Aela feels her blue eyes narrow on the dark appaloosa - just a moment - before her golden brow smooths back out. Cheri offers her a soft grin that the palomino doesn't return. There is only a distant sense of discontent in the air, which strikes Aela as odd. It only makes her regard the Loessian with a keen stare. The last time that her magic had been so obscured had been in the presence of Gale...
Her delicate ears flick back briefly at the mention of our relations, but just as Cheri isn't overly eager to finish her drink, Aela isn't overly eager to speak of those relations. Not just yet, anyway. She reaches down and takes a small sip of her own while she gathers her thoughts. It's only when she lifts her head that she replies to Cheri with another not quite smile, with a sparkling glance that revealed none of Aela's secrets. "Oh, you have no idea."
Very few did where it concerned Aela.
"I used to," she chimes back to Cheri, giving the mentioned forest a cursory glance. Aela gave her slender shoulders a shrug, as if the thought mattered little to her, before returning her attention to the Loessian heir. "It used to be a great deal of fun. Nashua would come charging in, throwing around all kinds of threats." He'd threatened her with banishment the last time she came through, and it only made the Pampas mare more determined to cross through the Northern territory. Her brother hadn't acknowledged her at first, allowing her to come and go through as she pleased. It was only after her increasing visits with Reave - their brother - and that Aela had sought Nashua out directly, that his apprehension towards her turned to open hostility.
A great source of pain for their biological mother is, what he called her.
A wound that never fully healed, one that Aela had apparently re-opened again and again every time Lilliana had glimpsed her golden coat.
"But it would seem he's been distracted lately," Aela finishes with a sigh, as if they had been talking of trivial gossip and not the theft of a Prince, an entire herd vanishing into the Taigan mist before her expression brightens back to Cheri. "What brings you to the bog then?"
@Cheri
They doused your soul in water,
but the flames raged higher.
And they called you devil's daughter,
such a pretty liar.