Chapter Twenty Taissa #2
She’s raising a hand to rub the evidence of her tears off her face when she notices something rather odd. Well, very odd, actually. Incredibly strange.
Coating her five fingers and her palm is an unfamiliar, glittering black dust.
(Her immediate reaction is to turn to Kion and say, “What the fuck is this?”, but of course he can’t see her, and also, there’s probably very little that he knows and she doesn’t. Thick skull, that one.)
It came from Sansa, this dust, but that doesn’t make any sense.
How many times has she stroked Sansa, trailed her fingertips across her scales?
It must verge on the thousands. And how many times has she encountered this odd substance?
Never. Only now, when her wyvern is ill.
Taissa puzzledly rubs it between her fingers.
There’s a strange, almost silky feel to it, like the fine dust collected on the top of Estee’s piano that she never uses.
As Kion’s footsteps retreat (he must think she’s walking with him, the numpty), Taissa crouches back down and tries to find out where else the dust is coming from on Sansa’s still body.
With her other, clean hand, she strokes Sansa’s flank, but her fingers come away clean.
Her tail, too, is free of any sparkling black powder.
In fact, everywhere but Sansa’s snout is clean.
(The possibility that she’s covering her hands in wyvern boogers is suddenly of great concern to Taissa, but she remembers a particular instance when Sansa sneezed all over her, and her fears are quickly put to rest. Wyvern boogers are much more disgusting than whatever this is.)
The dust is seeping from Sansa’s slit nostrils.
Did she inhale something, snort something that caused this illness?
Was she…doing some sort of drug? The other wyverns, is this coating them, too?
Carefully, Taissa crawls to the next stall over (dodging an overzealous magis’s rushing feet) and swipes at the other beast’s nose.
Gerrick, this one is called. Aster’s wyvern.
Yes. It’s on him, as well. Probably all the others, too.
Maybe even the cockatrices, the hippogriffs, rarins, and pegases.
Mind whirring, Taissa climbs back to her feet.
Does the DMC know about this? Why haven’t they said anything?
She should call Vance again, and show her the powder.
Taissa, grimacing, pulls out her qyl from her thigh holster and draws a Level Three Preserving glyph on her wrist. It will keep her exactly as she is, dust and all, until she manages to scrape it all off into a container.
Part of her is terrified at keeping an unknown substance on her hands (what if she falls ill, too?) but the Decontagion glyph she inked onto her skin should be enough. Probably. Maybe. Hopefully.
Tucking her qyl away, Taissa swallows hard, looking back at Sansa. “I’ll figure out what’s wrong with you,” she promises, although the Winged can’t hear her. “I swear.”
Heart pounding with the hope that she’s found a lead, Taissa creeps back to the stable’s exit, passing by Frasier. He’s arguing with a haggard-looking DMC official, who, Taissa realizes with relief, is holding a small jar of the sparkling black dust in his hands.
“This is an official investigation,” the official is repeating. “We can’t give out any information at this time.”
Well, there goes her plan of eavesdropping. But Taissa can’t resist taking Kion’s advice to heart. Besides, Sansa would want her to do the same. And with grief and anger spilling over in her broken heart, she’ll take the beautiful chance presenting itself before her.
Drawing her foot back, Taissa kicks Colum Frasier hard in the tadger. As he shouts in mingled confusion and pain, clutching his wee delicate unmentionables, Taissa sprints off, and doesn’t stop running until she makes it back to her car.
Panting hard, she slides into the driver’s seat—only to make contact with a hard male body underneath her. A hard, male, invisible body. She would know that grunt of annoyance anywhere. “Locke!” she snaps, scrabbling out of the car and nullifying her Unseen glyph. “That’s my spot—”
One by one, each Stymph pops back into view. Kion, sitting in the driver’s seat (and glaring at her; she had sat down rather hard), Bronte in the back with óríon…
Taissa’s brows furrow. “Where’s Knox?”
Watching Kion’s eyebrows rise in serious alarm is better than the best telly.
“Fuck,” he hisses, slapping the wheel. “We forgot Tanaka.”
It’s a good long while before all five Stymphs have returned to Taissa’s cottage.
She takes back what she thought earlier—watching Kion drag Knox over to the car from the stables by his ear beats anything that could ever air on the telly.
A storm is rolling in as they all crowd around her tiny sitting room, examining the strange black powder that she scraped into an empty jam jar, sealing it tight.
