Chapter Six Taissa #2
It’s why she wants him so badly. The others, they’re smart, yes, but something about Cronus is different.
He has that fire from the paintings. But there’s more than just plain old violence to him.
He’d stared her down, and for a moment, she hadn’t been able to tell if he was man or beast. There was a complexity to him, some power and intelligence that the others lacked.
That awful handler knew it, too. It was why he used a Voltaic glyph instead of something weaker.
Taissa would like to use a Voltaic glyph on him. See how he likes it.
Still trying to retrace her steps to the stables, she seethes in growing frustration. It’s a relief when she finally reaches the gigantic wooden door at the end of one of the corridors. She thought she’d gotten lost.
High-level Protection glyphs ward the entire entrance, but now that Taissa’s joined the team, the glyphs should recognize her as a player. Carefully, she twists the cold golden knob of the door…and steps inside, her fuzzy baffies touching the grass just as her Unseen glyph wears off.
This late in the evening, the stables are quiet. No handlers are in sight. The Wingeds have already been fed and are nesting in Yggdrasil, most sleeping, some not.
Cronus is not.
She can see him, at the very top, just a smudge of a bird from so far away.
She’s not fooled, though. He’s watching her, just as she’s watching him.
He’s the only one with red eyes, the others all have varying shades of blue and purple.
Those small scarlet orbs glitter in the semidarkness of the stables.
“You ruined my shoes,” says Taissa loudly and very, very grouchily. They were decent shoes, after all. “Now I have to wear these. They’re my only pair.” She shakes one of her feet, the bunny-shaped slipper nearly falling off.
From the tree, something that sounds suspiciously like a vindictive cackle cracks through the air. Cronus shifts, standing in his nest. She hears the flap of his gigantic wings and a caw of warning.
“Oh, come off it,” says Taissa, striding for the base of Yggdrasil. Other stymphs are watching her now, too, either in confusion or curiosity. One of them is shaking its head frantically at her. She cranes her neck, looking up. “You know why I’m here, you old fart.”
Traditionally, the witch chooses the Winged.
Even if Sansa hadn’t loved Taissa right back from the start, she still would have had to bond with her.
Taissa’s never thought very much of that rule.
Especially after she was forced to leave the Wyverns, when she knew Sansa was given no choice in the matter of bonding with Elise, whose own Winged had been horribly injured in a stupid stunt that Elise never should have tried.
Elise had a track record for being careless with her steeds. And for Sansa to be forced to bond with that horrible, nasty bitch…It makes an angry fire burn in Taissa’s chest. If she were a lesser woman like Elise, she could make Cronus come down and have someone restrain him.
But she, contrary to popular belief, is not a prick.
And she doesn’t take the easy way out.
(She has been stewing over that particular insult for hours now.)
So that’s not why Taissa has come back to the stables. Not to wrestle that glyph onto the angry old stymph, but to make him want to bond with her. Although she’s quite sure he already does. That fire in him. She sees the same flames whenever she stares too long in the mirror. It’s a hunger to play.
There’s a magnificent swoosh of air, a blur of gleaming bronze and flashing red, and then Cronus is landing in front of her.
In the tree, his children squawk amongst themselves.
Taissa looks down to his formerly injured foot where not a mark remains, and gives herself a mental pat on the back.
Although far from one of the most difficult glyphs she’s learned, the Panacea has been the most necessary for her to excel (and survive) in a sport where violent Wingeds and weapons abound.
Her eyes drift back to Cronus’s beak, his scar.
No creature bred in captivity for a cushy NCL club should ever be scarred, especially if they’ve only ever played as a reserve.
She’d bet anything that it was Markus who did it; she’d overheard him mention he used to ride Cronus.
Cronus’s head is tilted, and he looks like he’s considering pecking her to death.
“Save that for the pitch,” she snaps, folding her arms, rapidly tapping a finger on her biceps.
“I want to glyph-bond with you.” Even without the glyph, she has the strange feeling that Cronus understands her. “I want to play carriwitchet with you.”
The stymph in Yggdrasil that shook its head at her caws, probably as if to say: Are you absolutely mad?
Maybe. But Cronus’s eyes have narrowed. He’s scratching at the ground with one crooked talon, almost thoughtfully. His head cocks more, then straightens.
