Chapter Twenty Taissa
Chapter Twenty
Taissa
Taissa has never been able to forget the Banallan stables.
Not the warm, hay-like scent of it, nor its high rafters where bunches of dried lavender and chamomile hang.
The wyverns, filled with excessive energy, used to have so much trouble sleeping.
Their days were spent soaring around the pitch, the stable only for their restless nights.
Banallan handlers took every step to make the stables more like a nursery for the wyverns: The giant stalls are padded with quilted blankets and rest underneath lazily spinning mobiles of stars and moons.
It wasn’t a rare occurrence that Taissa would creep into the stables to sleep with her little wyvern, Sansa curling up around her like a child might curl up with a favorite teddy.
Now, though, it appears that the Wingeds are having no trouble sleeping.
It’s not natural, seeing the black-scaled creatures huddled stiffly in their stalls, their eyes closed and their massive bodies barely moving.
It’s not right, not at all. Taissa swallows hard, barely seeing the DMC officials moving about the stables, barely seeing the magistrates speaking in low tones to a few handlers that look vaguely familiar.
Like a shell pulled back to sea by the tide, she’s walking toward Sansa’s stall at the end of the stables, moving soundlessly across the dirt floor.
It’s then that Colum Frasier steps in front of her.
Her heart stops in her chest. The floor falls away beneath her. For a long, horrible moment, she’s sure that the red-haired man with a crooked nose and harsh gray eyes is staring straight at her. Every instinct in her body screams at her to run.
She feels his hands on her again, rough and unrelenting, holding her down as the sharp point of his qyl digs into her skin.
Feels his breath, hot and huffing against her ear as he etches that forbidden glyph onto the back of her neck.
Sees his cruel smile as he warns her not to nullify it, because then, well, then he’ll have his contact at UKHC Unveiled run that photo of them, after all.
He’d planned it. Carefully. Her da, he’d just…
He’d just died.
Her heart at once feels like it’s shattering from the memory. (What use is being a witch if no glyph can cure late-stage cancer?)
Taissa was lost. No, more than lost: She was adrift in a violent sea and on the verge of being yanked under.
She couldn’t focus on anything more than two minutes, and she couldn’t stomach eating anything but applesauce, the sort that comes in the wee plastic bag.
Her hair was unkempt and matted because she couldn’t bring herself to lather it in her usual detangler.
It was her da who’d taught her to do it, her da who’d had the same thick, curly hair although his was as red as anything.
And she didn’t know it at the time (she didn’t know anything at the time save for her da, her da with his quick smile and booming laugh, her da who loved her mum so much he took her last name, was gone forever), but she briefly took up the habit of muttering nonsense to herself under her breath, but they didn’t know she’d been mumbling a song he used to sing her, “Bà Bà mo Leanabh Beag” in Gàidhlig.
Her teammates thought she’d lost her marbles, and they weren’t the only ones. Coach Frasier had, too, and with a big match against the NCL Stymphs looming in the next weeks, Frasier had concocted a surefire way to make sure Taissa Cho brought home a victory.
(Really, he could have just used a reserve player. They weren’t great, not like her, but truly it would have been so much easier for all parties involved.)
(Frasier never took the easy way out.)
(Frasier liked to make things…difficult.)
Her coach took her out to a fancy dinner under the guise of talking it through—mind you, Taissa was too far gone in grief to realize how abnormal this was—and over a candlelit dinner of lasagna that she couldn’t eat because it wasn’t applesauce, a paparazzo snapped away at a set scene that looked, suspiciously, like an illicit date between a much older coach with a string of pretty ex-wives and a much younger player who personally found Frasier repulsive.
But that didn’t matter. Not to the pap, who’d been sent by Frasier himself.
And then the Monday of that match, he held her back in the locker room after the others had gone to the stables and asked if she’d permit a “performance enhancement.” By then, Taissa had been emerging from the pit of her grief (she’d moved on to cheese toasties from applesauce), and was wary enough to refuse, sensing an illegal ploy.
He’d threatened to release the paparazzo’s pictures of their candlelit meal to the public, complete with a smear campaign.
Taissa, growing furious, dared him to do it. The answer was still no.
But no hadn’t stopped Frasier in the end. Taking her by surprise, he’d pinned her against the wall, yanking her hair to the side and etching the Luck glyph onto her neck. And the rest, well, the rest was history.
