Chapter Seven Kion #2
Mahina and Isla are staring on in shock as Bronte claps her hands, yelling various encouragements toward both Knox and óríon while Adriel argues heatedly with Taissa.
Oh, Merlin, no. Cho, the idiot, has her qyl out and seems to be on the verge of inking a high-level Combat glyph.
Knowing her, she’ll absolutely do it. Again.
“MAGNúSSON!” Kion strides over to the scene of the headlock, yanking óríon off Knox just as the latter begins to wheeze.
“I’m dying,” gasps Knox, falling to the ground. “Oh, I feel the last embers of my life smoldering. Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray / Do not go gentle into that good night. Remember me well, Captain.” He stares up beseechingly at Kion who is largely unsympathetic.
“If you can recite poetry, that means you can breathe.” Breathing hard himself, Kion turns to óríon. “You want to tell me what the fuck that was about?”
“Já,” snaps óríon, his pale cheeks blotchy. “Knox Tanaka is—” Here he descends into a string of Icelandic that Kion cannot even minutely follow.
Although Taissa’s eyes are wide, this isn’t the first time that arguments between Knox and óríon have gotten physical.
It’s become a problem, to say the least. A harshly ripped hole straight in the middle of their once seamless family.
Nowadays, the two Dozers spend more time bickering on the pitch than playing, and a lovely little video of Knox punching his teammate in the face made its rounds on Cauldron last season.
Things haven’t gotten much better since.
If there’s a deeper reason why the two players despise each other so much, Kion has no clue what it is.
There’s clearly something, but neither Knox nor óríon will tell him anything about it.
The closest he got to discovering the truth was when Knox told him that óríon was an egotistical, self-absorbed maniac who hates people with even a modicum of talent and beauty and charm.
óríon is still spouting Icelandic profanities.
“Shut up,” Kion snaps, cutting him off mid-rant, wanting to put him into a headlock.
“There is absolutely no fucking reason why you should be putting your teammate into a headlock during practice. This is practice. If we want to claw out of this sad excuse of a league, if we want to shake off these Blunduns, that training happens in practice. And we’re getting fuck all done with you two tossers pecking about each other like the stymphs. ”
Ahava and Valsa, seemingly cowed, back away from Cronus and Robin. Kion points a hand toward the bleachers circling the pitch. “Magnússon. Tanaka. Seven laps.” As óríon reaches for Valsa, he glares. “On foot.”
“Oi, that’s not fair,” protests Knox. “He started it, he did! Me, I’m innocent—”
“Quit whingeing,” growls Kion, “and start running.”
As the two take off—fuck, Knox might be chasing óríon—Kion looks to the others.
“Right, you lot. I don’t want to hear shit about Taissa’s steed.
It’s done, they’re bonded, end of fucking story.
” And it’s his fault. He glances sideways at James, who looks like he’s fighting back a scowl that’s growing darker and darker by the moment.
He’ll buy him a pint tonight. Make up for it.
“Cho.” He watches as she stiffens. “Stay back a minute. The rest of you, start a flight warm-up.”
“You got it, Cap,” says Bronte, looking cheerfully amused.
She mounts Icarus in one smooth motion—the pre-mount riddles are reserved for practice matches and game days, not drills—and in a flap of brown feathers, they’re off.
She doesn’t wait for anybody, not even Isla, who’s climbing onto white-feathered Jemmy and watching Bronte go with a hurt expression.
There were the days when the two girls were inseparable, but while Bronte had seen all of it as one big, extended hookup, Isla had been…
invested. Fuck, Kion had warned them against being together—not because of any bigoted prejudice on his part, except for his extreme prejudice against teammates dating each other.
All it ever leads to is distraction and heartbreak, yet another reason why this fake relationship with Taissa is so unbelievable.
He would never date a teammate.
Never in a million years. And the longer he can put off deceiving his team about this ridiculous “relationship,” the better.
As Isla, Adriel, Mahina, and James take off into the skies, Taissa shifts from foot to foot. She’s clearly impatient to join them.
Not yet. Drawing Cato closer to her and Cronus, Kion says, “Riding a stymph is a lot different than riding a wyvern. Forget everything you think you know about riding. Start from scratch.”
Taissa eyes him distrustfully. “But the fundamentals must be the same,” she protests.
“Oh, she’s in for a treat,” snarks Cato.
“There’s aerial drag. You wouldn’t have had as much of that with your wyvern.
” Kion shakes his head. “And stymphs have different…temperaments. It’s not just Cronus’s great personality that you’ve been noticing.
