Chronicles of Zorro

Spain, 1782. Alejandro is sixteen, starving, and invisible - just another peasant boy in a forgotten Castilian village, watching his family's harvest vanish into the King's coffers. Then the royal drums arrive, and with them, a way out: the army, and a merciless recruiting officer named Don Luiz who sees something in him no one else ever bothered to look for.

What follows is the making of a legend no one has told before - the father of the man who would become Zorro.

At the Royal Military Academy of Barcelona, Alejandro claws his way from mocked peasant to the Crown's most brilliant military engineer, mastering mathematics, fortification, and the blade under the maxim Nunc Minerva, postea Pallas - science before war. He humiliates a Bourbon nobleman in a duel and somehow makes an ally of him. He falls for Elena de Madariaga, a woman as sharp as she is unattainable. And he makes an enemy of Count Diego de Mendoza - a man who will spend a decade trying to bury Alejandro under ice, sand, and betrayal rather than let him win.

When Spain, Britain, and the Catholic Church strike an uneasy alliance to stop Napoleon Bonaparte from unearthing a biblical relic buried beneath the sands of Alexandria, Alejandro is sent to Egypt with an unlikely crew - a pickpocket, a Bedouin guide, a Jesuit inquisitor, and a British sharpshooter - to steal the secret out from under the general who would conquer the world. What they find beneath the Temple of Taposiris Magna is older and darker than any of them are prepared for.

Forged in the mud of Castile and tempered in the fires of empire, Alejandro de La Vega will return home carrying more secrets than any one man should have to bear - and a debt to pay that will one day fall to his son.