Valiant Ladies Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  Feiwel and Friends ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  To the girls with steel in their bones and fire in their blood

  Let him who calls me wild beast and basilisk, leave me alone as something noxious and evil; let him who calls me ungrateful, withhold his service; who calls me wayward, seek not my acquaintance; who calls me cruel, pursue me not; for this wild beast, this basilisk, this ungrateful, cruel, wayward being has no kind of desire to seek, serve, know, or follow them.

  —Marcella, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote

  CHAPTER 1

  Kiki

  It’s a shame what we’re about to do to this tavern. Admittedly, it’s already a bit of a shithole, but it’s our shithole. Mine and Ana’s. The proprietor, Santiago, always keeps barrels of his best booze aside for us and makes sure to save the very best gossip for our ears only. But alas, some confrontations simply cannot be avoided.

  The tip of the knife digs into my skin as the man holding the blade sneers at me. He’s standing and I’m sitting, which would theoretically put him at an advantage, but if I had to put money on someone, it wouldn’t be him. He’s an ugly bastard with the personality to match. A ragged scar runs from his hairline to his chin, and he’s missing several teeth. I’d wager most of them were victims of bar fights.

  Much like the one about to break out now.

  I tilt my head back to look the man in the eye.

  Never take your eyes off your opponent. That is the first rule of swordplay.

  We aren’t playing, and this isn’t a game, but the rules still apply.

  * * *

  I don’t need to look down at the cards in my hand. I memorized them as soon as they were dealt. It is an excellent hand. A shame, really, that I’ll have to hasten this fool’s shuffle off this mortal coil before I get to play it.

  I set my cards down on the table as the corners of my lips tick upward. It isn’t a pleasant smile. It isn’t meant to be. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  “Why not?” The man’s words are slightly slurred, but he isn’t swaying on his feet, and the hand holding the knife is steady. So he isn’t fully drunk, not yet. Just drunk enough to feel brave.

  And that will be his undoing.

  I may or may not be entirely sober myself, but that is beside the point. I know my limits. I don’t think this pendejo does.

  “Because these are my favorite boots.” I reach for my cup. It’s a solid wooden thing, mostly full of a passable vintage. “I would hate to get your blood on them.”

  From the corner of my eye, I spy movement in the tavern. The man’s friends, no doubt, slinking about to flank us.

  The urge to glance at them is so strong it’s almost like an itch. But I refuse to give in to it. I trust the woman sitting to my right to watch my back so I don’t have to.

  Ana throws her cards down with a disgusted snort. “I fold.”

  Without breaking eye contact with the knife-wielding simpleton before me, I ask, “So soon? But we’ve barely even begun.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, Kiki. I can think of better ways to pass the time.”

  Something warm and dangerous blossoms in my gut. I love it when Ana calls me Kiki. I love the way the hard consonants sound bouncing around on her tongue.

  Only a select few people in the entire Viceroyalty of Peru are allowed to call me Kiki. Ana is one. The other is my older brother, who began to do so when my full name, Eustaquia, proved too much of a mouthful for a three-year-old. My father thought it was cute, so he started using it as well. The usage of that name is a sacred privilege, bestowed only upon the worthy.

  Ana leans backs in her chair. I can’t see her hand moving, but I can feel the rustle of fabric beside me. The man’s eyes dart toward her.

  I don’t need to see her to know exactly what she looks like in that moment. Her hair a wild tangle of auburn waves. Her skin kissed by the sun and dotted with the most charming freckles I’ve ever come across. Her honey-brown eyes gleaming with the promise of a little good old-fashioned bloodshed.

  “Don’t move,” he barks at her.

  “Sorry.” Her voice is sweet but not the least bit sorry. “I don’t take orders from gutter scum who entertain themselves by robbing defenseless women. Though I suppose they put up the only fight you stand of winning.”

  Rage flits across his face. He pulls the knife away from my throat to brandish it at her.

  He realizes the error of his ways as soon as he does it, but that split second of distraction is all the time I need.

  I lob my cup at his head, angling it so the wine splashes him right in the eyes.

  And just like that, the fight is on.

  Ana kicks the table hard. The man is just the right height to take the sharp corner to the crotch. He collapses, howling in agony, as the knife drops from his suddenly nerveless fingers.

  His friends attempt to stumble into action, but it’s soon clear they are woefully unmatched. One catches my elbow to his nose. The cartilage gives a satisfying crack under the force of the blow. Another gets well acquainted with the heavy sole of my riding boot when I slam it into his groin. I grab the back of my chair and swing it into his face when he tries to get up. The wood smashes against his skull; my arms tremble with the impact.

  With them down, I have the slimmest moment to admire the girl beside me. Ana whirls as she slips two daggers from the sheaths strapped to her forearms. The sleeves of the masculine frock coat she’s wearing—a deep emerald that complements her coloring—are perfect for hiding them but wide enough to make it easy to pull them when needed.