Frasier’s eyes narrow on hers. Taissa feels like she’s about to be sick, all over his shiny boots, but then an invisible hand is yanking her out of his path.
Oh. The Unseen glyphs. Heart pounding fast enough that it’s surely cause for alarm, Taissa watches Frasier make his way over to a magis, his thin lips barking a question.
“You all right?” Kion asks in her ear.
Never before has she been so glad to be invisible. “I’m fine,” she lies, and tries to believe it as she walks over to Sansa’s stall and crouches down on trembling legs.
Sansa. After two years, the runt is a little bigger than Taissa remembered (more muscle about her middle, maybe the picky eater of a wyvern has finally been giving raw chicken a chance).
She sleeps, curled up, like she was imagining Taissa lying there with her, cuddled together like they used to be. And she’s so very, very still.
Taissa has never, ever seen Sansa this unmoving. Even sleeping, she would roll about, kicking Taissa in the back, snarfling and snorting and snuffing. But now? Now, she’s just as much of a statue as the cockatrices.
Tears burn in Taissa’s eyes as she presses a hand to her mouth, holding back a sob. “Sansa?” She reaches out, but it’s like shouting into a void. Is she really only asleep?
What if…what if she’s already dead?
Kion’s hand presses against her back as, shaking hard, Taissa strokes the wyvern’s large snout with tentative fingers, waiting to feel a puff of air.
Sansa loved nose rubs, even more than she loved tummy rubs and the sweets Taissa would smuggle her.
(Probably why she never preferred chicken over a good chocolate sweet. Taissa spoiled her, she did.)
When she feels the slightest breath from her wyvern’s snout, Taissa thinks she might break completely from the relief of it. She rests her forehead against Sansa’s, a tear leaking down her cheek. “I’m so sorry, San.”
Taissa’s not quite sure how long she stays like that, pressed against her wyvern, breathing in the smell of her, so distinct this close: like hot creosote mingled with leather and summer rain (and, strangely, maraschino cherries).
This little wyvern had fought for her, viciously, when nobody else would.
Sansa had wanted to go and chomp off Frasier’s head after that disastrous game, and only Taissa’s pleas for her to remain out of it quelled the Winged’s murderous rage.
Sansa was the one who had stayed by Taissa’s side through all of it, until their bond was burned to shreds and Taissa was exiled like a traitor from a kingdom.
As Taissa had cried, Sansa had nudged her tearstained face with hers.
“Be strong,” the wyvern had told her. “Don’t let them see you cry. Never let them see that.”
So she hadn’t.
Until those photos of her wailing in that bar, and later behind the skip, had leaked.
Memories swarm in her mind like a flurry of butterflies swooping across a dying garden.
The moment she first laid eyes on the tiny runt, the way golden eyes locked with brown ones and widened.
Midnight escapes from the Nexitory into Banallan, soaring through summer squalls, laughing as hair and scale were drenched with warm rain.
That time they had a team photoshoot, and Sansa had balked at the flash of the camera, sending Taissa flying through the air and landing right on the photographer’s head.
Sansa, sneaking out to accompany Taissa on her first date with Everest Huang, hiding behind a tree in the park and watching their picnic from behind giant sunglasses and a massive sunhat.
The wyvern had forced Taissa to slide the oversized frames over her snout and plop the hat atop her scales because she thought they would be an excellent disguise.
They’d laughed for hours afterward about Everest’s face when he’d finally spotted the Winged spy.
When Taissa choked on her own spit, Sansa had pounded on her back with a giant clawed foot, which had only made them laugh harder.
Especially when Taissa fell down into the mud from the impact.
(Later, Taissa had tried to set Sansa up with Everest’s Winged, a giant dragon named Rolfe, but seeing as Sansa was a little less amenable to consorting with the enemy, the wyvern-dragon romance never came to be.)
Painting Sansa’s claws hot pink. Wrangling her into a giant, ugly holiday sweater she crocheted for her. Living and laughing and loving, all with her.
For two years, she’s yearned for her wyvern. Her best friend. She’s cried herself sick missing her, has forced herself to watch Wyverns games just to catch a glimpse of Sansa. And now she’s here, but something is so very wrong.
It may be minutes, or hours, before Kion whispers that it’s time for them to go, that more magistrates are pulling up outside the stables and she’s not in a state to be arrested. Reluctantly, and with a wet face, does Taissa pull back from Sansa and slowly rise to her feet.