October NaNo Prep Day 2 story

Henda of the Hill woke.  That was the way it was with her.  Men told her they returned to consciousness slowly, beginning with their hearing, which registered all the sounds around them and tested the location for threats.  Next would come their sense of smell telling them whether there was fire, rain, a dangerous animal or a delicious breakfast.  Warm sunshine might tease their eyelids open but, whatever they felt, they would almost all scan her day-lit chamber before relaxing anew in her bed.  Then it would be the touch of the air around their exposed skin and the touch of her silky skin against theirs.  Taste would follow; the taste of her sweetly perfumed hair or the flavour of the magnificent and well-earned morning meal she might cook if she liked them more than most others.  For Henda, it was her way to wake quickly and then get on with business.
She looked with distaste at the tousled, lank-hair making a grease-stain across her best lace pillow case.  She wouldn’t be making him breakfast.  Instead, she stroked a long urgent fingernail across his thigh and followed it into the space he made for her.  “My darling,” she whispered silkily into his dirty left ear.  “It’s past dawn and my lord protector must even now be getting dressed.”
He stirred and sleepily pulled her across his fat belly.  “Wake me properly,” he commanded and opened his eyes to watch.
She moved the way he wanted her to move and did the things he asked her to do then, exactly as she’d expected, she heard the sound of a horse approaching over the gravel.  “It’s my master!” she whispered urgently.  “You have to go now, unless you want to face his sword!”
More quickly than anyone else would have expected him to move, he rolled his sweating carcass off her mattress and began pulling on his underwear.  “What about you?” he asked, as he pushed one leg after the other into his heavy woollen trews.
She pulled the coverlet down to her waist and stretched her arms and shoulders in a long luxurious yawn.  “I’m supposed to be asleep,” she smiled, secretly envying those women who were allowed to sleep through the night.  Then she moved to the window and gasped: “He’s on his way!  How will you get out!”
Her urgency transferred itself to him and he struggled to pull on his tunic and cloak without stopping to properly untangle them.  She pushed him through the doorway onto the well-worn spiral stairs and he almost tripped in his haste to vacate the property before her husband found him.
A heavily-cloaked soldier pushed past him on the top landing, his armaments rattling and jangling like horse-harnesses and he thanked the fates he’d woken in time to leave peaceably.  At the bottom he realised he was missing his moneybag and turned to retrace his steps.
There was a scream and he heard his woman of the night pleading with her husband to let her live.  By the time he was halfway to her room, she was blaming everything on him and he could hear the blows coming fast and hard.  Money was easier to come by than healing, he thought as he descended as quickly and silently as he could.  Another man might have felt some responsibility for dropping a love-potion into the woman’s drink but it was common knowledge that only harlots drank with strangers and she hadn’t protested when he’d pushed her down on her bed.  In fact, she’d giggled and informed him her husband had neglected to take the key to her chastity belt so he felt she deserved her beating and he hoped it wouldn’t be her last.
At the upstairs window, Henda and her companion watched the man scuttling hurriedly across the uneven cobbles towards the inn where they’d chosen him.  For a large bribe, the innkeeper had sold him a draft which would render any woman willing and, for the promise of her usual smaller bribe, he’d replaced it with Henda’s usual substitute; something with a flavour she could detect but without any power to intoxicate.
When they were certain he was safely inside, the innkeeper’s daughter threw off her heavy cloak and the rest of her disguise.  She helped the whore to count the gold and separated a modest cut for herself.  “My mother says you ought to join a theatrical company,” she informed Henda.  “She says she saw you dance, more than once, and there’s less chance of you catching the …”
“I know,” Henda interrupted, suddenly weary, “but it isn’t and never will be my fate.”  She gathered up her share of the coins and hid them behind the loose brick near her clothes chest.  “Wake me if he doesn’t ride off today.”  She climbed onto the mattress and shuddered as she pulled the filthy covers around her.  “Tell your father, I’ll rest tonight.  My mother’s bringing my baby tomorrow.”  She smiled as she drifted into sleep and the innkeeper’s daughter crept quietly down the stairs.