  We both have swords, but knives are often far better suited to close-quarters combat like this. It’s a smart move on her part. Sometimes though … I prefer the flash of a sword to anything else, even if it’s not the most utilitarian choice. I draw the saber at my hip, baring my teeth in a snarling smile.

  One of the man’s friends skids to a halt, his eyes darting from the gleaming steel to me and back again.

  “Having second thoughts?” I ask. “Can’t say I blame you.”

  The taunt makes something snap inside him. You’d be surprised how many men can’t handle a pretty young woman making fun of them.

  With a pathetic excuse for a battle cry, he all but drives himself into the tip of my saber. I pull back so the blade doesn’t get lodged in his ribs. It takes only one time to learn how costly a mistake that can be.

  I have the scars across my own back to show for it.

  He melts to the ground as his legs go out from under him, the shock of the pain and blood loss rendering him completely useless.

  Behind me, a faint whoosh of air disturbs the hair at the back of my neck. I duck, just in time to see a clay wine jug smash against the wall behind me.

  “Oh, come now,” Ana calls over the fray. “That’s no way to treat perfectly good wine!”

  Her shouting distracts this new foe long enough for me to sweep his legs out from under him with a well-timed kick. My foot snaps out as he tumbl
es to the ground to smash his kneecap as hard as I can.

  That should keep him down for a good long while.

  I glance up just in time to see Ana clock one of the last men standing with her elbow. He falls back onto the hearth, nearly setting himself on fire.

  How any of these witless men survived into adulthood in a city as notoriously unkind as Potosí, I haven’t the foggiest.

  In the time it’s taken for Ana and me to dispatch his friends, the first man, the one with the sneer and the missing teeth, has pulled himself up with the help of a nearby table.

  He looks worse for wear, though I hardly touched him.

  “Back for more?” I twirl my sword, flicking the blood off the tip onto the ground.

  The man spits roughly in the direction of my feet. His spittle lands a safe distance away, as he seems too afraid to get any closer. “You’ll regret this.”

  I smile sweetly at him. “Doubtful.”

  He mutters a curse I don’t quite catch, but then he stumbles out of the tavern, dragging one leg behind him in a noticeable limp.

  A resigned sigh escapes me as I survey the damage. The patrons with sense fled at the first sign of trouble—one doesn’t survive in Potosí for long without learning to sniff it out—but there are a few stragglers left huddling against the walls. One absolute legend of a drunk hasn’t budged from his perch at the bar. He’s still nursing the same cup of fermented chicha he was when the fight began.

  “You all right, Kiki?” Ana asks. She’s kneeling, going through the pockets of one of the men she took down. There’s blood masking most of his face, and I would bet my father’s entire villa that he won’t ever be getting up again. When she finds what she’s looking for, she stands with a triumphant shout. “Got it.”

  In her hands is a purse of crimson velvet, tied together with a garish golden rope. Not the sort of thing these men would call their own. And it isn’t. They stole it. And we’ve now retrieved it. We meant to track them down later tonight, but luck brought them to us first.

  Santiago might not feel so lucky when he sees the state of his fine establishment now. Blood drips from the tip of my sword onto the packed dirt of the tavern floor. The toes of my boots are already dark with it. Disaster surrounds us in the form of overturned tables, two smashed barrels of chicha, and a perfectly good roast pig dumped on the ground, its sightless eyes seeming to stare at me in accusation.

  I distract myself from the sight of how fetching Ana looks with droplets of blood smeared across her freckles by focusing on the dead man at my feet. The one who all but gutted himself on my blade.

  Fool.

  He is not my first kill. And he will not be my last. No one survives long in this town without cracking a few eggs.

  “Ana,” I say, “must you always make such a mess wherever you go?”

  Ana shoots me a mischievous grin. With sweat beading on her brow and plastering her shirt to her skin, she has never looked more beautiful to me. Her hair began the day bound back in a green ribbon of the finest silk. Now it flows around her shoulders, as free and wild as she is. My hands twitch with the urge to run my fingers through those auburn tresses, to feel that silken softness against my skin. The kicker is that I don’t have to imagine the sensation. I know what it feels like. I’ve brushed and braided it more times than I can count. I know exactly what it looks like spread against crisp white sheets. I know these things, but I wish to know them even better and in very different ways. I clutch the hilt of my sword a little tighter, grateful to have something solid to hold.

  “Oh, come now, Kiki.” Ana winks at me. My heart sputters in my chest, like a bird fighting against a too small cage. “Don’t tell me you didn’t enjoy yourself.”

  At my feet, the man I mistook for dead groans. Ana arches a thick eyebrow at me. I roll my eyes and flick the blood from my sword again. It’s a pointless gesture. It will need a thorough cleaning once we get home. “I would but…” I shoot her a grin. “We both know it would be a lie.”

