Chapter One
TaissaMay 2026Banallan, ScotlandTaissa Cho, the once-revered Robber of the Banallan Wyverns, national carriwitchet sensation, and the most popular athlete to ever grace the walls of fans, has gotten rather good at yelling at the happy-eyed youth to
get off my lawn, right this moment, or I’ll make you regret it.It is a talent she’s been carefully honing ever since her luckless ban from the Wyverns, which sparked a deeply concerning midlife crisis for Taissa at the tender age of twenty-two. During that transformative period, she morphed into a crotchety old crone trapped inside the body of a twenty-four-year-old witch.
Gone are her days of soaring triumphantly around a cheering arena, replaced instead by a crumbling cottage in Banallan (carriwitchet money dries up fast, especially if one had to bribe reporters with hush money) and angrily crocheting scarves on the porch while eyeing the neighbors’ children with suspicion, lest they encroach upon her territory.
(Which they do. Frequently. Dirty little rats.)
In the past two years, Taissa has crocheted
thirty-seven scarves. And throughout the creation of each, she viciously imagined strangling a certain captain of the NCL Stymphs with the neat, colorful acrylic rows of cable, suzette, waffle, and cluster stitch.
For the past two years, Taissa Cho has lived in
if onlys.
If only she hadn’t let her carriwitchet coach force her into wearing the forbidden Luck glyph.
If only she had demanded a more subtle place to have it inked (her back, her armpit, her torso, her
buttocks—literally anywhere besides where it had been).
If only Kion Locke hadn’t caught sight of it and chosen to completely destroy her life.
If only any other National Carriwitchet League team would have taken her after the scandal.
But they hadn’t. And so, she turned to scarves. And she has become rather certain that one day, the UKHC Bureau of Unconventional Homicidal Instances will descend upon her cottage, and her unholy piles of scarves will be labeled as murder weapons.
That Kion Locke’s gravestone will thusly read: kion locke, october 1996–may 2026 death by scarf. oopsies!
Taissa just hadn’t expected
today to be the day she brutally murdered him.
All in all, however, the day starts off as it always does. Taissa wakes up and—over a nice cup of tea—wallows in her complete and abject misery before dragging herself to her front porch, where she furiously flips through the papers for NCL headlines and delights in certain tidbits of information. Such as, and especially, the fact that the Pinion-upon-Keat Stymphs are still predicted to epically fail this season (although how they can fail even
more than they already have is a mystery to Taissa).
The photograph on the page is one of the entire team. Taissa glares at Kion Locke, standing next to the pretty Samara Heaton and the bespectacled James Ridgeshaw IV.
From what she remembers, James Ridgeshaw was a fantastic player, taking the position of the Bailer. When a player is knocked from their mount in carriwitchet, they and their Winged must wait in the holding tier of the siege tower to be tagged back into the game. The Bailer is the only one who can stage these rescues, and Taissa can’t count the number of times James whizzed by her fast as lightning, grinning smugly.
But nobody in this photo is smiling, not even mischievous-eyed Knox Tanaka, one of the offensive Dozers. Instead, he looks almost as depressed as Taissa feels daily as he stands next to one of the defensive Knockers, a girl that Taissa remembers as Isla Adaway.
Taissa can’t help it. Her eyes drift to Kion Locke, towering over the rest of his teammates with his
ridiculous height, hands behind his back and dark eyes flashing. How did she ever think he was fit? He’s a monster. A sharp-jawed, tousled-haired monster.
With one fingernail, Taissa scratches out his eyes.
(Ha.)
Perhaps for her, the game is over, but her hatred of Kion never will be. It’s a very
particular flavor of hatred. It’s what you end up with when love goes sour.
She used to have posters of him plastering
her wall. He’d been her idol, Kion Locke had. Everything she wanted to be, he
was. Everything she wanted to do, he
did. To her, he was a god.
