The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy (Montague Siblings, #2)

by Mackenzi Lee

“I’m not saying I’m a rare breed,” I reply. “I just mean . . . you don’t meet many girls like me.” “Maybe not,” Sim replies, fingering the marlinespike again. “Or maybe you just don’t look for them.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I hate that I am apologizing to him when it is he who kicked me, he who has made me feel that I’m in the wrong for daring to ask for something. Not even something—for anything. He has me apologizing for asking for the minimum that is granted to most men.

But I like dressing this way.” She spreads her arms. “I like curling my hair and twirling in skirts with ruffles, and I like how Max looks with that big pink bow on. And that doesn’t mean I’m not still smart and capable and strong.”

I want to know it all so badly it feels like a bird trapped inside my chest, throwing its body against my rib cage in search of the strong wind that will carry it out into the world. I would tear myself open if it meant setting it free.

I want to know everything about my own self and never to have to rely on someone else to tell me the way I work.

“You’re trying to play a game designed by men. You’ll never win, because the deck is stacked and marked, and also you’ve been blindfolded and set on fire. You can work hard and believe in yourself and be the smartest person in the room and you’ll still get beat by the boys who haven’t two cents to rub together.”

I don’t feel confident—I feel like an actress, a pretender, someone who wears a brave face because the moment a strong-willed woman shows weakness, men will push their fingers into it and pry her apart like a pomegranate.

because women don’t have to be men’s equals to be considered contenders; they have to be better.”

“That’s the lie of it all. You have to be better to prove yourself worthy of being equal.”

Everyone has heard stories of women like us—cautionary tales, morality plays, warnings of what will befall you if you are a girl too wild for the world, a girl who asks too many questions or wants too much. If you set off into the world alone. Everyone has heard stories of women like us, and now we will make more of them.

It is a horrible thing, to cause so much fear in something. If it were older and had a few more teeth, it would turn predatory. I know—I’ve felt that sort of fear too. I’ve felt cornered and turned on, and I’ve bitten back.

Maybe it’s that Percy isn’t just precious to me, but he’s half my brother’s heart. I’ve never seen fear like this in Monty. I’ve never seen fear like this in another human, as Monty presses his hands to Percy’s face and his forehead to his and begs him to open his eyes, to breathe, to survive.

“Mythology is all shite anyway,” she says. “It never has stories about people like us. I’d rather write my own legends. Or be the story someone else looks to someday. Build a strong foundation for those who follow us.”

In the company of women like this—sharp-edged as raw diamonds but with soft hands and hearts, not strong in spite of anything but powerful because of everything—I feel invincible. Every chink and rut and battering wind has made us tough and brave and impossible to strike down. We are mountains—or perhaps temples, with foundations that could outlast time itself.

I’m learning there is no one way for life to be lived, no one way to be strong or brave or kind or good. Rather there are many people doing the best they can with the heart they are given and the hand they are dealt. Our best is all we can do, and all we can hold on to is each other.