Valiant Ladies, page 11
What lies on that table is just a body. Nothing more.
My hand trembles the tiniest bit as I pick up the heavy brass candleholder. The light flickers, casting dancing shadows against the bare brick walls.
I force one foot in front of the other until I draw up beside the table. A white blanket covers his nude form, as if the dead have any dignity to be spared. His eyes are glossy and open. Unseeing. My hand twitches toward his face to close them, but I know better. They won’t stay closed without the muscle cooperating. That’s not how dead bodies work, no matter how many plays and novels try to convince us otherwise.
My hands curl into fists at my sides. The desire to touch him wars with the part of me that knows I’ll regret it if I do. He won’t be warm. He’ll be cold and weirdly soft. He won’t be what I remember him to be at all.
It takes every inch of my will to guide my eyes away from his.
I came here to find something. Anything. A single clue that would tell me where to start looking for the truth of what happened to him.
Alejandro did not kill himself. This, I know. He was murdered. It’s the only thing that makes sense, if a senseless, cruel, violent death can be forced to make any sense at all.
But my brain refuses to be clever when confronted with the awful truth of his dead body lying on a wooden slab like so much meat.
“Come on,” I say out loud to no one but myself. “There has to be something.”
The last thing I want is to reach out and pull the blanket back. It’s not that his nude form is a mystery to me. I’d seen him naked before, in the lake by the Sonza estate, with its crisp, cool waters. He wasn’t ashamed, and I grew up in a brothel. Neither one of us were overly bothered by it. But that was when he was alive. Now, he’s not. But I do what I must.
Breathing a prayer I don’t quite feel in my heart, I reach for the sheet. Bile rises in my throat as my fingertips brush against his cool skin.
It’s not him. It’s not Alejandro. It’s just a body.
The thought isn’t as comforting as I want it to be.
I squeeze my eyes shut as his—as the corpse is revealed. But I have to open them eventually. Otherwise, this whole trip was a monumental waste of both time and money.
He looks smaller, lying there. Lifeless. Still.
There is no tension, no strength, in those corded muscles lying beneath his mottled skin. There is no pumping blood to warm the pale skin of his cheeks. No air in his lungs to make his chest rise and fall. There is nothing. Just … nothing.
I drag my eyes across his body, looking for something. I don’t know what. I’ll know it when I see it, I suppose.
My gaze stutters and stops when it hits his neck. Bile rises, sharp and acidic, in my throat. I want to look away but I can’t.
His skin is still indented slightly where the rope dug in. The flesh is mottled purple and black. It’s a bruise that will never heal.
Warmth floods my body, but it isn’t the pleasant kind. It’s hot and vicious and angry. It is rage, pure and undiluted.
“Who did this to you?” I ask softly, knowing I will never receive an answer.
I force my eyes to wander further south, down the curve of his shoulder and his arm. My brow furrows as my gaze reaches his wrist.
There is a mark carved on the back of his hand. That was what I saw the night in the garden. At the viceroy’s ball. There had been too much happening around me to notice the finer details but I see them now. The blood’s been cleared away and the mark stands out bright and lurid against the pale skin of his hand.
It looks a bit like a P, but the loop is too large, and something resembling a tail wraps around the stem of the symbol like a snake coiled around the trunk of a tree. A circle surrounds the—I don’t know, sigil, perhaps—containing it. Marking it as deliberate.
This is no accidental scar.
My eyes follow its swooping lines, committing its shape to memory. There might be something in Kiki’s library that can give it meaning. It’s one of the more extensive collections in all of Potosí. Perhaps even in all of New Spain. It’s somewhere to start at the very least.
I’m about to pull the sheet back up when an overwhelming urge stills my hand.
Don’t touch him.
But I cannot help myself.
My hand approaches his, as if guided by some unseen force that isn’t me. When my fingers brush the sallow skin of his knuckles, it isn’t revulsion I feel.
It is sadness.
“I’m sorry.” There is no one to hear the words but me, but it feels important to say them. “I’m sorry this was done to you.”
I watch his face, as if a part of me is expecting his lips to tick up into that wry grin of his and tell me that it’s okay. That everything will be fine. But that face will never smile again.
“I don’t know what happened, or who did this…”
I hold his hand even though he cannot hold mine back.
“But I swear to you, on all that is holy, on all that I love…”
I tangle my fingers with his one last time.
“I will find out who did it. And I will make them pay.”
CHAPTER 13
Kiki
Something lands on my bed with a heavy thump.
“Get up.”
Ana’s voice is hard. Harder than it’s been in quite some time. For days, she’s been soft, soothing whispers in the dark, a gentle hand brushing the hair off my brow, a calming presence by my side.
But not now.
“Get. Up,” she says again, enunciating each word with enough force to punch a hole through the wall, as if there was even the slightest possibility I—in the absolute silence of my bedroom—hadn’t heard her the first time.
“No.”
I burrow deeper into my pile of blankets. The goose feathers in my pillow tickle my nose. It will need fresh stuffing soon.
“That wasn’t a request.” More hard consonants. More clipped vowels.
