La Reina Descalza Gratis.epub Link

"Is this your queen?" he called to his men. "A beggar woman with a tin crown?"

"Your Majesty," they said, "they have cannons. They have horses. We have nothing."

Isabella walked to the city gates. The enemy commander, a scarred duke named Alaric, laughed when he saw her bare feet in the mud. La Reina Descalza Gratis.epub

The enemy horses reared and scattered. Alaric's cannon sank into the mud. And the people of Valdecuna, who had no army and no weapons, simply stood in the rising water and watched the invaders retreat.

La Reina Descalza (The Barefoot Queen)

Isabella did not answer. She knelt and placed her palms flat on the earth. The ground began to tremble. The olive trees shook. From the roots of the oldest tree—the one her great-grandmother had planted—a spring of clear water burst forth. Then another. And another. The river that had dried up seven years ago, on the day her family died, returned in a roaring flood.

Historical fiction / Magical realism

She had inherited the throne at seventeen, after a plague swept through the palace, leaving her parents and three brothers in unmarked graves. On the day of her coronation, the archbishop placed the ruby-encrusted slippers before her. She looked at them, then at the cracked earth beneath the castle balcony, where children played barefoot among the olive trees.