Chapter Seven Kion
Chapter Seven
Kion
Kion loves early mornings like these: when the pitch is sparkling with dew, the air smelling like the rich earth and just a hint of last night’s coldness, the sky cloudy but not too cloudy—with just a bit of sun trickling in.
He tilts his head back, breathing in deeply, letting the scent of grass and fresh, clean air fill his lungs.
These days, he comes out early, an hour or two or sometimes three before the others, intent on finding a way—just one bloody way—to beat the Blunduns out of himself like a goblin with a club.
It’s become part of his routine, but today, there’s just one difference.
What she has decided to be, though, is pissed off.
She was pissed off from the moment he knocked on her door this morning, and she’s pissed off now, glaring at him like he kicked a puppy or ran over a bloody unicorn. Fucking hells. Taissa Cho is apparently not a morning person.
“Why are we out here, Locke?” she demands, rubbing one of her eyes with a fist. Before he can reply, she scowls. “No. Let me rephrase: Why are we out here, when I could be curled up and warm in my bed instead?” A mistrustful look enters her eye. “If this is payback for last night—”
The image of Cho’s eyes staring up at him as he inked the Bonding glyph against her bare skin flashes through his mind like a paparazzo’s camera catching him guilty and red-handed.
The image of the faint burn smattered across her skin.
Grinding his molars together, Kion shakes his head to clear it, fisting the mesh bag he holds in his left hand even tighter. Her eyes go warily toward it.
“Drills,” he snaps curtly. “Been two years since you played, Cho.”
She straightens. “Are you insinuating I’m out of shape, Locke?”
“Not if you’re insinuating you regularly kept up your training,” he retorts, reaching into the bag to pull out a few cones and striding out onto the pitch to start dropping them down in lines.
An angry splutter sounds from behind him. “Listen, you—”
Before she can say numpty like he knows she’s going to, Kion jerks back around, wishing she’d stop taking everything he says as a bloody insult.
“You know as well as I do what this sport demands. It takes more than slapping a few glyphs on our skin and then hopping onto a Winged to play carriwitchet. Yeah, Cho, I’m saying you’re probably out of practice.
I’m also saying that as your captain, and as your coach, it’s my bloody job to keep you safe.
” He sees her falling from her wyvern again, and slams down another cone harder than what’s necessary.
Even with the glyphs, it takes good, strong muscles to stay secure atop a Winged, and takes a player in peak physical condition to block and parry with weapons while in the ruddy air.
“So until you’re back up at your old level, you get used to coming out here with me at the arse crack of dawn.
The more you complain, the more I run you ragged.
” Breathing hard, Kion sets down the last cone and watches as Taissa opens and closes her mouth like a suffocating fish.
Her eyes are a little bit darker than they were before and there are two bright pink spots burning on her cheeks.
For some inane reason, he finds himself staring at them before he looks quickly away and glares at the cones instead.
Taissa clears her throat. “Numpty,” he hears her mutter sourly, her voice slightly hoarse.
Kion keeps glowering at the cones.
“Could we at least,” she says a moment later with a haughty sort of dignity that reminds him of a furious royal, “do this a little later in the day?”
“Not a chance, princess,” he snaps. Taissa’s nostrils flare at the word, and he feels the familiar, smug satisfaction that always comes with incensing Cho. He adds the word to his arsenal of insults. “Stretch well. We’re running suicides.”
“ ‘We’?” Taissa demands, reluctantly rolling her shoulders. Kion ignores her, already taking off for the first line of cones. Her aghast stare is cold on his back.
An hour later, Kion peers down at Taissa, who’s collapsed into the grass like a pile of jelly, flushed from exertion.
The suicides, and the drills that followed, were enough for him to gauge her current fitness level—and it’s not as bad as he’d thought it’d be, but it’s also a testament to just how far Taissa has fallen.
The past two years did a number on her. Fuck him if he doesn’t feel a small pinch of something almost like guilt.
“Cho,” he grumbles, crouching next to her, a chilled water bottle from his practice bag in his hand, “are you alive?”
Unless the dead can very articulately suggest he do something anatomically impossible, Taissa Cho is alive and well. Grimly, he presses the water bottle into her limp hand. Fuck, he’s got his work cut out for him.
“We’re done, aren’t we?” she mumbles. “Please tell me we’re done, Locke. I’ve not even the energy to tell you how much I hate you right now.”
His lips twitch.
Practice hasn’t even started yet.
