Chapter Four Taissa #3
“I only used that glyph once,” Taissa growls, rising to her feet and stalking back to her side of the compartment. “And if you wanted to hide me, Locke, all you had to do was ask me to use an Unseen glyph. But you always had more brawn than brains. Hit one too many times by a Knocker, we’ll say.”
“You—” Kion is throttling the playbook in his hands, looking like he’s half inclined to rip it apart. “My brain is perfectly fucking fine, Cho.”
A muscle in his jaw is twitching so violently that it reminds her of a dying insect.
How fascinating.
“Debatable.”
He mutters something unsavory under his breath, half shutting his eyes and obviously pretending to sleep. But she can clearly feel him watching her through his slitted gaze.
Suddenly weary, Taissa ignores his antics and leans her head against the window, watching the rolling clouds and fantasizing about breaking the glass and hurling a certain man away from her, forever.
The rest of the train ride is very, very long.
The Stymphs’ Nexitory is an oblong, sleek glass building built adjacent to the pitch—it’s the kind of building, thinks Taissa, that screams, We might have been relegated to the Minor League, but we used to have loads and loads of money!
As she climbs out of Kion’s car—a sleek black Porsche, of course it is—Taissa fights the urge to sprint over to the neighboring field of green, breathing in that familiar scent of freshly mowed grass.
Her heart nearly pounds out of her chest as her eyes move to the two siege towers stationed at opposite sides of the pitch, the massive wooden structures stretching toward the sky, the cloudy English sky.
Morgana. She nearly falls to her knees right then and there.
Once, this would have been enemy territory, but now…
Home.
She is home.
The enormity of this, all of this, hits her like a speeding semitruck.
She’s going to play carriwitchet again. In this moment, Taissa is already soaring amongst the clouds, as light as a roc’s feather. Nothing can possibly bring her down.
Except Locke.
To her absolute chagrin, Kion is less than inclined to let Taissa go sprinting and whooping onto the carriwitchet pitch of the NCL Stymphs.
Instead he catches her by the arm before she can go skipping about lah-dee-dah, and half drags her inside the Nexitory.
He does indeed bring her mood considerably down.
She has no interest in appreciating the glossy marble floors or the cloying air-freshener scent of the building where she’ll be living with the rest of the team, not when she longs to be outdoors.
And she has absolutely no interest in being herded into the swanky office of the club’s owner, Bill Dodds, and being faced with his aghast expression as a golden-haired elf hurries in behind them, stilettos tapping on the polished birch floor.
Still clad in her baggy jeans, muddy from the garden, and her equally grass-stained white tank top, Taissa suddenly feels incredibly out of place.
And the way Bill Dodds is currently spluttering and gaping at her, like a fish on dry land, isn’t helping, either.
(Nor is the way his eyes are bugging out.)
“What is this?” he demands in a posh accent, standing from his mahogany desk, and looking like it’d be a much better idea for him to sit back down with his flushed neck and trembling white mustache.
Taissa’s eyes slide sideways to Kion as the blonde elf hurries to the white sofa on the side of the office, tapping away at a tablet with perfectly manicured purple nails, chewing on a glossy lip.
Did Kion not tell Bill that he was recruiting her? Her brows draw together.
Some welcome this is.
“This,” says Kion calmly, “is Taissa Cho. She’s going to be taking Samara’s place this season as my other Robber. I’ve already had a contract drawn up. She’s signing it this afternoon.”
Bill dabs his forehead with the cuff of his gray suit. “No. Absolutely not. The last thing this team needs, Kion, is a known cheater—”
“Nice to meet you, too,” snaps Taissa, disgruntled and unable to help herself. She has drawn her qyl out of its holster and fiddles with the metal stem, rolling it between her fingers and considering inking another Combat glyph onto her arm.
Kion shoots her a warning look and she angrily shifts her weight where she stands on the tufted checkered rug.
“You gave me one more season to save this team, Bill,” he snaps back.
His right hand seems to be twitching from the effort of not pointing accusatorily at Dodds.
“One more season to save the Stymphs from dissolution. To do that, you made it clear that we have to claw our way out of the Minor League, and I believe that Cho can help us.”
Taissa stares at the office’s expansive window overlooking the pitch to make sure pigs (at least, the ones without wings) aren’t flying. Kion Locke defending her. She never thought she’d see the day.
“By Merlin! Think of the press, Kion!” Bill Dodds explodes, slamming a fist down into his desk.
