Chapter Six Taissa
Chapter Six
Taissa
“Locke, he’s perfect,” Taissa insists as the prick unceremoniously shoves open the door to the Nexitory flat she’ll apparently be staying in, not looking back at her even once.
“Did you see how quickly he dove toward us? Think about what he could do on the pitch.” Visions of glory drift through her mind’s eye (winning the World Cup, being decked in medals)…
“He tried to eat his own children,” growls Kion in response. Soon after the Winged had flown away, Kion—surprisingly pale about the face—snapped that they’d return tomorrow for her to find a stymph. “My stymph included. The handlers had to restrain him. We call him Cronus.”
Oh. So she hadn’t know that. But…
He’s still perfect. Strong, powerful. Angry.
And there’s the little fact that Kion doesn’t want her to bond with him.
That makes Cronus basically irresistible.
“Well, I can excuse child-eating,” Taissa says defensively as Kion flicks on a light switch and she steps into the flat. He shuts the door behind her.
Pristine white marble counters and the humming, sleek refrigerator of the kitchen greet her as her sock-clad feet shuffle on the smooth flooring (she’s long abandoned her poo-ridden trainers in the bin).
Someone has kindly set her bags in the living room, where a dark leather sofa sits on a soft gray rug before the telly.
The flat’s window looks right out onto the pitch—she’s a floor or so above Bill Dodds’s office.
Swanky, she thinks, comparing it to the cottage she’s spent the last two years in.
To her surprise, part of her misses the hominess of that little house, the warm lighting and the cozy mess she left strewn about, all things that made it, well, a bit of a home. The Nexitory’s lodgings are cold and still in comparison.
“And where’s your flat?” she asks Kion as he folds his arms, lingering by the door. A dark look comes into his eyes. Taissa grimaces. Great. “I suppose it’s right next door, then?”
“Directly across from you,” he mutters back. “Bronte is to your left. Knox is to your right. Isla, Adriel, óríon, James, and Mahina are on this floor, too. Reserves don’t live in the Nexitory.”
“About Mahina,” says Taissa, and watches as Kion immediately stiffens. Does he think she’s about to insult the other witch? He’s protective of her, she realizes. Are they…
It doesn’t matter.
“I want to learn sign language.”
Kion glares at her. She glares right back, more of a knee-jerk reaction than anything.
“What?” Has she said something wrong? With the way he’s seething at her, it seems so. Taissa frowns, bewildered.
Kion’s lips are thin. “If you really mean that,” he bites out, “that’s great, Cho. But if it’s performative, you can fuck off.”
“What…” Taissa blinks, staggered, moments before her utter confusion is replaced by rising fury. Morgana. Kion always assumes the absolute possible worst when it comes to her. Although she hates it, a small part of her heart shrivels up in hurt.
But she’ll be damned if she lets him see that.
“I’m not performing, you complete toad arse!
” she snarls. “If we’re going to be a team, I want Mahina to talk to me, not through Adriel.
I thought you’d help. Clearly, I was wrong.
” Breathing heavily, she watches as Kion blinks, something almost like regret (if she took out her contacts and then squinted at him with her astigmatic eyes) crossing over the planes of his face.
Tightly, he replies, “Lots of people have said they want to learn it. A few of the reserves. Bill. Edward, the team medic. Niamh. Our old coach, Royd. Guess what?”
Taissa falters.
“None of them ever did,” Kion finishes, mouth tight. “None of them ever even tried. They made a big, bloody show out of wanting to, but it came to shit-all. And based on what I know about you, Cho, you like to take the easy way out.”
“That’s not true,” she protests, her stomach doing that stupid dropping thing again, but Kion doesn’t seem to notice, or care. He’s turning away.
“If you’re serious about it, Adriel is your best shot.
His sister signs. He taught me, and the others.
He’s the third door to your left.” Kion hesitates with his hand on the doorknob, glancing at her over his shoulder.
“Look,” he grumbles. “Tomorrow we’ll go back to the stables.
Find a stymph for you. Until then, newbie, don’t do anything stupid. ”
“I haven’t the foggiest what you mean,” snaps Taissa, who already has an intricate and slightly stupid plan in place. “Now leave me alone. I have things to do.”
In the steamy mirror of the bathroom, Taissa traces the tiny splotch of black on her breastbone, the remnant of her Bonding glyph with Sansa.
