In sixteenth-century Mexico, a fearless young woman strives to uncover the secrets her mother kept as the last Aztec empress in a sweeping historical epic by the author of Daughter of Fire.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Other Moctezuma Girls by Sofia Robleda, which releases on February 24th 2026.
Tenochtitlan, 1551. Thirty years after the Spanish Conquest destroyed everything she loved, the last Aztec empress has passed and left behind a pristine yet tenuous legacy for her children. As her last will and testament is read out, her daughter Isabel suspects that another account of her mother’s life may exist, hidden away, chapter by chapter, in the Valley of Mexico. Following each clue, Isabel is determined to find out who her mother really was and to discover the secrets she buried in order to survive.
Joined by her siblings and a handsome young cook named Juan, Isabel embarks on a perilous journey to piece together the past—a journey that will force the party to brave the brutal viceroyal court, face fearsome legends in mystical chinampas, and trek through desert, fire, and snow. As Isabel’s feelings for Juan grow, she confronts everything she thought she knew about her Spanish father, her empress mother, and herself. Facing everything from the tunnels of ancient pyramids to the summit of an active volcano, Isabel will meet every challenge to fulfill an epic quest for the truth.
Excerpt from THE OTHER MOCTEZUMA GIRLS by Sofia Robleda, Text Copyright © 2025 by Sofia Robleda Published by Amazon Crossing
Chapter 5
Tecuichpoch
1509–1519
When you are born, as I have been born, the favored daughter of the huey tlatoani—una princesa, as they say in Castellano—you have but two fates: to die, or to be married. And what is the latter but a long, drawn-out version of the first? I would know, for I had already been married three times by the age of twelve.
Oh, how it will stun you to hear me speak so. To hear me speak at all, in this last great act of defiance. I say last, for there have been many, although I could never stake my claim to them. I did not wish to add suffering to my life.
But this is Tecuichpoch indeed, daughter of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin and his principal wife, Chimalexochitl, “Shield-Bearer Flower.” The Spanish called her Teotlalco, but that was the place she was from. Writing that sets me more at ease, for how can I leave a world that does not know my mother’s true name?
Oh, but I know . . . men would leave us nameless, if they could.
Who shall suffer the consequences of my indiscretion? When no one believes you can read, write, or strategize, these musings may well be explained as the ramblings of a frail old woman, a ruse, or a lie. It will be up to you to decide, but one thing is certain: I will not die silent. Now that I must die, I will speak my truth.
I must speak my truth, for I cannot be free while this great turmoil lives inside me. I must expel it, lest I be damned to wander throughout the earth as a restless wind spirit. I do not wish to wander the world any longer. I wish to be at ease. Oh, how I have earned it.
Indeed, death has threatened me many times, though my survival was foretold. It was written in star and blood, that I would not perish. The soothsayers said, upon my birth, that I would live until I had borne all my seven children and seen my first son’s wife carrying my line forth, a line that would never end. Then, and only then, would death come for my soul, my yolia, and take me to Mictlan, where Xolotl the salamander dog would carry me swiftly on his back to paradise in the ninth level.
I know I shall be spared the trials of the underworld, for there are no jagged winds and crashing mountains, no rivers of blood that I have not already swum through in life tenfold and over. And if it is indeed true that there is no underworld, but only a golden heavenly sky with a great bearded god who is my one true father . . .
Well, I already know what it is to be the favorite child of a man who is revered as a thing divine, who holds the power of life and death at his hands. The love of gods and kings is a double-pointed lance, black and sharp, glimmering and deadly.
Indeed, I was his silken feather, his spring hummingbird, his heart of jade. Yet it did not stop my father from giving me as a prize to his enemy. It was he who taught me not to trust in the pretty words of men. But I will say this of my father: He was no coward.
Oh, he was beautiful, and powerful. Even the priests of the Flayed Lord, Xipe Totec, feared him. Yes, even the ones who dressed themselves with the skins of captured slaves. Not even us, his own children, were allowed to look at the huey tlatoani’s face.
But I always did, and he never once scolded me as he did my brother and sisters. His eyes, large and black and piercing, would twinkle in amusement at my daring. For a blink, he’d break his grave, majestic veneer, and twitch the emerald piercings above his nostrils up and down, to watch me struggle not to laugh. I never did, for he was much too imposing and I was not fool enough to push my luck.
But it is that image of him that I wish to take with me, that I wish you to have. My father, standing in all his glory in front of the carved stone throne covered for his comfort in jaguar and deer pelts, his copper brow adorned with a panache of a thousand quetzal feathers, his earlobes weighed down with jade and emeralds, his neck shining with light reflected from the plaque of gold and macaw feathers resting on his chest. His luxurious mantle, dyed a brilliant shade of turquoise, embroidered with perfect geometric patterns.
