??igo de Balboa, Captain Alatriste's fourteen-year-old page, accompanies the captain to the Dutch city of Breda, to wage war and participate in the Spanish siege against the city, in the name of King Phillip IV and Catholicism.
Captain Diego Alatriste along with his two comrades Sebastian Copons and Moor Gurriato are ordered to intervene against a crucial Spanish crown conspiracy, an assassination during Christmas Mass in Venice.
Captain Alatriste embarks upon a dangerous mission in Seville where he is charged along with his men for a plot involving contrab and gold from the Spanish galleons returning from the Indies.
Captain Alatriste agrees to help a desperate father rescue his daughter from a convent where she is being used as a personal concubine by a powerful priest, but his efforts soon place him in the middle of a religious and political conspiracy that leads to the highest levels of the Inquisition.
Seventeenth-century swordsman Captain Alatriste, continues his adventures at the court of Spain's King Felipe IV in Madrid, where he becomes involved with a beautiful actress, and foils an assassination plot against the monarch.