The warlock who removed it with a Level Four Burning glyph had missed a spot.
It’s small, tiny and insignificant. Yet the little mark is everything to Taissa.
After the procedure, her skin had been red and raw—even now, after dozens of Panaceas, there is a slight burn scar, for the injury had gone deeper than just her skin.
Not even magic can remove the pain of being ripped away from Sansa.
Sometimes (so rarely that it might as well be never) Taissa feels, for a moment, the echo of Sansa’s presence.
For a split-second, she’ll hear the whisper of Sansa’s wry little voice, or a huff of steady, sleepy breathing during the night.
And she’ll wonder, touching that little scrap of the Bonding glyph, if their connection hadn’t been broken entirely.
More likely she’s imagining it.
Taissa’s hand falls to her side and she slips into her pajamas before padding out into her bedroom, where she’s put away her belongings.
Her beloved crocheted scarves are strewn across the bed, and her old NCL trading-card albums from her childhood are more tidily arranged on the white wall’s shelves.
Maybe to torture herself, Taissa grabs one of them (a tiny book, with a ridiculous polka-dot cover she used to adore) and flips through the laminated pages until she lands on the card she’s looking for.
She pushes up her glasses, slightly foggy from the steam of the bathroom.
There’s Kion, eighteen and glorious, in his team’s purple-and-silver riding gear, photographed atop the same stymph he rides now, Cato.
His playing number, 11, glitters silver on the cardstock where it’s splashed above his triumphant pose.
One of his arms is raised in victory, hand holding a shining draconian jewel, and his dark hair is mussed and windswept.
This card, out of all of them, has the most signs of wear, with worn edges and a creased surface.
She carried it everywhere with her. To her riding lessons, then to her tryouts, practices, and games.
Thirteen-year-old Taissa was ridiculous.
Twenty-four-year-old Taissa sticks her tongue out at Kion, slams the book shut, and shoves it angrily back onto the shelf.
She doesn’t know why she’s kept it.
Earlier in the evening, she’d knocked on Adriel’s door. It was óríon who came out into the hall instead, from his own flat across the corridor, his muscular arms crossed.
“Adriel is not here,” the man said. “He has gone out. Probably will not be back until late.” óríon was very tall, with hair so white he could almost pass for a Wintertides elf, and eyes colder than snow.
And he was looking at Taissa with so much grave hostility that she was pretty sure he could give Kion a run for his money.
“You are a mistok. You being here, it will only cause more trouble.”
Taissa snorted disdainfully. “I don’t think that you can possibly get into any more trouble than you’re already in.”
“More trouble would be dissolution,” he replied with a frown. “And you will distract him. Already he thinks about you too much. Nei. I do not like this.”
Already he thinks about you too much. “Wallows in loathing, does he?” Taissa asked, but to her chagrin, óríon simply stepped back into his doorway, looked her dead in the eye, and shut the door in her face.
Charming.
Now, Taissa quietly slips back out into the corridor and closes her own door shut as quietly as possible, extremely aware that Kion is probably lurking in the flat across from hers.
The low-level Stealth glyph she inked on her wrist in the bathroom has taken effect; she’s also etched on an Unseen one, with the lightest touch of magic so that it will have faded by the time she enters the stables.
Until then, no wandering eye will see her as she creeps through the Nexitory, set on achieving her goal.
She opts to take the complex’s stairs rather than the lift.
More subtle. The stables are on the bottom-most floor, and although technically part of the Nexitory, they’re more of a building connected to it, and accessible through the ground level.
Thanks to the simple Stealth glyph (and her bunny baffies), Taissa’s footsteps hardly even echo on the concrete stairs.
It seems that no matter how fancy the rest of the Nexitory is, stairwells are the same everywhere. Cold and dank and gray.
Out of the stairwell, and onto the ground floor.
The door connecting the stables to the Nexitory is hidden in a maze of glossy white floors and walls laden with framed news clippings—Ncl Stymphs Take 1967 World Cup!
, Terry Dodds to Pass Legacy to Son, Bill!
, Ncl Stymphs Sweep Championships!, Kion Locke Named Carriwitchet Prodigy—and paintings of stymphalian birds in all their glory, some from Ye Olden Days.
The stymphs in those paintings have a sharp, cunning look in their eyes that these bred ones lack…
All except that old one.
Cronus.