She was alone on the road that morning. The weather had maintained a steady, relentless drizzle the entire time, slowly turning the edges of the road into muddy swamps. She stayed in the center, where the earth was packed tight and occasionally turned into roughly-hewn slabs of stone, where some enterprising official generations past had thought to make a proper road.

The hood attached to her traveler's jacket was slung over her head, and beneath it her tattooed eyes surveyed the trees pushing at the edges of the road. The drizzle had quieted any forest sounds that might have been, and the whole world felt a little lonely.

Her clothes were typical mercenary garb where she was from, although she'd yet to see much of the same style on the island in the day or so she'd been on it. People stared at her pants, tucked into boots, and her thick leather belt that carried the pouches containing her few meager possessions. Her main dagger was in plain sight to warn off any potential thieves, and she hadn't made much of an effort to hide the other weapons on her person. Thin slivers of gold and silver pierced her ears or slung around her wrists or fingers; like many mercenaries, she wore her wealth, and had the scars to prove that she knew how to keep it.

She wasn't fooling herself, though; it was the eyes that did it, the thick rings of near-black on her lower lid, tattoos that were common to mercenaries and warriors where she was from. She supposed the Escovans might have accepted the pants on a certain level, or even the general air of menace. The tattoos were pushing it.

She fiddled with the thin band of gold on her wrist, relieved to let go of her focus on the Find. She knew he was in Maristheum, and there was only one road there. Briefly, she wished there had been time to procure a horse for the journey, though she chalked the desire up to laziness. It was not, she'd been told, a very long walk. Merely a day. She'd walked much farther in her relatively short life, and horses were a luxury. Besides, she didn't have very much space to run or hide on this little island if she was caught with a stolen one.

As if called up by her thoughts, she heard the muffled clip-clopping of hooves on a wet dirt road. Her lips curled up in half a sneer; she had no intention of moving off into the mud for a rider, and hoped that whoever it was would simply be smart enough to navigate around her.