Chapter Seven Kion #3
She turns to Cronus, whose eyes narrow. As the seconds tick by, the old bird doesn’t seem to have any plans on lowering himself to let Taissa mount him.
Kion pinches the bridge of his nose as Cho throws her hands up into the air at some point in the silent exchange. Cronus snaps his beak, once, then twice, standing erect. Kion raises his brows as Taissa looks back at him.
“He won’t,” she says slowly, “ ‘bow.’ He said he’ll never do it to anyone ever again. Can you please explain that it’s not bowing?”
“He won’t do it,” Cato tells him. “He won’t lessen himself in front of anybody. Not after what Markus did to him.”
Kion hesitates. Does Cato mean the Voltaic glyph, or something that happened while the former reserve player rode Cronus? “What do you mean?” he asks slowly. His stymph stamps his feet.
“It was before I was born; I heard this from—” At this he lets out an incoherent squawking in Kion’s mind—a stymphalian name.
The names the players give their steeds are only placeholders for their true names, unpronounceable by mortal tongues.
“—or ‘Jemmy,’ who was a hatchling at the time. She said that our father would come back from practices limping, or worse. Markus wanted to make the official team, instead of reserve, but never did. He blamed Cronus.” Cato hesitates.
“Jemmy said Markus would scream at Cronus, and then Cronus would scream at her and the others. And try to, you know, eat them. Good old Dad. Apparently, he used to be a lot less barmy. But I still remember him trying to snack on me while Valsa swatted him away. The bastard.”
Kion digests this. “Limping…or worse?” he repeats slowly, his mind still on what Cato had mentioned earlier. “Would Markus beat him?” How was that fucking allowed? Had anyone even reported it? Or had they brushed it off, saying, He’s just a bird? Part of him already knows the answer.
“Seems that way.” Cato ruffles his wings, equivalent of a shrug. “And after Markus made him go mad, they locked our father up in the Nexitory. Like it was his fault. Which I think just made him…madder.”
Fucking hells. He’d sent a ranting email to Bill Dodds the night before, urging him to fire the old handler who’d used a Voltaic on Cronus, but he’d refused: They were “short-staffed enough already,” and Markus was “the handler with the most experience.” Besides, Bill had written as an infuriating closing remark, that stymph is trouble.
Kion glances at Cronus, at the way the ancient Winged is snapping his beak defensively at Taissa.
Maybe it’s not just anger and pride in Cronus’s eyes. Maybe there’s fear, too.
Merlin. He’s going to send another fucking email to Dodds. This time with more profanity.
“Locke’s bowed to me before,” Taissa is saying to Cronus, with a shit-eating smile directed his way. “On his knees.”
He’s jerked out of his own thoughts by that. Bleeding hells. “Cho.”
“What was that?” pants Knox, passing by on óríon’s heels, who looks back at him in alarm. “You’ve bowed to her?”
He feels his neck flush. “No!”
“Stop chasing me,” hisses óríon, glaring over his shoulder and increasing his speed. Knox’s white-painted number 07 on the back of his leathers steadily catches up to óríon’s 67.
“Cronus won’t do it,” Taissa says as the two men race by. She’s clearly exasperated. “According to him, I can only mount him if he’s standing up.”
He makes a note to share Cato’s information with her later, away from Cronus’s snapping jaws, which are now pointed toward him, as if to say, You can’t make me.
And he’s right. Kion sighs as he stares at the old bird.
Standing, the stymph is at least three times Taissa’s height.
“Fine. There’s the High Mount.” As long as he actually allows her to mount him, one way or another, there will be no problem.
“Which is…?”
“Watch.”
Cato stands, obligingly. Kion rolls his shoulders, backing up until the distance between him and the stymph will be covered by a sprint.
“Ready?” he asks.
An eye-roll. “Just get it over with.”
Kion rushes into a sprint, arms pumping as he approaches Cato, who’s clearly unimpressed.
He launches himself into the air just as he passes the length of his beak, his left hand snatching the saddle’s billet strap.
Grunting slightly, Kion swings up, grabbing the saddle’s horn with his right, and pulls himself up.
Thank fucking Merlin for the arachnis silk, he thinks.
Otherwise, this whole ordeal would shred him to pieces.
Breathing hard, he dismounts, landing in front of Taissa, who has that sparkling gleam of excitement in her eyes.
His heart pounds harder.
He must still be winded from the suicides.
“You try,” he says, crossing his arms like he can hide his beating heart from her, although he has no idea why he feels the need to. It has nothing to do with Taissa Cho at all.