And when she joined the NCL at eighteen, she sought him out like a self-destructive, stupid young moth seeks an aloof, cruel flame who would, in his words,
never waste a precious f***king minute on mentoring a simpering muppet.She still remembers that moment so clearly. It was the annual NCL Gala, honoring present players and welcoming new ones. Taissa was wearing a dress her mum had bought her: a blue and white floral sundress that she felt pretty in. It was her debut, and she was a bundle of nerves.
Taissa spotted him immediately. Of course she did. Besides being inducted into the NCL, this was what she was the most excited for . . . meeting the incredible, extraordinary Kion Locke. Her hero, leaning against a pillar in the huge ballroom, smartly dressed with a glass of champagne in one hand. It was unfathomable; it was everything she’d ever wanted and more. Taissa walked over, heart bursting in her chest. She barely heard the dropping of a champagne flute from somewhere behind her, the sharp shattering of the glass. Perhaps it was an omen of what was to come.
When he first looked up at her, she didn’t recognize the flash in his eyes as disgust, mistaking it for interest. Stupid. With a shaking voice, she introduced herself, and possibly rambled on about how extraordinary she found him, before timidly asking if he would consider showing her the ropes around the league. Mentoring her, if he had the time or the inclination.
Locke shook her off with an irritation that cut her to the bone, snarling those words she still remembers. And the rest of the night she spent in a teary blur, even throughout her induction ceremony. What was supposed to be the greatest moment of her life.
Does it still sting? Of course not.
(Fine, yes, maybe it does.)
But Taissa takes great comfort in the fact that shortly after she was expelled from the Wyverns, the Stymphs embarked on a losing streak of most epic proportions, fumbling their place in the NCL Major League and sinking all the way toward the bottom of the Minor League underneath the Dunanaird Cockatrices.
The
Cockatrices.They’re worse than the team with the rooster-wyvern hybrids.
(Taissa had always struggled to keep a straight face while watching those overgrown chickens.)
And this particular article declares that they’re on the brink of being dissolved, thrown into the carriwitchet rubbish and disbanded forever. On top of that, they’re about to lose one of their Robbers: Samara Heaton has just announced her pregnancy, and will be leaving the team to protect the baby from an already risky sport where injury itself is part of the game. So the Stymphs are a player down and on the verge of collapse. Delighted by this splendid prediction, Taissa cheerfully yells for little Abigail Williams to stay the hells off her lawn if she knows what’s good for her.
A shift working at the local grocery store follows, with interludes of acute embarrassment as customers either recognize her or fail to. (She’s not sure which is worse. Maybe the third option, where people recognize her in a confused, vague sort of way and stare, trying to figure out where they know her from. Or the fourth option, where they recognize her and pummel her with verbal abuse. Or the fifth, where they call the paparazzi on her and then images of her crying behind a skip bin make their rounds on social media.)
Scran Mart is, politely put, the bane of Taissa’s entire existence. She’s made to wear a hideous yellow apron, for one, and to stand for hours on end listening to tinny pop music and breathing in the smell of the pork scratchings that her manager, Donald, is constantly eating. It’s not a posh shop, not at all. No, Scran Mart has a selection of fresh produce equivalent to the field of a medieval farmer during the bubonic plague.
Dirty, wilted lettuces.
Carrots so misshapen that they would give urologists nightmares.
And don’t even get her started on the aubergines.
Scran Mart’s
real profit comes from the dirty magazines available for purchase behind the counter. (You’d think that with the rise of modern technology, nobody would want to suffer the acute embarrassment of purchasing pornography
in public, but this tiny corner of Banallan is far away from the city and full of old perverts who don’t know how to navigate the wonders of the aethernet.)
Taissa tried to get a job somewhere else. Literally
anywhere else. Including a breastaurant. But Banallan is loyal to its team, and spared no disgust for its “cheater.” Scran Mart was her last hope, and Taissa has the lurking suspicion that Donald took her on for some less-than-noble reasons.
Like sniffing her hair whenever he gets the chance.
Copyright © 2026 by Sophie Kim. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
