Chapter Nine Taissa #2
Bronte’s also somehow managed to nearly knock herself unconscious by flying straight into one of the siege tower’s wooden legs. While a Panacea had healed the brunt of her wounds, she’s still looking a bit, well, woozy.
The defensive Knockers—Isla, Adriel, and Mahina—aren’t faring much better. Adriel crashed into Mahina instead of an opposing player. Mahina then crashed into Isla. Isla almost fell off her steed.
“Don’t worry!” the tiny Irish player had shouted, dangling from her stirrups, blood rushing to her heart-shaped face. “I’m grand!”
Even Kion and James are struggling. It’s more of the same problem.
Fumbles and near-misses with severe injury from doing the smallest maneuvers.
But it’s not like Taissa is immune from criticism, either.
It’s her first time back in two years; she’s rusty.
And her stymph isn’t exactly making these things easy.
“Cronus,” she threatens now in her most dangerous voice, “we don’t break formation.”
“Go fuck yourself, hatchling.” He bucks midair, but she stays on by sheer force of will.
“You want to win? You stay in the Echelon.”
“I do want to win,” admits Cronus grudgingly as he returns to his position in the diagonal formation, just behind James, who’s behind Kion.
James’s white-painted number, 29, stares accusingly at her.
“I hunger for victory,” continues her bird, croaking in her mind, sounding ancient and bloodthirsty.
“Sweet triumph. My appetite for conquest is insatiable. Don’t you feel the same, hatchling? ”
“YES—”
“But I also want to go skewer my children. And they’re over there.”
“Feeling unlucky?” James asks over his shoulder as Taissa makes a soft noise of frustration. “Old dogs can’t learn new tricks,” he adds coldly, glaring at her like she killed his grandmother.
Taissa refuses to let him see her scowl as they soar in the Echelon past the boundaries of their side of the pitch.
The other team’s Knockers immediately head toward them, their stymphs cawing, and Taissa leans forward in her saddle determinedly.
Riding Cronus is different from riding Sansa (which is the most polite way Taissa can think to say it) but the game is still the game.
Carriwitchet is still carriwitchet.
Cronus’s riddle to her before the mock-game had been ridiculously hard. Hard enough that while the other players had answered their carriwitchets promptly, earning the right to ride their steeds throughout the practice match, Taissa had hesitated, fearful of her one and only guess being wrong.
“I own kingdoms but no homes,
I own seas with no fish.
I own forests but no trees,
Traverse me if you wish.”
A map is what it had been.
Thank Morgana she’d solved it.
In the air now, Taissa grimaces as she keeps her eye on the three draconian jewels, the morning wind ruffling her hair and Kion yelling over it for her to stop playing like a pathetic pigeon, Cho, as he and James break from the Echelon to distract the opposing team.
It is, in short, the worst practice of Taissa’s life. However much Knox and óríon bicker, she and Cronus bicker ten times more.
“Don’t squeeze me like that, you stupid child!” he roars when she squeezes him with her legs in an attempt to have him veer right.
“You need to get close enough to the tower for me to reach a jewel!” she fires back.
Although he’s flying in circles around the siege tower, he’s not close enough for her to grab one of the glittering, opalescent, fossilized eggs.
“Have you seen how Cato does it with Kion?” Early on in the scrimmage, Kion had managed to snag one of the three jewels…
although he’d had to return it after being knocked from Cato.
James had managed to rescue him from the holding tier shortly afterward, thank Morgana.
“Cato,” scoffs Cronus in disdain. “I should have eaten him whole when he was a mere chick. Now, I’d have to break him into tiny pieces.”
Taissa mentally sighs. Reserve Knockers, the other side’s defense, are hurtling toward them, having given up on attempting to chase down Kion and James. “We have to abort.”
“Don’t tell me what to do, you overgrown nestling.”
She grits her teeth. It makes sense that, after Cronus’s experience with Markus, he’s reluctant to take orders and demands from his rider, as opposed to Sansa, who listened attentively and was happy to follow Taissa’s instructions.
Even her squeezing, and her steering, seems to set something off in the old stymphalian’s brain, sending him into a panic he covers with fury.
Her old methods of riding won’t work on him, not without costing him peace of mind.
The Knockers are getting closer now, and Cronus is still only hovering in the air, much too far away from the jewels for her to snag one, despite her sad attempts.
“Abort, Cronus.”
“I don’t take orders from loudmouthed hatchlings.”
Perhaps, she thinks in resignment, she should just…ask nicely.
