Chapter Eleven Taissa #2
(The other is rather bewildered and paralyzed by the awkwardness of it all.)
As Isla, Bronte, and Mahina trickle in after her, Kion grabs her wrist. His grip isn’t hard, but it’s enough for Taissa to whirl around in irritation, wondering what he could possibly want.
“Cho,” he says, “a word.”
“I’d really rather not,” she retorts under her breath, and he looks like he wants to murder her. Good. She feels exactly the same.
Conscious of the team’s curious stares from where they sit on the wooden benches lining the room, Taissa grits her teeth into a sickly sweet smile and grudgingly allows Locke to tug her back around the corner, away from the others.
(Although with the Communication glyph, she’s sure they can hear everything anyway.
How lovely!) “A rather inconvenient time for a chat, don’t you think?
” she snaps, yanking her wrist out of his grip.
His eyes are so dark, and so very unamused. “Show me the back of your neck.”
She blinks, momentarily caught off guard. Although she’s wearing Balance, she suddenly feels unsteady. “What?”
A muscle in Kion’s jaw jumps; he shifts on his feet. “Your neck, Cho. You know what I’m checking for.”
Realization slowly creeps through her, followed by a confusing surge of hatred, guilt, shame, and fury. “You can ask the other girls. They saw me change.”
“I need to see it myself.” Kion’s expression is like stone, harsh and unyielding.
Humiliatingly, her throat begins to close up. “Locke—” It feels like she’s standing in front of the Board again, pleading and defending herself in vain, begging them to turn their scorn and punishment onto Frasier instead. Nobody ever believes her. Nobody ever listens.
If she were a man, they would have taken her seriously, because they wouldn’t have been rooting for her downfall from the very start.
Carriwitchet was never meant for witches.
For years, it was thought of as a warlock’s playing field, a war game unfit for the delicate sensibilities of witches.
Even though the times have changed, the tiny female changing spaces in team locker rooms are clearly an afterthought.
And the NCL Board is made up solely of warlocks who, two years ago, looked at a grieving witch and labeled her as “unstable” and “guilty of desperate measures.” They hadn’t even let her use a Truth glyph before throwing her—and her life—into the rubbish.
(And she hates it, but Taissa is too frightened of the law to just draw one on illegally like Kion did in her cottage.
She’s already got a reputation as a cheater, and who knows if the DMR—the Department of Magical Regulation—would have some sort of pre-existing bias for her and would throw her into Shackell without even hearing her out.)
But even if she could have found a willing magis, she still couldn’t have used a Truth glyph—not without Sansa’s sparkling life hanging in the balance.
“Spread these lies again,” Frasier had hissed, cornering her after she’d been dismissed by the disbelieving Board, “and I’ll see your little wyvern put down.”
The threat had bought two years of her complete and utter silence.
Taissa wants to say this, wants to say all of this, but Kion’s just like them. He’s just like Coach Frasier, just like the rest, with their cold eyes. She’s thought about it before: that maybe the reason he hates her so much is because she’s a witch. And she was better than him.
Her throat is too tight to say anything more as she reluctantly turns around, pretending like her eyes aren’t burning as she lifts up her heavy plait and feels Kion searching her neck for an illegal glyph.
“Your arms,” he says.
Feeling numb, like she’s standing outside of her own body, Taissa turns back around and yanks the leathers up. Kion notes the Balance and Focus glyphs with a cursory nod.
“What,” Taissa manages to say, covering her rising tide of emotions with a sour, spiteful tone, “are you going to make me strip, too?”
For a moment, she thinks he might have flinched, flinched violently, only there’s no remorse in his eyes. There’s something, but she doesn’t know what it is. “I trust the witches you changed with would have told me if they saw any illegal glyphs anywhere else on your body.”
Avoiding his stare, Taissa yanks her sleeves back down and redons her gloves.
Her vision is slightly blurry, and her mouth tastes like salt.
The nerves swarming in her stomach aren’t helping matters, either.
She waits for Kion to turn on his heel and stride back to the group, but he doesn’t move. “Cho. Look at me.”
Not like this. She will not let Kion Locke see how her eyes are swimming with tears and how her mind is swarming with bad memories.
“Oi,” he says, quieter this time, and then his leather-gloved hand is lifting her chin up, forcing her to meet his damnably dark eyes.
Taissa quickly sneers up at him, but it’s too late.
He’s seen. His Adam’s apple bobs. “I had to check,” he whispers, not gently but not roughly, either. “You know that.”
She steps away from him, tapping her fingers on her legs, looking anywhere but his face. His stupid, handsome, infuriating face.
“You haven’t chosen a number yet,” Kion adds after a long moment in which she imagines murdering him in great detail. “Newbie,” he prompts when she doesn’t hear him, still wrapped up in her violent daydream. “Number.”