Chapter Fifteen Taissa #2
Not a moment later, there’s a faint whistling sound, and Taissa looks up to see the joined swords plummeting blade-first toward them.
With a scream of warning, she staggers backward (hauling Kion with her), as do the others.
Adriel leaps away a moment before the weapons hit right where he was standing only seconds before.
The swords quiver where they are embedded in the ground.
Breathing hard, Taissa meets Kion’s eyes.
Everything that just happened defied the laws of probability.
She’s never seen two swords become stuck like that.
Even at Level One, her Balance glyph shouldn’t have been overwhelmed so easily, not by her own backward momentum.
And her saddle…Of course it snapped free at just the right moment.
And of course the swords nearly decapitated Adriel—again.
Only dark magic can prey on probability like this.
This is not the bloody Blunduns.
Kion’s jaw seems tight as the reporters swarm them like flies to honey, all chattering over one another.
It’s another madhouse, just like yesterday’s—reporters looking for Mahina to comment on her near-tragedy rescuing the Cockatrice player, nosing into whether the tragedy has brought the infamously bickering Knox Tanaka and óríon Magnússon closer together, and practically salivating over the fallen swords.
She can just see the headlines: Devastation Continues On-Pitch for the Stymphs: Second Near-Decapitation for Adriel Pollack.
“Fucking hells,” mutters the captain.
“It’s going to be like this for a while,” she grumbles back.
“What with the Dust Bite and all.” Her eyes snap toward a shrewd-looking goblin, and inwardly she grimaces.
Surely him, and the other reporters, are wondering why her supposed boyfriend shouted at her rather than comforting her after yet another one of her near-death experiences (she supposes it comes with the game). Right—time to act couple-y, then.
Taissa bites down a scowl as she closes the tiny distance between them, enveloping (trapping, really) the captain in a hug. “Oh, pookie,” she rasps, “I was so scared.”
The cameras click as Kion stiffens underneath her touch. Oh, honestly. “Hug me back,” Taissa demands in a whisper, stepping on his toes. You’d think the man had never been hugged, the way he’s standing like a statue.
As his arms reluctantly close around her, Taissa tries not to notice that he’s not wearing cologne today, and smells instead of soap and sweat.
She also tries very hard not to think about the Tent-Pitching Catastrophe, as she’s named it.
Instead, she concentrates on how he’s holding her just a little too hard, and how he’s the most insufferable, horrible person she knows…
“Locke,” she hisses, stepping harder on his toes, “you’re suffocating me—”
“Pardon me!” a squeaky voice interjects.
It’s the goblin reporter, popping up before them, adjusting his smart purple suit and slicking back the thinning hair on his large head.
“If I could just take a moment of your time…That was a big fall, by the way, gave us quite a scare…Seems like everybody’s falling nowadays, hm? ”
“I didn’t even buck you off that time,” Cronus adds, unhelpfully. “Ungrateful chick. When will you thank me for saving your life?”
Taissa breaks the embrace, stepping away from Kion, suddenly cold without the warmth of his ridiculously large body. “Thank you, Cronus,” she grumbles back. The elderly bird preens.
“Manners are important.”
“Hypocrite…You shit everywhere.”
“FOR THE LAST TIME! It’s not my fault you stepped in it!”
“I cannot have this conversation with you again.”
While she bickers with her stymph, she sees that Kion is glaring at the goblin from behind her. “Spit out your question, yeah?”
“Fine, fine. Miss Cho,” the tiny man continues, black eyes glittering, “are you aware that your old team, the NCL Wyverns, have had some words to say about your return to the sport?” His tattered, pointy ears and snout nose twitch expectantly as Taissa inhales sharply.
A familiar pain slices through her chest as the goblin smiles smarmily (he’s getting a great story right here: Taissa Cho Falls from Sky; Starts Crying) and rummages inside the chest of his suit to give her a folded newspaper.
With a hand that’s only shaking slightly, Taissa reaches down to pluck the newspaper from his gnarled, ink-stained little hands.
It’s a copy of Complete Carriwitchet, and while the front-page headline is of the Dust Bite (Taissa closes her eyes against the image of the falling Wingeds), the dog-eared section in the middle is what the goblin is really waiting for her to get to.
She takes her time, purposefully lingering on the page before the marked one, staring down at an ad for Púca Púca LLC (which she’s quite sure is a criminal front of some sort for the notorious Withers) without really seeing it at all.
(get lucky fast! púca púca llc grants bargains without the jargon!) With a trembling finger, she turns the page.
Kion, standing over her shoulder, seems to stiffen. “You don’t need to read that,” he says quietly. “At least, not in front of him.”