I don’t know why, and I don’t know how, but the other Wingeds have less of an aversion to the sensation of a rider on their backs.
With stymphs, it’s different; one of their cons.
Cato’s tried to throw me off mid-flight more times than I can count. ”
“Sorry about that. He-he.”
“Even if he might not consciously want to, it’s one of his reflexes.” And with an old bird like Cronus, being a steed to a rider will be almost impossible to become accustomed to.
Taissa grimaces for a moment, but then straightens, blinking. “Right. Okay.”
“And as we’ve discovered, you’re out of practice.
” Okay, fine, so maybe he doesn’t need to say it like that.
But he can’t help himself—he can never help himself around Taissa—and she flushes, hands curling into fists at her sides.
“Face it, Cho. It’s also been two years since you even mounted a Winged.
I’m not letting you take off, just like that. ”
“I have my Agility glyph,” she snaps, tapping the leather sleeve of her arm, “and my Balance glyph—”
“That won’t be enough.” Kion rubs his jaw, staring calculatedly at Cronus, who stares right back at him with those angry red eyes. He’s a big bird, yeah, but he’s old. Almost decrepit. Probably arthritic. Merlin, Taissa really knows how to choose them. “Both of you—watch as I mount Cato.”
It looks deceptively easy, mounting a stymph. Cato lowers himself in front of Kion, so that he can slot his foot in one of the stirrups, then grab the horn and pull himself up, swinging his leg over Cato’s back. But that’s only because Cato has become, after years of play, accustomed to Kion.
Below, Taissa is gazing up at him, a fierce hunger in her eyes. She wants to fly. And she will.
But hells if he’ll let her try to mount Cronus yet. It’s clear to him that she doesn’t fully understand how different a stymph is to a wyvern. Understanding that difference is the key between life and death when it comes to riding an ancient geezer like the child-eating Cronus.
“C’mere,” says Kion gruffly.
“Come—where?”
He had Cato hitched with a double-saddle this morning for a reason. Kion pats the leather seat behind him pointedly, not trying to hide his exasperation. “We’re going for a ride, Cho. Getting you a feel for the aerodynamics of a stymph. And we’re doing that on Cato.”
Cronus squawks angrily next to Taissa, those red eyes narrowing as she murmurs something to him. Those giant wings ruffle, revealing the bladed undersides.
“He’s not happy,” warns his son.
“Stop that,” snaps Taissa, looking completely unimpressed by her bird’s showboating.
“I’ll come back for you, you angry chicken.
” Kion’s pretty sure that Taissa’s about to be decapitated as that sharp bronze beak snaps through the air at the word chicken, but she just rolls her eyes and stalks over to Cato.
Kion’s stymph shifts anxiously as the new rider hefts herself up into the second saddle, shivering as though he’s about to shake like a wet dog.
It’s only Kion’s presence on top of him that keeps Cato from bucking Taissa’s unfamiliar body off like a wild bull.
“Hate this,” Cato clucks as Kion feels Taissa’s warmth against his back. “Hate this, hate this, hatethishatethis.”
“It’s only for a few minutes. And I’ll give you extra meat later.” When he speaks aloud, his voice comes out sharper than he means to. Taissa’s pressed up against his back, and he’s breathing in the smell of honey and thyme. “Hold on to me,” he mutters.
She grumbles something unsavory under her breath.
Kion clenches his jaw as her arms loop around his waist. The others are soaring above them, warming up their Wingeds, and with a slight squeeze of his thighs and a nonverbal command, Cato flaps upward to join them.
It takes about fifteen seconds for him to fully begin to rise, and he feels Taissa’s surprised huff as Cato glides and soars around the pitch.
His stymph seems to scrape against the morning sun as he rises higher and higher, past Bronte and the others. The late morning air turns cooler, and a wind swirls through their hair, a few stray strands of Taissa’s curls tickling the back of his neck. Kion fights back a shiver. Bloody cold up here.
The sound of chiming bells rings through the air, and it takes him a second to realize that beautiful sound has somehow come from Cho, who’s whooping and laughing as Cato flies through mist, her hands outstretched and trailing through the wisps.
Alarm blares through him. Fuck, she’s supposed to hold on to him…
But Cato is going slowly, carefully, mindful of air pockets.
And the sound of her laugh isn’t completely grating.
Kion’s lips twitch as Taissa shouts in joy, and even Cato seems to be enjoying himself as he slowly begins a descent.
When Cato’s taloned feet finally settle upon soft grass, Taissa jumps down before Kion, headed straight to Cronus.
As Kion dismounts, Taissa throws him back a grin. “Great. I’ll try now.”
“Cho—”