It contains only around half of the strange substance found on her little wyvern—the other half she dumped into an old Branston Pickle container that is only slightly sticky.
It’s evidence, after all: If she’s to turn the powder in to the magistrates, she’d quite like some to keep for her own research purposes (which have so far involved fervently shaking the jar in hopes that the answer to what it is will suddenly manifest itself. It has not.).
She’s lit the fireplace, and the sharp pops and crackles make up for her lack of a heating unit.
The temperature has dropped dramatically from the merry summer afternoon it was as heavy gray clouds, bloated with cold rain, creep across the horizon.
It’s almost cozy, this scene: Taissa and Kion sitting on the tattered sofa, with óríon, Knox, and Bronte scattered about the cushy black floral rug Estee had given Taissa for her birthday last October (far too big to drag to the Pinion Nexitory).
One of Kion’s legs is pressed against her own, and she doesn’t exactly hate the feel of it, even though she should.
So what? He was kind to her outside of the stables for a grand total of ten minutes, and suddenly she’s ready to forgive him for ruining her life—and being a cruel bastard long before then? Absolutely not.
(But it doesn’t help that the suppressed, teenage fangirl inside of her can’t stop replaying the events of the boudoir shoot, blushing and giggling and kicking her feet. Pathetic. It was just—an act. They were acting. Being actors.)
“What is that?” Knox asks as Taissa tilts the jar this way and that, examining it in the orange light of the fireplace.
“I don’t know.” Taissa shakes her head. She’d called Felicity Vance, frantically, after returning home.
But the DMC agent had regretfully told her that the ability to share their current leads was far above her pay grade.
It’s comforting, knowing that the DMC has also found the strange substance, but Taissa wants answers now.
She is, personally, a fan of instant gratification.
So, really, what else is she supposed to do but try to figure it out on her own?
Or, perhaps, not on her own. There are four of her teammates watching her with curious eyes.
Even though the idea of putting herself back out there to be ripped apart by so-called friends makes her rather want to stomp off and hole herself up, Taissa wonders if perhaps she should try to…
trust these players. For Sansa. One person trying to solve this alone, well, it’ll take much longer than five.
(And maybe there’s a loneliness in her, dark and empty. She hadn’t realized how closely those wisps of Sansa clung to her until they disappeared, dormant. Asleep.)
She clears her throat. “Maybe it’s a drug,” Taissa says, tapping her fingers against the glass. “It was all around their snouts, coming out their nostrils. They ingested it.”
“Wyverns do drugs?” Knox asks, frowning. Bronte shushes him, but it’s a valid point. Saying it aloud sounds ridiculous. Sansa was always so picky. She would never touch a carrot, let alone some hard drug.
“Or this powder is spilling out of them from the inside,” offers óríon somberly. With the shadows of the fireplace flickering around him, the hard planes of his face are darker than usual, and his blue eyes gleam like raw sapphires. “We do not know much about this illness, do we?”
“Maybe we should just let the DMC handle it,” says Knox, yawning. “They’re the pros. I’m just a wee lad who plays a wee sport.”
Taissa bristles. “Don’t you realize what’s at stake, Tanaka?” she demands, shaking the jar angrily. “It’s not just Sansa. It’s the entire bloody game. No Wingeds means no carriwitchet. No carriwitchet means no careers. I’ll go back to working in Scran Mart and crying behind skips.”
Bronte grins. “Oi, come on. I saw that photo. You still looked fit. D’you know, some people look hot when they cry? I’d never understood it until that picture.”
Morgana. Taissa takes a deep breath, trying to organize her spiraling thoughts.
She fiddles with the jar, bouncing it from one hand to the other.
(Is it a good idea to bop the dust around like this?
No, probably not, but she just can’t keep still.) “It’s not that I don’t trust the DMC.
But I want to help. My wyvern is sick. I don’t want Cronus to be next, and I’m sure you don’t want your stymphs coming down with whatever this is, either.
And”—she shrugs helplessly—“our match next Monday won’t be going on, will it, with the pegases down for the count? We have time on our hands.”
Knox looks as serious as she’s ever seen the cheerful lad be. “I mean, what you’re saying makes sense. But if we’re going to, I don’t know, become a bunch of sleuths, shouldn’t we focus on the team curse?”
“What is ‘sleuth’?” asks óríon, frowning.
“Rannsóknarlogreglumaeur,” supplies Knox, and Taissa blinks in surprise. He turns to her. “I learned some Icelandic so I could understand when he was calling me a ‘stupid nobody.’ ”