My father, doting on his prized daughter. The mighty warrior, an emperor who wished to spare his people a war he knew he could not win. Not from prophecy or misplaced belief, and never from lack of nerve, but because he was a perfect scholar. He was used to studying his enemy like a jaguar tracking his prey through the underbrush, and he’d scarcely ever failed. Only the Tlaxcalteca had ever outwitted him before.
Yet he was a veteran, a conqueror himself, precise and ruthless. Before they even set foot in our city, my father knew everything about the weaponry the Spanish men carried, unlike anything we’d ever seen. He knew they were only men—not teteoh, not gods. He knew that even if we won the battle against this company, more were coming from across the seas. He saw the truth as clearly as the sun shining on a cloudless day.
The Spaniards were greed incarnate, insatiable, a swarm of chapulin grasshoppers that would wreak destruction on his empire. And still, he tried bribing, diplomacy, subterfuge, everything except warfare. When they eventually marched into our city, he welcomed them as honored guests, as though he had expected them all along, and gave his entire nation a sublime performance. Their huey tlatoani, entirely in charge of an unfathomable situation. In the end, he fulfilled his ultimate duty as a ruler. He gave up everything he loved to protect his people. Even though he failed, I believe—I must believe—that when he gave me to the Spanish, he thought there was some hope.
But this is not his story, it is mine. Though I must admit, it is truly difficult for me to disentangle myself from the people who claimed to love me, whose schemes and battles, victories and defeats engulfed my life in such a way that I look back sometimes and blink in astonishment that I am here when they are not.
Moctezuma, Cuauhtemoc, Cortés, Malintzin . . . they reshaped the order of the entire world. They may be dead, but by God, they are known.
Yet no one but you will know me. I may be mentioned in passing as the child, the wife, the mistress. People shall assume all things about my courtly life and training, which was rigorous and relentless. They’ll guess how my mother schooled me on palace manners and the endless rules of protocol, religion, ceremony, self-sacrifice, cleanliness, order, and virtue. They might imagine the way she taught me how to moderate my voice and keep my face serene. How to show no fear, no hesitation.
They’ll believe, because I have said naught until now, that I learned my place, to bite my tongue and obey my mother and father and my six husbands.
They will swear I was the perfect woman.
Indeed, these were my lessons, and I was expected, as the daughter of the huey tlatoani’s principal wife, to excel at them. It was demanded of me, and I met those demands without complaint, for I wished more than anything to make my father proud.
Yet no one but you will know about my stone tank full of axolotl, the two dogs, and the seven monkeys that I kept in Father’s zoo, near the family of tapirs.
No one but you will know that, whenever I could, usually at dawn after the priests sounded the enormous drum to wake the city and greet our lord Quetzalcoatl, I’d give our guards the slip, and take my beloved brother Axayacatzin with me to the palace gardens to swim in the freshwater pools and catch lizards. We’d sneak them into the other wives’ chambers and wait outside their windows to hear their shrieks. Oh, how we used to laugh! Indeed, that was me!
No one but you will know how my mother became so frustrated at my tricks that she pricked my arm with a sharp maguey thorn and threatened to take me to the Great Temple to bathe me with the clotting blood of the newly sacrificed. She knew I hated the sight and the clouds of flies. When this warning didn’t work, she swore she’d tell my father.
I never got caught again.
Listen to me, rambling on. Trying to carve out a pinprick of light in the darkness these people have cast over my life. It is very difficult, for I was also taught, as all Nahua are, not to exalt myself, not to seek attention, lest I be judged or mocked, or worse, publicly shamed. As my mother would say, Tlacoqualli in monequi—moderation is a must.
Her counsel served me well. Modesty and moderation and silence helped me survive, but I no longer need to. I no longer can. I feel instead, in my dying bones, in this well of pressure in my throat, that I must speak. I must share everything I have held back all these years.
And perhaps speaking about motherly threats and monkeys and lizards doesn’t matter. But Axayacatzin loved them, delighted in them, and I delighted in him.
He is worth remembering. His cheeks stuffed to bursting with tamalli. His long brown hair fluttering above him as he leapt off a boulder into the clear pools blanketed in a rainbow of fragrant flowers. His eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he pulled the string of his bow. The look of wonder on his face when he struck his first kill, a turkey.
He loved birds and rocks, which he used to collect in a little wooden box. Obsidian, crystals, amber, volcanic rocks—he would find them and pick them up and say, “Look, sister, is this not a wonder? I shall save it in my box.”
He was the only one of my family who shed tears when I was taken away. I wish my mother had cried too, for then I might not have felt ashamed of my own soaking cheeks. Although I found out much later that she begged my father to spare me, and never spoke a word to him after that day. When my captivity began.
Though that is a tale for another day.
My hope is that you will find it.