Before I can muster a suitable retort, my armor is stripped away. Ana yanks the blankets off me all at once, exposing my legs to the frigid morning air.
“What are you—?” I scramble up to sit, pulling my nightgown over my bare knees. It’s not modesty that compels me to cover up. Ana has seen everything and then some. But I feel naked without the weight of those blankets on me. Naked and vulnerable.
“Come on.” Ana is already dressed, a rarity for her so early in the morning.
The breeches she’s wearing are tight enough to drive a nun to sin. They’re a nice contrast to the flounce in her loose white shirtsleeves. Her copper hair tumbles over one shoulder in a sloppy braid. She did it herself, then. She can never get the plaits quite right. It’s not incompetence on her part. It’s impatience.
Frowning, I glance down to see what the thing was that she tossed on my bed.
A sword, nestled comfortably in its scabbard. My sword, to be exact. My sword, that I haven’t touched in ages. My sword, that I have absolutely no interest in picking up. What good will a sword do me now, when I already know I cannot use it to protect the people I love?
“No,” I say, flopping back down onto my bed, blankets be damned.
A hand—small and strong—closes around my ankle.
“I said, that wasn’t a request.”
And then, with all her might, she pulls.
Goose down muffles the sound of my shriek as Ana manhandles me out of bed and into a set of clean clothes.
If I had the heart for vengeance, I would make it long and painful. But I have the heart for very little. And that, I know, is why Ana is so keen to make me suffer.
“Hit me.”
“I don’t want to.”
The tip of my sword hangs listlessly inches above the ground. I am not so careless as to let it drag, damaging the good and very expensive steel, but it’s heavy. Heavier now than it’s ever been.
Ana puffs out a frustrated breath, her bottom lip directing the exhalation upward to blow an errant lock of hair off her face.
The solarium is hot. Unseasonably so. Normally, this high up on the hills, we are blessed with crisp winds and cool air. But today, even the sky seems listless. Heat clings to the painted stone walls, trapping it in here with us. Beads of sweat form at my temples, at the nape of my neck, trapping my unkempt hair against my skin.
Ana knocks her sword into mine. Gently, but the impact still reverberates up the blade. “Attack me.”
I begin to step away. “Ana—”
“You need to hit something!”
I freeze, my weight half transferred to the ball of my left foot as I cease stepping away. “Is that how you solve all your problems? By hitting things?”
“Not all my problems.” Ana shrugs. “Just most of them.”
It’s almost enough to make me smile. Almost.
Instead of smiling, I sigh.
“If I refuse, will you continue pestering me like this?”
With a grin sharp enough to slice through stone, Ana says, “Yes.”
I stare at her, longing to feel the spark of recognition that razor-sharp grin should incite within me. But all I feel is a stodgy dullness. It’s like the sensation you get in your mouth after a long, hard night of drinking catches up to you in the morning. Except it’s not just in my mouth. It’s everywhere. In the center of my chest, in my heavy legs, in my leaden arms.
“Why?” I ask her.
Why are you doing this?
Why are you making me do this?
Why does any of it matter anymore?
The grin fades. Ana’s eyebrows shift, ever so slightly, toward each other. Not quite a furrow, but something close to it.
“Because I need you to be yourself again.”
I stare at her for a beat. I don’t know what to say, so I go with honesty. “I don’t know if that girl exists anymore.”
The words sound hollow to my own ears. Again, those copper brows twitch.
“She does. And I need her to wake up.”
That is the last thing Ana says before she charges me.
Ana
Alejandro was the first to let us handle these particular swords. That’s the reason I’ve chosen them for this little exercise. We were too young, too small, too weak to be able to properly use any of these blades then. But we grew. And now, we can wield them as good as any man. Better, even.
Kiki is not quite herself yet. Her arms are sluggish, but that’s to be expected. Spending several days straight in bed without eating a single bite of food isn’t the best way to build muscle and maintain agility. Her footwork is a goddamn mess. I’d point it out to her, but I can tell from every grimace, every bitten-back curse, every trembling exhalation that she knows.
Eustaquia de Sonza has lost her edge.
And I, Ana Lezama de Urinza, am here to help her get it back.
She is going to need it.
We are going to need it.
If we are ever going to find justice for our fallen brother, then she will need all her strength and then some. She will need to remember who she is. What she is capable of.
I lunge. She parries. I thrust. She dances out of the way. Or at least, she tries to.
The seconds tick by into minutes. Minutes into hours. Her strength should be depleting, but I can see it returning, inch by fragile inch. Her shirt clings to her chest with sweat. Her muscles quiver with exertion. I can see the moment she stops thinking about the past few weeks—about the ball and Alejandro and the great and terrible hole left at the heart of this family—and starts thinking only about the fight. About the movement of her body through space. About the sword in her hand and the sword in mine.
Slowly, her feet remember how to move. How to sidestep an oncoming blow. How to trick my eye into thinking she’s going one way when she’s actually going the other.
She is not herself. Not yet. She’s getting there though. She’s trying. And that counts for everything.
But all it takes to bring down an opponent is one small misstep.