  I draw in a breath—through my mouth, not my nose, as the man’s stench is quite atrocious and will only worsen with death—and drive the finely sharpened steel through his heart. I make it look easy, but it’s not. There’s a certain trick to sliding a thin blade into the space between a man’s ribs. It took me quite a few tries to get it right, but now that I have it down to an art, it’s a mercy really. A direct blow to the heart kills a man quicker than anything else. It would have taken him an hour to bleed out from his stomach wound.

  I may be ruthless, but I am not cruel. I think it’s one of the things Ana likes about me. I do bad things when I must, but I try to do good when I can.

  Today, we have done a public service in more ways than one.

  These men were the worst of the worst. I’d call them bandits, but that would be an insult to proper bandits everywhere. No, these men preyed on the most vulnerable denizens of this sprawling city. Young women. Children. The elderly. They’d tried to pick a fight with us after clocking the quality of our weapons. It was the last thing they’d ever do, and the world was slightly better off for it.

  “You’re making that face,” Ana says, wiping the blood off her own blades before sliding them back into their hidden scabbards.

  “What face? I’m not making a face.”

  “You are.” She furrows her brow and tilts the corners of her lips down just a hair. “This face. Your thinking face.”

  I roll my eyes. “I do not have a thinking face.”

  “You so do. You have a face for everything. It’s why you’re so bad at cards.”

  “I am not bad at cards. I was about to beat you just now.”

  Ana makes an indelicate sound. “That’s only because I let you win.”

  I open my mouth to challenge her to a rematch, but a gruff voice cuts me off before I can make another peep.

  “I hope you know you’ll be paying for this mess.”

  I turn to find Santiago standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips. A crate of bottles—several now smashed—lies at his feet, right beside the prone form of a man I distinctly remember assaulting with a chair. Looks like Santiago barely missed getting hit by the man as he fell. His bottles of what might be wine, judging from the deep burgundy color spilled across the floor, weren’t so lucky.

  I wish I could say it was the first time we’d trashed Santiago’s place, but that too would be a lie.

  I point to the dead man at my feet. “He started it.”

  It’s almost not a lie. And therefore not really a sin, in the grand scheme of things.

  Ana tosses her arm around my shoulders. My heart does a fractured waltz in my chest. “Yeah,” she says. “We just finished it.”

  “And you couldn’t have finished it outside?” Santiago sighs before bending down to retrieve the salvageable bottles of wine.

  “Relax,” I say, extricating myself from Ana’s hold. I want to stay close to her, but I want it so badly it frightens me. I need distance. “We’ll cover the damages.”

  I fish a generous handful of coins from the pouch tucked into the waistband of my breeches. I lay them down on the nearest table, one by one so Santiago can see that I’m good for it.

  His eyes widen at the pieces of eight I place on the table. It’s worth far more than the cost of a few broken tables and some spilled booze. It’s good to keep one’s friends happy. Especially friends like Santiago, who’ve proven more than once to be an excellent source of both information and ale.

  “A little extra for labor,” I say with a smile. It’s the smile that’s smoothed over more than one sticky situation at the society parties my father insists on hosting. It works only half as well on a man like Santiago, but it works all the same.

  The fight goes out of him as he huffs a defeated sigh. “I take it you’re not sticking around to help clean up.”

  “Not really our style,” Ana chimes in as she all but skips toward the door.

  “We do have a reputation to maintain,” I add, sheath
ing my own blade.

  Santiago mutters something about street rats and hooligans, but once I cross the threshold, the sounds of the busy thoroughfare drown out his complaint.

  It’s late, but Potosí is as alive as ever. Torchlight floods the road like spilled honey, leaving only the alleys in darkness. I can hear bodies shifting in some of them with the telltale sound of fabric sliding out of the way. It’s honest work, I suppose, but those women won’t earn nearly as much as the ones in the brothels down the road.

  People spill out of taverns. Some to fight, some to drink, some because they’ve run out of coin to pay for their habits. There’s a place nearby that hosts the most vicious card game this side of the Atlantic, but I’m not sure I have enough left on me for the buy-in.

  “Where to next?” Ana asks, slipping her hat on her head. She’s tucked her hair up under it, but there’s nothing she could do to make herself look like anything less than the beautiful young woman she is. She throws her arms out to her sides and spins as she walks. “The city is our oyster. Where shall we hunt for our pearl?”

  “Aren’t you tired?” I ask.

  “Tired?” Ana’s smile is more like a baring of fangs than anything else. “You know I’m never tired after a fight. I could take on another ten men, easy. Twenty maybe.”

  “I envy you your vitality,” I say. It’s a lie. A small one, but still. I’m not tired. Not in the least.

  Nothing makes me feel more alive than a good fight. Blood pumps through my veins, so hot and hard I can almost taste it. It all but roars in my ears. But I know that if we don’t return to the villa soon, we’ll regret it later. Twice already this month, a servant has caught us sneaking back in well after we’ve allegedly retired to our beds. I am under no delusions that my bribes can continue to buy their silence. The servants are loyal to one person at the Sonza estate, and it’s not me. My father is a good master, generous and kind. They’ll hold off on ratting us out but only for so long.