Chapter Eight Taissa
Chapter Eight
Taissa
Blood. Sweat. Tears.
The overwhelming urge to bury her face in a pillow and scream obscenities until she passes out.
As Cronus balks and bucks beneath her, Taissa grips the saddle’s horn and squeezes her legs around his sides, trying to ignore the stares of Bronte and Knox. They’ve hung back after their practice to enjoy the show, although she really wishes they hadn’t.
Friends aren’t really her forte. Not anymore. Oh, she had them once. But then they turned cold. Dragged her name through the dirt. Tore her heart into shreds. Friends. What a joke…
“Wow,” says Knox, tilting his head. “Do you know those mechanical bull things? In those American pubs?”
“Nope,” Bronte replies, arching a brow, “but color me intrigued.”
“Well, just look at her and you’ll get a good idea of what they are.”
Taissa flushes in irritation, tightening her grip on the horn as Cronus does a strange little wiggle.
She’d suspected it from what she had overheard yesterday, after Markus used that glyph on Cronus, but hearing it from Kion’s lips had nearly cleaved her heart in two.
Those who hurt animals, magical or otherwise, are the lowest of scum.
It makes sense now, how Cronus’s unwillingness to have her on his back far outweighs that of his children.
Is he expecting her to hit him? To scream at him?
Well, she’d rather die before doing either to any Winged.
“Cronus,” she attempts, holding on for dear life, “it’s just a wee bit difficult for me to stay on right now. ”
“I hate you and everything about this,” he snarls back, sounding eerily like her old Granddad Athol.
It’s that hoarse smoker voice and that heavy layer of sarcasm, so thick that it traverses past the point of sarcasm, and to something else entirely.
Some indescribable tone of deep loathing and cutting causticness. “Stupid little girl.”
She refrains from reminding him that each time she falls off, he stands over her, snapping for her to get back on.
He wants to play; she can feel it. She can tell, if she closes her eyes and focuses the small part of her that’s tied to him—that bitter, bird-shaped space of loathing and anger—that he used to love this game.
That he still does, and that watching his children play it without him has been the cruelest torture imaginable.
“You just need to control your instincts. Your reflexes.”
“You’re an idiot, idiot hatchling for glyph-bonding with me,” Cronus snaps. “I’m old. I’m useless. I can’t win.”
“Those don’t sound like your words,” she replies, frowning. In fact, they sound like Markus’s. “I chose you for a reason, you know.”
“Bah.”
The late afternoon sun is tingeing orange in the sky from where it’s partly hidden behind a blur of clouds.
In the span of some five or so hours, Taissa has been trampled, pecked, stomped, and spat on.
Every inch of her hurts. Her calves ache thanks to the drills, and her back is stiff from a nasty fall.
Her shoulders, her arms, everything in between, feels like it’s been pummeled by a gladiator.
Damn him, but Locke is right. She is out of shape.
The most exercise she suffered through these past two years has been half-hearted morning jogs and, when she felt like punishing herself, a few trips to the local gym (until a snorting squad of teenage warlocks had taken it upon themselves to snap not-so-discreet photos of her slamming into a punching bag like it had personally wronged her; those photos were, of course, then submitted to various gossip sites, and Taissa avoided that gym like the Pixie Pox).
Since her first fall from Cronus, she’s made three more visits to the infirmary.
Very much a gentleman, the rather adorable Edward Becerra now sits in the bleachers surrounding the pitch to save her the trouble of limping back and forth.
His hair shines golden in the sun, and every time Taissa glances his way, he nods encouragingly at her and she can’t help to feel a slight rush of warmth in return.
He’s so very cute, in a cherubic sort of way.
She may have sworn off friends, but there’s no harm in enjoying a bit of eye candy, is there?
“This was never going to work,” Cronus snaps. Literally. His beak gnashes in the air, angrily, once, twice, thrice. His feathers ruffle.
The Bonding glyph keeps no emotional secrets between them.
It’s deep-rooted magic, ancient magic from Ye Olden Days.
Unlike other glyphs, there is only one level to it, and it is only ever used within the sport of carriwitchet.
The bond draws from both the Winged’s and the rider’s magical composition, mixing and mingling, the strength of the bond depending on the compatibility of the pair.
