The woman was tired. They were walking faster than usual. It felt good to finally get out of the dungeons. Up and up they went, another flight of stairs and then through an inconspicuous door guarded by two goldcloaks. One of them handed her a plump leather pouch, coins clinking inside. She quickly counted them, and sure enough, the amount was correct. The maiden-beast turned her head. She likes the sound of that well enough.
The sun was about to set when they finally emerged above ground in Flea Bottom. After the long, timeless darkness below the castle, she would have preferred dawn over dusk. The woman took out three coins from the leather pouch and handed them to her younger companion. "One for your service, two for your silence."
She stared at them in disbelief. "Are they real?"
The woman nodded curtly. It was always the same reaction she got when she took a new girl to the job. "Never seen a dragon before, have you?"
The younger woman shook her head. "So that was the actual Lord Hand?" She blurted out, incredulously.
"Yes."
That made her giggle. She was her innocent, maiden-like self again. "I thought he was some knight or minor lord like to make whores call him Lord Lion for the kicks. Never imagined the Hand of the King to frequent the likes of us. Everybody knows he hates whores."
The woman looked at her sternly. "Yes, precisely. If you value your life, you'll see that it stays that way. If any of this becomes known, if the Lord Hand just so much as suspects he is becoming the talk of town, he will have us both shortened by a head, or worse." She paused, unsure whether to address this delicate issue or to just let it go and quietly find replacement for the young woman. "You should have told me about what you were planning with the beard," she finally said. "That was folly. I feared for our lives then and there."
The girl seemed genuinely taken aback. "We get to do all these things to him, but take a little hair, and that will cost us our heads?"
The older woman wasn't sure why that was, either, or why she had known with such certainty that they had overstepped their boundaries. All she remembered was the sudden sense of dread plucking at her innards. "The Lord Hand has a great appetite for many things, but he has no taste for having his facial hair mutilated, it seems. Best not to bring a knife without telling anyone, either. An overzealous guard might misread your intentions, and that would be the end of you."
"Why does he like it?" The young woman asked, after a long pause of silence. "The other stuff, I mean."
The woman shrugged. "Some men like to take a woman from the front, some like to take her from behind, some men have no appetite for women at all. Some pay a woman so they can humiliate her, others like the taste of humiliation. It's all the same to me, as long as they pay with good coin. That he does."
The young woman nodded. "Just another job then."
They kept walking in silence. "Who is this Tysha I'm playing?" She asked after a while.
"Some girl he wronged," the woman said. "You already know most all you need to know about her. He gave her to his men to teach his son the demon dwarf a lesson. You look a lot like her, or so I am told. It's why we picked you, but don't think we can't replace you. There's a lot of girls look like Tysha in this town, I assure you."
There had been three or four others before her, but they had proven inept or unreliable. One she even had to have killed for fear the girl wouldn't be able to keep her mouth shut.
"Was that real poison you used?"
"Real enough," the woman confirmed. Too many questions.
The young woman laughed. "If my father knew I had the chance to poison the Hand and didn't do it, he'd beat me bloody."
That's the trouble with girls from Flea Bottom, the woman thought. Not one among them don't know a dozen people hold a grudge over the Sack. She pointed at the gold dragons the young woman clasped tightly in her hands. "Never kill a man who shits gold right into your pockets. Before I became a part of this... arrangement, I had to spread my legs for ten, fifteen men a night, drunk brutes most all of them, and I could hardly put enough food on the table to survive. Now, I visit the cellars of the Red Keep once a fortnight and live comfortably. I've even had a taste of suckling pig. You best remember that when you next have the urge to avenge the Sack. Besides, one drop too many in his lordship's mouth, and you'd have all them maesters come rushing forward with their antidotes. They are never far. He would live, and you'd be drawn and quartered and fed to the crows." You and I both, she thought uneasily. These girls, no matter how carefully chosen, were always a risk.
"I was but a babe at my mother's breast," her young companion quickly reassured her. "I have no mind to avenge the Sack."
The ease with which she lied about her age unnerved the older woman. I'll have to speak to the Spider about this one, she thought. And then we'll have to find a new girl. Again.