Work Text:
Lacey had never been a remarkable woman, nor the kind people turned to when they needed to offload their emotions. She had certain practical skills that her friends and acquaintances turned to her for, but that was all. People paid her all kinds of compliments, of course, but that was simply flattery, or else attention focused where she wouldn’t have chosen it to be.
She slept with a woman who loved another, pocketed the coin she was given, and thought nothing of it. Only, then, the woman kept returning. She never would give a name. Lacey figured she was likely some noble’s wife, and worried of word getting back. It hardly mattered to her. It was simply work, and the woman paid well. They never spoke much. Lacey always took her cues from her clients, so when faced with a quiet woman she became quiet herself. Clearly the woman didn’t mind, or else she wouldn’t have kept coming back.
She never could have anticipated what she would be drawn into. She never did discover the woman’s name, but her understanding of why changed. A woman who made secrets her business would keep her own firmly locked away. Lacey, who had dropped all identifiers, could understand that. After the first few months, each time the woman visited she’d carefully, deliberately, offer up another piece of information to Lacey. Nothing all that revealing or personal. Just little things, things that Lacey could add her own information to. If the woman said that so-and-so was getting married, Lacey might add that he was pleasant enough in bed. The kind of information that some people wanted, but no-one would kill for. Women and men, though they were fewer, like Lacey talked to each other, hoarding scraps of information that could ease their paths or even save their lives, and Lacey had always been sharp. Not all of her clients knew that, for Lacey made sure they saw what she wanted them to see and would make them want her, but the woman did.
The further she was drawn into this realm of secrecy, the more she felt something change within her. It was a funny sort of freedom, knowing that, for once, someone looked at her and saw more than a body to lie with. She liked the woman a great deal, for offering that. The world she had become a part of felt like another realm entirely, sometimes. One where the things she had heard whispers of could come true.
The woman had even seen Lacey afraid, for on one occasion when the woman had dropped by to visit her, a drunken man had been threatening one of the other girls, and Lacey had stepped in and got a knife to the throat for her troubles. The woman had pulled the man off her, and then turned to Lacey and spoken to her with surprising gentleness. They didn’t have sex that night, and she was grateful for it. She had thought, at first, that they would, for the woman had still indicated that she would like to see her in a private room. Instead, though, they had sat on the bed, not touching, and the woman had spoken to her of rumours until she was calm enough to contribute. She was paid as generously as she always was for her time.
So she liked when the woman visited her, even though she knew she was stepping further and further into something utterly unknown.