "You do not keep a person like water in a pool." Tara paused. "You give them a reason that is theirs, not yours." Prisma turned that over the whole walk back. Mossback needed still, silent water to sleep. She had dug him a pool, but she had never given him the thing itself, freely, as his. She found him rolled by the water, careful of the mushrooms. She knelt beside him in the mud. "The pool is yours," she said. "Not the school's. Yours. Whether you teach or not. You can sleep here as long as it stays quiet." He opened one yellow eye. "And the frogs?" "I'll drown out any frog that comes. I'll sit here all night and hush them myself." A long silence. Then the corner of his mouth moved. "You'd hate that." "I would," she said. "I'd do it anyway." He settled deeper into the water. A new mushroom would grow by morning; that was how he judged a good night. "Then I'll stay," he said. "For the water." He shut the eye. "And the rest." Prisma sat back on her heels. He had not said the words she wanted. But he had stayed, and he had stayed by choice, not for the school. That was steadier than any curtsy. The pool held still. The gnats hummed low. For the first time, the quiet felt like it belonged to both of them.