Masiel was used to riding alone through the countryside, staying to the roads and keeping her heavily-armed shadow unseen. It was something they had always done, and she couldn't remember when they'd started doing it, or how it had begun. Perhaps by unspoken consent, or perhaps by an incident she no longer remembered. And for her to forget something, it meant that she had either taken care of it so that it would no longer bother her or be a future menace to her and her organization, or it had been so inconsequential that she hadn't bothered to give it much more thought. Either way, it was and it would always be, and it wasn't like he couldn't hear her if she began to talk. Not that she did, not even to herself, for her speaking was an early warning that things might get nasty and his intervention might be required. Not that Masiel couldn't handle herself or take care of herself in nasty situations. It just made things easier when a living mountain appeared out of nowhere, armed to the teeth, and looking dumb and scary enough to use his teeth instead of those weapons.
That thought made Masiel's lips twitch in a small sardonic smile.
Brogan was anything but dumb. He was anything but what people assumed him to be. That had been her mistake as well, when she'd first met him. A half-giant who could barely string a few words together to make a coherent sentence? He would be easy enough to defeat. She'd been confident of that fact. Too confident, and that had almost been her demise. Seeing him fight, seeing what he could really do, and what he really was, made Masiel appreciate Brogan in a way no one else did. He wasn't really a mountain, slow and immovable, worn down inch by inch by weather and time; Brogan was an avalanche, carefully balanced upon a pebble's edge, ready to tumble down onto the unsuspecting with deadly brute force and merciless fury.
Her shoulders tightened in reflex to that thought. She bore a physical reminder of that force and fury, and though the wound had long since healed, she was still able to feel it as if it were fresh and new.
She pushed those thoughts aside before she became too tense to even remain in her saddle and needed to dismount to walk off the restless energy. She knew if she did that, Brogan would instantly be by her side, and damn the consequences.
So she turned her thoughts to the task ahead.
As assassinations went, it was a simple enough task. Get in, kill the mark, get out. But any further planning depended upon her actually being able to see what she was dealing with. Most towns and cities were the same - buildings of differing heights, different districts, all sorts of people - but where they differed was their layout and construction. While some towns and cities placed their buildings close together, others sprawled and had considerable space. Since this town was close enough to the sea to have issues with pirates, she assumed that these buildings would likely be closer to sprawling in the more wealthier district and more closely packed together near the docks and in the poorer district, where space was at a premium and it was easier to rebuild after an attack.
That kind of layout posed its own problems, but they were easily-solved problems. She also knew that there were problems she could only anticipate until she'd seen them, and there were problems that she'd never anticipate at all. She would have a plan, and a back up plan, and a back up plan for the back up plan.
Plus a proverbial shopping list of contingencies for the contingencies.
Checklists for checklists.
Masiel sighed and turned her gaze toward Brogan, picking him out easily even though any other eyes would skip right over him without realizing that a one-man army was riding so close at hand. They would ride for a few more hours, she decided, and then they would find a place to take a break and stretch their legs, and give the horses a momentary rest.
Then they would continue on, at least until dark. She didn't expect to reach their destination tonight, of course, but she would try, because the longer they were out and exposed, the more likely it would be they would run into trouble. And she really didn't want to run into trouble.
At least, trouble she didn't cause.