Thirty minutes later, as Taissa leads her ancient fuck of a stymph out onto the pitch through the back door of the Nexitory’s stable, Kion tries to tune out his teammates’ gasps (or chokes, in Adriel’s case) of stunned—and disgusted—surprise.
Mahina slaps Adriel violently on the back as Cronus lifts his head to the sky, red eyes blinking in the sunlight.
“Er,” says Knox, “does anybody else see this?”
“Yes,” snaps óríon. “We all have eyes.”
“What the fuck?” signs Mahina succinctly, her jaw dropping.
Cronus has already been saddled by a handler whose arm he probably bit off in the process, and is clearly eager for flight.
It’s been around twenty years since he’d last been in a practice, to Kion’s knowledge.
The old beast’s wings are flapping excitedly as Taissa guides him to stand in between Isla and Bronte, who are staring at her with varying levels of shock and dismay—just as the rest of the team is, even the reserve players, who are familiar enough with the tales of Cronus’s exploits to fully realize just how bad of a fucking idea this is.
But the Bonding glyph that Kion himself inked onto the bird’s beak glows black on bronze in the sunlight. Bloody hells. Nobody’s been better at wearing him down than Taissa.
“Holy shit,” Bronte says, moving closer to her Icarus, who’s eyeing his father warily. “That’s the stymph you chose?”
“Ertu ae djóka?” mutters óríon, leaning on Valsa and glaring at Cronus. “You will ruin this for us all. Helvíti.”
Kion, who has picked up enough of óríon’s expletives, narrows his eyes at the Dozer. “Careful,” he grinds out.
óríon looks entirely unbothered. Kion loves him like a brother, but he can be a sodding prick.
“I don’t know what he just said,” Adriel says, staring with wide hazel eyes at Cronus, “but just based off the way he said it, I definitely, and totally, agree.”
“Stop talking shite about my stymph,” snaps Taissa.
The aggression in her voice startles even Kion, but that’s Cho for you: irritable and brash and a pain in the arse, especially in the mornings.
“It doesn’t matter a Winged’s age—I rode an ancient hippogriff at my Witchery, and he was absolutely brilliant.
And it doesn’t matter that Cronus tried to eat his children. He’ll strive for team unity. Probably.”
“Does she remind you of someone?” Cato asks, bumping Kion’s shoulder with his beak.
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck you, too.” Another bump. “You and her. You’re not so different.”
He scowls at his stymph. “Your point?”
“Oh, nothing.” Cato blinks in a not-so-innocent way. “I’m just an animal, after all. My mind is only ever on one thing. Meat?”
“Later.”
“Now.”
“I don’t have any on me.”
“You have two arms. Do you absolutely need both?”
“Merlin, Cato—”
“Kion.” As the others dissolve into bickering, James steps closer to him, and speaks quietly, evenly, even as voices rise between the others.
It’s one reason that they’ve become so close.
James balances him out. “Look, are you truly going to allow this? That bird is old, and that’s the least of its problems. We’re trying to win here, and I’m very sorry, but I simply don’t know if this was the correct decision. ”
He’s probably right, isn’t he?
Kion grimaces, looking over at Taissa. Her unruly hair, sweaty from drills, is tied back in a plait, but a few loose curls slip out as she jabs an angry finger at óríon.
Her cheeks are flushed pink with anger and exertion.
That little splotch of freckles across her nose that he’d noticed last night scrunches up as she snaps something back involving óríon, a draconian jewel, and a place where the light never shines.
Fuckkkk.
Kion pinches the bridge of his nose as the shouting between the teammates intensifies. Valsa, offended on behalf of her rider, is tussling with her father, who’s smacking her head with a gray wing and cawing in rage. “She saw…something in him.”
“It’s only a matter of time before he eats her.”
Hypocritical wanker. “Thanks, Cato. Real vote of confidence, there.”
“Ha, ha. You’re welcome.”
“He’s practically geriatric.” James’s voice is tense.
Kion knows how much winning means to him.
How much the losing streak has hurt him.
It’s given his mother a reason to claim that she was right, that he should have become something else, anything else, instead.
James is worn down by the losses, and there’s real panic in his eyes as he stares at Taissa, who’s still jabbing her finger around like an angry old lady.
“He belongs in a retirement home, not on the pitch. What was she thinking—”
Kion’s eyes widen, no longer listening to James. Bloody hells.
“OI!” he shouts. Somehow, the squabble has escalated to óríon wrestling Knox into a headlock, who’s slapping his shoulders in panic, face growing purple. Knox’s red stymph—Robin—is defending Cronus against Valsa and Adriel’s Ahava. Angry chitters and clucks fill the air.