“Cronus,” Taissa says evenly, “on the bottom tiers of this tower, there are weapons. Will you drop down and fly through the closest tier, so that I can grab some?”
She feels him thinking. And then…
“Well, fine,” he snaps magnanimously, dropping down and shooting through the tier just as the Knockers converge on them.
Taissa sighs in relief as she manages to snag a sword, dagger, and an axe (all blunted for practice).
They hurtle back toward their side, only for a defensive reserve player to catch up, and slam their stymph sideways into Cronus.
Jolted by the impact, Taissa nearly drops her armful of weapons just as Cronus begins to screech in earsplitting rage.
“CRONUS!” she shouts as her Winged begins to thrash, swiping his talons at the other stymph, all biting beak and shrieking anger.
It’s like nothing she’s ever known, boiling like the hottest magma, fanned on by a resentment and a betrayal so dark that she can barely breathe.
As the other stymph draws back, squawking something that almost sounds like an apology, Cronus turns around in a knife-sharp motion and—talons poised and ready—gives chase to the offender, back toward the opposing side.
“CRONUS—” Taissa tries as her stymphalian shoots through the air.
“Cronus, let him be—we need to get back to our side with the weapons—this isn’t our job—”
“HE INSULTED ME!” Cronus screeches back in that hoarse, smokey voice. “I WILL RIP HIM FROM LIMB TO LIMB. I WILL PECK OUT HIS EYES!”
Bronte swoops in on Icarus, knocking another Knocker out of their way as Cronus chases down his prey. “What are you doing?” she demands, flying alongside her as Cronus’s chase takes her in a loop around the opposition’s side.
“OI, TAISSA,” shouts Knox, also catching up. “Toss me the axe, yeah?”
“Nei!” That’s óríon (of course it is), furiously gesturing for her to throw it to him. “That is my weapon, we all know this—”
In the time that it takes for Taissa to resolve to throw óríon the axe (a maneuver reminiscent of javelin-throwing, known as the Herculean Hovet), the stymph that Cronus has been chasing decides he’s had enough. The stymphalian turns and rushes toward Cronus headlong—and again rams into him.
Hard.
With an enraged squawk, Cronus is knocked off course and Taissa’s throw (instead of neatly fitting into óríon’s outstretched hand as Valsa hovers in place) shoots toward his face, and hits it dead in the center.
The axe.
Hits óríon’s face.
He’s knocked backward onto Valsa (luckily, he’s harnessed onto the saddle) and Taissa curses as Cronus, dropping down away from the other stymph, screams obscenities about being hit over and over by an ungrateful battering ram of a child.
She watches with wide eyes as óríon slowly sits back up, clearly dazed, blood trickling from one side of his face… which is, thankfully, still intact.
Thank Morgana for blunted weapons.
“Fokk,” he spits.
The axe, still falling through the air, ends up landing on Kion’s head, who’s flying below.
“CHO!” he roars, half in pain, half in fury.
That puts even more of a damper on things.
And it only goes downhill from there, thanks to the hit an opposing Knocker manages to land on the side of her head with a club, Kion’s constant bellows as his team falls apart, the time that Ahava breaks Knocker formation solely to swoop around Cronus in mockery, and the time that Cronus decides to chase her down, too, to shit on her head in retaliation.
By the end of the practice match, Taissa is drenched in sweat, panting hard, and so infuriated that she cannot even see anything past a vague blurriness that just might be tears. She has never played so badly in her entire life.
Not one draconian jewel.
Not a single one did she manage to snatch.
Dismounting Cronus, she strides across the pitch toward the base of the closest siege tower and kicks the wooden base over and over and over and over again, hard enough that a small piece begins to splinter.
She’s hardly aware that the rest of the team is staring at her where they stand in a circle, breathing hard. She’s hardly even aware that her toes are bruising in their thick leather boots, her throat aching with unshed tears.
“FUCK!” Taissa screams, and it’s a tantrum to rival Kion’s, but she can’t bring herself to care. Two years, and she’s lost it all.
Two years, and the only part of her that ever mattered, the only thing that she was ever good at, has all gone to complete rubbish.
The wood of the tower transforms, becoming Coach Frasier’s face as he snarled, lifting his qyl to draw the Level Three Luck glyph.
Then Frasier is morphing into a smug Kion as he called over the referee, rippling into the faces of the booing crowd, into her team—dark-haired Aster and blonde Elise and all the others, her team who had once been her family but left her in the dust like she had never laughed with them over drinks, like she’d never cheered them on, like she never even mattered. Not even a little bit.