“Right,” Taissa replies, rolling her shoulders.
“This is not going to end well,” Cato informs Kion.
Kion bites the inside of his cheek. Fuck, did drawing the Bonding glyph sign Taissa’s death warrant? Just as she backs up, about to lurch into a sprint, he shakes his head, silently cursing. “Cho, wait—”
Damn it. It’s too late. She’s already running and imitating his motions perfectly, rushing headlong toward Cronus, who’s already begun to shift uncomfortably on his feet.
Images of her thrown off his back, lying crumpled, swarm his mind.
It’s like that match when she fell from her wyvern.
All he can do is watch and hope that she doesn’t end up broken in a million different pieces.
Taissa’s leaping into the air, her hand closing around the dangling billet, swinging upward with the momentum to close her other hand around the horn.
Kion exhales raggedly as she pulls herself completely up.
For one brilliant moment, Taissa looks at Kion and grins, cheeks flushed and eyes crinkled.
But Cronus is twitching in a way that Kion is beginning to find disturbing.
“Did you see that?” she crows. “Did you—”
One moment later, Cronus is shaking, bucking, throwing Taissa off him.
She goes flying, and Kion—having anticipated Cronus’s move—is there, arms open, catching Taissa.
With anybody else, the catch probably would have gone smoothly, even heroically.
But it’s Taissa Cho, so of course their heads bash together hard enough to see stars, and of course Kion is knocked backward onto his arse from her impact.
“Smooth,” snickers Cato.
“Shut up,” hisses Kion.
Groaning, Taissa clambers off him. A simple thank-you would be nice, but Taissa doesn’t even look his way as she stomps back toward Cronus, clearly fuming.
Kion climbs to his own feet and tugs off one riding glove, unholstering his qyl and lightly drawing a Panacea on his forehead.
He gets enough bloody headaches as it is.
“I told you, Cho,” Kion grinds out. “The bucking is a reflex, and was probably made worse from past experiences. But it’s a reflex that he needs to overcome if he’s going to play this game.
Try again. Until you can sit on him without being thrown to the bloody stars.
” Overhead, he feels the weight of his teammates’ stares.
Taissa looks up into the sky, her longing to take flight etched all over her face. It’s almost painful to see. “How long do you think it’ll take?”
Probably eternities.
“Make it take only one day.” Cato lowers himself to the ground, and Kion mounts him easily. “There’s training to do.”
And the season starts next Monday, the first of June, with a match against the Cockatrices. Cato throws his father a smug, backward glance before he and Kion both take to the sky.
When he looks down a half hour later, in the midst of running relay flight drills, Taissa is covered in dirt and grass and seems to be bickering angrily with Cronus. The stubborn old bird is flapping his wings in agitation and stomping his taloned feet.
Kion’s eyes narrow.
“I told you,” James tells him atop Mabb as they wait in the relay line, voice tight with frustration.
His face glows with sweat as Mabb flaps below him, working hard to hover in one place.
It’s what this drill is great for—stillness followed by immediate motion.
“Kion, I am sorry, but this has to stop.”
“It’s too late,” Kion grumbles back. “They’re bonded.”
And he’s an idiot easily influenced by women wearing 50 Centaurs shirts and bunny slippers.
James scrubs his jaw with a hand, a nervous habit. “We just…We cannot be dissolved. You know what’ll happen to me.”
His mouth twitches. “You’ll have to admit to your mum that she was right, and that carriwitchet isn’t a real job suitable for a wealthy tosser like you?”
“Yes,” James replies, hands fisted around the saddle’s horn, “and then I’ll have to go to law school, where the professors will all give me terrible grades, because they were once staunch Stymph supporters until it all went horribly downhill.
And I’ll meet a girl I like, and we’ll start going out, but then she’ll break my heart in the most brutal way as revenge for getting the Stymphs dissolved.
And then, Kion, I’ll enter a depression so great that I leave school and spend my days bagging items at the shop, until I’m old and entirely blind in one eye, and then I’ll die right there on the linoleum floor, holding plastic bags and wearing a name tag that doesn’t say my real name because I am too embarrassed to claim my true identity.
” James takes a deep breath just as Mahina whizzes by them, toward the back of the line. “My name tag shall say Jeff, I think.”
“That was…specific.”
“I had a very disturbing dream last night.”
“Bloody hells.” Kion blinks at him. He’s never seen James this high-strung in his life. Usually, he’s calm and cool, so collected that it enrages him. Right now, he’s breathing hard and looks slightly ashen. “James, mate, are you feeling all ri—”