The lost shapeshifter

Chapter 7

- 5 years earlier-

Erica Ashryver was sitting in a dark corner of some tavern in the poor side of the capital of Terrasen. Fucking gods, was it really a poor side when her plate was made of silver and it was cleaner than her room back home?

What you need to know about Terrasen and particularly Orynth is that... how did her father say it? Oh, yeah. Our fair queen Aelin Galathynius rightly believes that there should not be such thing as poverty. So she erased it from our oh-so-mighty land.

Good thing Erica was done with this shit.

"Hey, Ica," the waitress sat next to her. "Here again?"

"Yup. Can I... ask you something?"

"Sure?"

"Does... general Ashryver come here by any chance?"

The waitress smiled a little. "He's a handsome one, isn't he?"

Erica's lips curved a little only because she had to smile. Her father wasn't that handsome, but somehow he caught the eye of her mother. That was the strangest thing of all.

"He does come here, but not a lot. Most of the waitresses here are his..." Erica didn't hear anything else, because there he was.

Her father.

General Aedion Ashryver, the cousin to the queen, the one who drowned his two older daughters and wanted to marry the third one off as if she was a mare.

His left hand was rested on some light-haired woman's waist. A woman that looked nothing like her mother. She took a deep breath as her father kissed the woman, as he laughed with her. Didn't he realize that his daughter was there? Didn't he sense her?

That was the day Erica would remember years later as the death of the lovely little lady Erica Ashryver, who would have become a princess to the Southern Continent if only she had stayed in Terrasen.

**********
Present days

"Erica!"

She was about to jump on the back of her mare when her younger brother - her little James - screamed after her. She turned around immediately and even before she could look at his face, he jumped at her arms, hugging her, crying in her neck.

"Hey, little one," she whispered. "I missed you."

When he was a little boy - just five or four years old - he used to ask her about war and what was the point in it. She never knew what to answer. His kind soul, she remembered telling Gav once. The world wasn't ready for someone like their little brother.

"Don't go," he whispered. "Please don't leave me, again."

Again hit the hardest.

She never meant leaving him. Or any of her brothers. She meant coming back just to see them. Sooner or later.

But... she realized she was selfish. She truly did. But all of them would have done the same thing.

The truth was however that if she had stayed in Terrasen, becoming the perfect lady that her father had always wanted, she would have stayed so blind to the world. Tern - yes, an assassin - showed her so many things. Unlike his master, he had raised her as his own daughter. He loved her, he gave her everything she needed even if it was a trip or a giant wyvern.

He loved her. And she loved him.

And if she had to chose between Terrasen and the family she had found with the assassins, she wouldn't think twice before choosing Tern.