“It must feel dreadful,” says Taissa, “being cooped up in here all your life.” Do the handlers even allow him the DMC’s mandatory sky-time? “Watching your children be picked for the team, and never you. If I were in that situation, I’d probably try to eat them, too. Maybe with some whiskey sauce.”
A screech of outrage from the nests of Yggdrasil. Cronus’s feathers ruffle, almost like he’s trying not to laugh. He’s staring at her face now with a little less hostility than before.
“And then there’s Markus.” Taissa draws out her qyl.
Cronus rears, wings drawing back like he’s planning on shooting those knifelike feathers at her.
She tries not to balk. Morgana. It’s been conditioned into him, this fear of qyls.
Her voice gentles. “I’m not going to hurt you.
And if you were my steed, you’d be under my protection.
Markus wouldn’t be able to do anything to compromise your ability to play.
If he tried, it would be well within my rights to hurt him right back with my qyl…
or my fists. How do you like the sound of that? ” She tucks the qyl away.
Cronus calms, but only slightly. He’s begun to pace, back and forth in front of her.
Taissa raises a brow. She knows exactly what could be the cherry on top. “Remember, you’d get to attack other Wingeds. That’s right. During practice, you’d get to skewer your own kids.”
Is it just her, or does he brighten considerably at this?
“But not just them. During real games, you’d be up against cockatrices, pegases, rarins, griffins…If we get back up into the Major League, you’d even have the chance to take on a dragon.”
The old stymph stops pacing and stares at her. There’s a very bright gleam in his eyes. Taissa grins. She has him now.
Oh, Kion’s going to eat his words.
“So,” she whispers. “Will you do it? Will you bond with me?”
From Yggdrasil comes a symphony of hoarse clicks.
The stymphs who are awake are flapping their wings, cawing amongst one another…
laughing at their father who, for a moment, seems to shrink in on himself.
Just for a moment, but it’s enough that Taissa’s heart cracks a little in her chest. She knows what it’s like to be despised.
In the stymphs’ laughter she hears Coach Frasier’s voice as they stood before the NCL Board, whiny and pitchy, begging for his lies to be believed. I didn’t know anything about it! She’s—she’s clearly unstable, look at her.
That’s not true!
She hears Aster, whispering with Elise, both sending dirty looks her way. She sees Aster’s neck, bare from the droll, matching friendship locket they’d bought together after a fantastic game, back when they were laughing and flushed with happiness, convinced they’d be friends forever.
What a lie.
As his children dissolve into hysterics, Cronus looks at Taissa for a long, long moment. Maybe he sees the same kindred fire that burns inside his ancient body reflected in her. He blinks once, then twice.
And then the old stymph dips his head into a short, curt nod.
Taissa’s lips spread into a slow smile, relief and excitement flooding through her veins like the most potent drug, heady and addicting.
“We’re going to have so much fun, you and I,” she whispers to Cronus just as the doors to the stable slam open, and Kion Locke strides in.
“Oh, good,” she says as Kion shouts her surname, stalking toward her.
His wavy hair is damp and messy, falling into his eyes, where a disbelieving anger burns.
“Just in time. You can draw the Bonding glyph on us.” It’s one quirk of the Bonding glyph, that it must be inked on by another person.
She’d planned to wait until morning to tell Kion the extraordinary news and see the look on his face, but now is even better. Yes, now will do very well.
“What,” her captain seethes, stopping a few paces away from Cronus, “in Merlin’s balls are you doing?”
Taissa spares a glower toward Yggdrasil, where Kion’s stymph must have tattled to him, mind-to-mind, about the goings-on of the stable. Snitch.
“What does it look like?” she retorts. “I’ve chosen Cronus, and Cronus has chosen me.” She gestures to the qyl holster over his gray joggers and tries to ignore how nicely they fit his hips. She’s already ignoring how nicely his tight white long-sleeve tee fits over his chest.
(It is getting difficult, balancing all these things to ignore.)
“I won’t take any other stymph, Locke, I won’t.
So either you bind us or I play the entire game on foot.
” It happens, sometimes. When a rider fails to answer their steed’s carriwitchet correctly in the beginning of the game.
Either they can sit out, or they can still technically play—but not on their Winged.
(In the Pherrex v. Hippogriffs game of 1973, the Pherrex Bailer—unable to ride his winged white tiger—had instead sprinted across the field, dodging attacks from the hippogriffs, scaled the tower by hand, and tagged his players back in.)