It’s too late. In bold, black letters, she sees it: Wyverns Struck Incredulous by Return of Taissa Cho.
The NCL Wyverns were left rattled yesterday when news broke of infamous ex-player Taissa Cho’s return to the National Carriwitchet League.
“It’s absurd,” Elise Henricks, the Wyvern’s Bailer, confides. “Taissa’s a known cheat. I’m shocked that the NCL would allow her to rejoin even its worst team. But we all know how she got in, right?”
Henricks is undoubtedly referring to the rumored romance between once-rivals Cho and Kion Locke, captain of the low-ranking Stymphs. In past weeks, this pairing has raised some eyebrows—and some questions, with Cho’s surprise reveal on the NCL Stymphs.
“Taissa was a fraud and a half,” adds Aster Flint, Robber.
“She fooled the world into thinking she was the crème de la crème. She fooled me. Here I was, comparing myself to her, when the whole time, she was probably using illegal glyphs. Rubbish. I’m counting down the days until she shows her true ugly colors—again. ”
Cho’s former coach, the beloved Colum Frasier, doesn’t seem to care at all about Cho’s return.
“I don’t concern myself too much with the worms writhing around on the sidewalk after the rain,” he says, snorting derisively. “Why would I give a damn about Taissa Cho?”
Taissa’s eyes burn as she stares down at the words, which have started to swim on the page. The goblin is scribbling away gleefully at a notepad as Taissa tries not to utterly humiliate herself before him (either by crying or by screaming profanities at the sky).
“Stop that, you whimper-wimp.” Cronus’s sharp beak nudges lightly at the side of her face, betraying his gruff tone. “It’s annoying me.”
“It’s not fair.” She sounds like a petulant child, she does, but it’s just—it’s not fair, not fair at all. As she loses grip on her composure, Cronus has evidently had enough: The stymph takes a menacing step toward the reporter, glaring down at him with those bloody red eyes.
“Do you want me to pick out his liver?”
Kind of, actually. But that would be a lawsuit and a half. “Cronus, no.”
“Cronus, yes.” His feathers begin to ruffle menacingly, sharp silver undersides gleaming.
Nervous now, the goblin taps his pen, an enchanted Pell-Mell Plume, on his chin.
Taissa despises those shiny, purple-feathered ballpoint pens; they allow their user to write faster than what’s even remotely natural.
Taissa had used them at the Witchery for churning out notes during the rapid lectures, but after The Scandal, she despised them.
Pell-Mell Plumes are most often used by nosy reporters.
“Er—can you call off your stymph?” the goblin pleads.
“Nope,” Taissa is about to say unpleasantly, but Cronus beats her to it. With a violent snap of his beak, the goblin is in imminent danger of dismemberment. The little reporter scurries back, and with one last fearful glance, decides to target the rest of the team instead.
“If you could stop falling off Cronus, that would be great,” Kion grumbles to her out the side of his mouth. But his heart doesn’t seem in it. He’s watching James with dark eyes.
Taissa shoots him a glare, fidgeting with the newspaper. “I told you—cursed.”
He exhales, exasperatedly, grabbing the paper from her. “And I told you not to read this shit, Cho.”
“I dinna care, ye wee numpty,” she lies and the corner of Kion’s mouth twitches.
“Is that why your accent is suddenly as thick as Knox’s skull?” When she fails to laugh, or even smile, at the joke, Kion’s eyes narrow. “You’re angry. I know your tells.”
“Don’t pretend like you care,” Taissa bites back. You don’t believe me. It’s good to be reminded once in a while that Locke is still a raging arsehole. “Pookie,” she adds, simply because she can’t help herself.
“Let’s not do this right now. Sweetheart.”
(She is not blushing. Not at all.)
“Fine,” Taissa sniffs. “We have better things to focus on. Is practice over?”
His jaw works.
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Is it?”
“Fine.”
“Where are you going, hatchling?” Cronus almost sounds disappointed, although the most potently noticeable overtone is his annoyance.
“To pay a visit to someone with answers,” replies Taissa. “Go try to eat your children, old man. We’ll be back soon.”
The look Cronus gives her is extremely unimpressed.
“Bring me with you,” he snaps, crotchety. “Don’t just abandon me to my awful spawn. They’re planning my assassination; I just know it. A coup.”
Taissa’s brows raise, incredulous, but she considers it. Unless, unbeknownst to her, her contact has moved, the man should still live in Pinion-upon-Keat (more specifically, on Cherrybush Lane). It’s not a far flight; not in comparison to the flight times of full carriwitchet games.
And it would save her from listening to Locke tell her to keep her feet off his dash.