It happens too fast for a sluggish Kiki to counter. My blade connects with hers at just the right angle. The hilt slips from her hand. My heel hooks around her ankle and I pull.
“Ana—!”
Kiki tumbles to the ground, her rear end smashing into hard stone. I almost feel bad about it. Almost.
But life is going to hit us a lot harder than that if we follow the path I know we must.
She strikes out with her legs, but she’s still slow. I dodge her feet with ease, extending the hand holding the sword until the tip is inches from her bare, vulnerable throat.
“Yield,” I say.
It’s the word that does it. Not the loss of her weapon or the tumble to the ground.
A spark flashes through those dark eyes.
And there she is.
With trembling arms, she pushes herself to stand, keeping wisely just out of reach of my blade. I watch her stand, our eyes connected.
She needs this. Needs to stand on her own two feet, under her own power. She needs to know that she can.
“Yield,” I say again, stepping forward. The blade of my sword presses against her throat. Not hard enough to draw blood. (I would never hurt her, not like this, not ever.)
She stares me down, that spark building and building until I see that flame ignite.
“Never.”
Kiki
If it were possible for me to hate Ana, even a little bit, I would hate her. But it is not. And so, I don’t. Not even a little bit.
It hurts to breathe. It hurts to stand. It hurts to exist. But it’s a good kind of hurt. Not the bad kind. Not the kind that has laid over me like a shroud for days. Since the ball. Since Alejandro. Since my world fractured into a million tiny pieces that I fear I will never be able to pick up and reconfigure into something approaching normalcy.
Sweat drips down my brow. I wipe at it with my shirtsleeve, feeling the fabric pull away from my sticky skin with the motion. I don’t know how long we sparred. All I know is that I needed it. I needed to move. To fight. To feel, even if only for a fleeting moment, like myself once more.
I watch as Ana hangs up both our swords—my arms are too shattered to even try to pick up mine—and fills a cup of water from the jug on the table by the rack. Only then do I realize that my throat is absolutely parched.
“Thank you,” I say as she hands me the cup. I down it in a rapid succession of unladylike gulps.
I am not talking about the water. Judging by the knowing look that flits across her face, she is well aware.
“Don’t thank me yet.” Her expression is carefully guarded. It is so unlike her, it nearly makes me forget that I am so thirsty that I have half a mind to pour the entire jug of water down my gullet in one go.
“What is it?” My hands tighten around the cup. I do not know if I can handle one more morsel of bad news. My cup is already overfull.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” Ana begins. Again, so unlike her to hedge her words. Normally, she wears her feelings on her sleeve, for anyone to see. She is not careful or circumspect. It is not in her nature.
“Whatever it is, just spit it out, Ana.”
“Alejandro didn’t kill himself.”
The mention of his name, breathed aloud into the air, feels like another blow, this one right below the sternum. I have not spoken his name out loud myself. I could not bear to do so. Not when I knew it would go unanswered forever more.
I stumble over the name to the meat of what Ana has just said. The words are out of my mouth before my conscious mind truly has time to process both her statement and my response. “I know.”
Her brow furrows. “I—Wait. How?”
How? It’s a ridiculous question. Absurd. Truly. I know it the same way I know that water is wet and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. I just know.
“He wouldn’t.”
Ana nods, slowly, as if to herself. “I saw him.”
If the mere mentioning of his name was like a blow, this particular collection of words is like being run through with a blade, like being gutted, left to hold my own, still warm innards in my trembling hands.
I see him then too. I blink and I am there. In the viceroy’s garden with the smell of flowers in the air and the muffled sounds of lovers rustling together, hidden behind a wall of hedges. Boots swinging in the wind. Hands, limp, pale, bloodied.
“Kiki.”
Something warm lands on my shoulder. I blink. It is Ana’s hand. Again, her brow is pinched, but more severely this time.
“Stay with me.”
I breathe in through my nose. A mistake. I can smell it still. Flowers and blood.
“There was something on his hand.”
Limp, pale, bloodied.
“Someone carved a sign. Or a crest. Something. I don’t know.”
My racing thoughts come to an abrupt stop. His hands. They’d been bloodied. But why?
I stand there, silent and dumb, as Ana takes a piece of parchment out of her pocket. It’s folded, and the ink is smudged, but the image is clear enough. A circular sigil, inscribed around the edges with letters and symbols. What they mean, I do not know.
My hand extends toward Ana, toward the paper. She places it on my palm. I stare at it, and the memories of that night slough off like half-dried mud.
“What is this?”
“I don’t know.” She gives a helpless shake of her head. “I checked every book I could think of in your library—”
“You did research?”
“Try not to sound too shocked. But yes, I tried to look it up, but I couldn’t find a damn thing. All I know is that a man who is about to hang himself—”
“He wouldn’t.”
“I know.” She breathes in deeply. Rubs the bridge of her freckled nose. “I know. But what I’m saying is, someone else carved that onto his skin. It was on his left hand.”
Our eyes meet, and I frown. It takes a moment for the significance of that statement to sink in.
“Ale is left-handed.”
We both hear it the moment I say it. Is.