On his white walls, framed photographs of two smiling, rosy-cheeked toddlers in snowsuits—grandchildren?
—rattle. “The last thing we need is for Complete Carriwitchet to have another excuse to call this team a ‘piece of twitching roadkill milking its last sorry breath.’ ”
“Rather specific,” grumbles Taissa.
“It was very harsh,” murmurs the elven woman quietly, still tapping away on the tablet. “That particular headline, unfortunately, traumatized our dear Bill.”
Taissa fights back a smirk and decides she might like this elf. The small flowers woven into her light hair tell Taissa she hails from the Springtides, or maybe the Summertides.
“Bill.” Kion’s voice is as taut as a frayed wire. Danger sparks in the singular syllable. “It’s not like we can sink any further than we already have.”
The owner’s mouth works furiously like he’s a cow chewing on a piece of cud. His sharp blue eyes move from Kion to Taissa, and back. “That business with the Luck glyph,” he finally says, stare drilling a hole through Taissa’s forehead. “Nasty. A complete disgrace to the league.”
As she fights back a flinch, for a brief, exhausted moment, she considers relaying the full story.
Here, in this office, setting the record straight.
But what’s the point? The NCL Board didn’t believe her.
Her own teammates didn’t believe her. Only her mother, and she’d been sworn to secrecy with an Untold glyph to protect Sansa.
So Taissa just shoves her fidgeting hands into the pockets of her jeans and juts out her chin.
“Let me play,” she says. “You won’t regret it.” (What she really wants to say is, Or I’ll make you regret it, but the stakes are high enough that she holds her sharp tongue. Just this once.) “Neither will your team’s coach.”
There’s a beat of silence. Bill slowly sits back down in his chair, glancing to Kion, who’s suddenly gone stiff. “Coach Royd isn’t here, dear,” he says, very condescendingly, to Taissa. “He quit last season and we’ve had some, ah, trouble finding a new one. I thought Kion would have told you.”
The bastard most certainly hadn’t. She whirls to him. “There’s no coach?”
He’s staring straight ahead, not looking at her. “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he replies, tightly.
It’s like she’s in a horror movie, like that terrible music before the jump scare has begun playing.
Oh, fuck no. Absolutely not. His intensity in studying the plays on the train suddenly makes a dreadful sort of sense.
“Please do say you’re shitting me,” says Taissa, who has never said please to Kion Locke once in her life. He grimaces. Visibly. “Locke,” she hisses. He cannot be her new coach. She refuses to believe it. Taking orders from him as a captain is bad enough. As a coach?
It’s a nightmare come to life.
“He’s not shitting you,” says the elf with a sigh. She sounds like she truly does empathize with Taissa. “Sorry, love.”
Great! (She’s going to boke.)
Bill leans forward at his desk. “You are, obviously, free to leave if this upsets you, you know.” A pointed smile curls his thin lips. “That, I think, would be the best course of action.”
So keen to get rid of her. Taissa’s spine stiffens. Right. Well, this is…an unfortunate development. The worst development in the history of developments. But as her grandmum would have said, Keep the heid.
Taking a deep breath through her nose and again resisting the urge to scratch another Combat glyph onto her arm, Taissa looks back out the window toward those two beautiful siege towers.
Imagines herself soaring toward them, snatching a glittering draconian jewel from the highest tier.
Landing, cheeks flushed, to the thunderous applause of fans.
Arguments rise to her lips, but she never gets the chance to utter them.
Because—
“Bill, Bill. Wait. Don’t tell her to leave,” the elven woman suddenly says, rising to her feet, staring down at something on her screen.
He frowns. “Niamh?”
“Look at this!” She hurries to his side, passing the tablet to him. Taissa glances at Kion, frowning, but he’s eyeing Niamh’s tablet with a surprisingly knowing expression. And he does not look happy.
Foreboding curls up in Taissa’s stomach. Whatever this is, she knows she’s not going to like it. Not one bit.
Bill Dodds takes the device in his hands, clumsily zooming in on something. “I fail to see how this matters,” he says, clearly annoyed.
“Bill, this is the first positive headline we’ve gotten in two years.
” Niamh grins, clapping her hands together, the gauzy ruffles of her pink maxiskirt swaying with the movement.
“Similar articles are already cropping up elsewhere: Wily Witch, Seelie Spectator, even The UKHC MorningStar. People are talking, and the word ‘roadkill’ hasn’t once been uttered! ”