Taissa and Cronus, both extraordinarily grumpy with a penchant for violence, are quite compatible.
So while Cronus’s words are harsh, Taissa feels his disappointment, his embarrassment, his anger, and his frustration, all knotted together in a terrible lump she swallows down in her own throat.
Taissa can’t blame Cronus for his growing upset.
Bronte’s stymph, brown-feathered Icarus and a “lousy waste of sperm” according to Cronus, is circling them from above and cawing in amusement.
Even Knox’s stymph, despite siding with his father earlier in their physical kerfuffle, seems to be on the verge of laughter.
Taissa glares daggers at them, disliking the two birds more and more with each passing moment.
Sure, he’d probably tried to eat them at some point—and perhaps turning him into a laughingstock was their stymphalian way of coping—but she was not amused.
“It will work,” says Taissa firmly, turning back to him. “Because you know what’s more embarrassing than being bad at something?”
“The fiery spell.” Cronus’s feathers ruffle. “My feathers being pulled out. Not getting food because I lost. Not getting water.”
Taissa flinches. Oh, she’s going to murder that handler in cold blood.
Red begins to encroach on the edges of her vision.
She makes herself swallow once, then twice, knowing Cronus can feel her anger and hoping he knows that it’s not at him.
“Those—those are all worse. Much worse. And I-I’m so sorry that happened to you.
It never will again. I promise.” She grimaces.
“But I was going to say, er, giving up.” It sounds stupid now, but it’s what Estee used to tell her when Taissa had just started riding lessons and couldn’t even make her steed bank left or right.
“Come on. We’re both out of practice, but we’ll get there,” she says, leaning over and genially patting Cronus’s head.
He stiffens even more, clearly affronted, but doesn’t buck her off.
She counts that as progress.
Even with all the scratches, bruises, sprains, and broken nose (thank Morgana for Edward), she won’t give up on him. He’s hers.
(And she really, really, really needs to prove Kion wrong.)
Icarus cackles as Cronus does a strange shimmy, swooping lower and laughing in his father’s face, so close that his beak clips his father’s head.
That, in the end, is what does it.
For the first time in hours, Cronus grows still with his fury. His stamping feet freeze in the grass. For a brilliant, beautiful moment, he’s frozen with his wings outstretched, glaring up at his mocking son.
And then he’s launching into flight.
Knox cheers from below as the wind lashes Taissa’s face, whipping her hair.
Cronus flaps his wings, rising and rising into the air, gaining height.
Her stomach bottoms out as he finally shoots upward.
Her hands scrabble to hold the saddle’s horn as the drag sets in, but Cronus himself makes no move to shake her off, instead swooping and soaring.
His joy is Taissa’s own, pure and sparkling, as she lifts up her hands and whoops, her heart bursting in her chest, before a rather jarring series of bumps has her gripping the pommel again.
She’s finally back in the skies, in the air, on her own Winged, feeling as if she only needs to reach up a hand to scrape the surface of the evening’s sunset.
Cronus is exhilarated with his newfound freedom, soaring toward one of the field’s siege towers, where a few draconian jewels left out from practice glisten and glimmer.
They’re not truly jewels at all, at least not in the literal sense, but they’re as precious as any gemstones could ever be: the last of the Wingeds’ eggs from Ye Olden Days, back when the Wingeds could breed, and hatch, freely in the wild.
Hunted to the point of extinction, perhaps it was the fetal Wingeds’ choice to stay within those eggs, never to hatch, nor to fly, but never to be speared to death by hunters, either.
So the eggs fossilized, and time went on, and Wingeds were bred in captivity—domesticated—in an effort to save the species.
Some wild-bred eggs are in museums, but most are used in carriwitchet: a way to honor what the Wingeds once were.
(Perhaps it’s a bit ironic.)
Regardless, excitement swarms in Taissa’s chest as Cronus banks toward the tower, and as she reaches out to snatch one of the precious gems. It glitters in her leather-gloved grip and she tucks it close to her chest, cradling it with a surge of giddy love, her vision suddenly blurred.
Taissa Cho is back.
“Stop all this sappiness. It disgusts me.”
“Ah, shut up, you old bampot.”
A rough noise scratches from her bird’s throat. It just might be a laugh.