Chronicles of the Dragon Pirate Read Online Free PDF Page A

Come into the protection of these walls and be welcome.” Alfonzo gave Master Gomez a dark look but subsided as the soldier motioned at one of the other soldiers behind him. “Take the good captain’s horse and stable him with Master Gomez’s.”
    The soldier came out of the gateway and took the reins from Alfonzo, leading the animal toward the small stable, a stone’s throw from the church. As we walked toward the gateway, I got my first good look at the men I knew must all be Draco Dominus. To my surprise they stood in two very different groups. The ones on the right looked like normal Spanish soldiers, except they all had black, shiny, Artifact breastplates and leg armor, each of them wearing tunics underneath with long, puffy sleeves. Each breastplate had a snarling wolf carved upon it, most of the designs enameled with a red coating of some kind, although two of them were enameled in silver.
    The soldier with the easy voice had a wolf enameled in gold. He was tall, with a short, pointed beard, and as we approached he gave us a courtly bow. “Knight-General Montejo, cousin to the Montejo’s of the Yucatan, at your service.”
    From the soldier beside him I was amazed to hear a woman’s voice. “Leon, you never told me the boy was comely.” Behind her, a totally different group of soldiers began to laugh. They were a mixed group, mostly natives or half-bloods, but with a few Spaniards, a couple large men from Africa, and one man pale as an Englishman, his head totally bald and covered in scars. All of them save the woman and the pale man, wore badly stained cotton padded armor, with pieces of Artifact plate sewn into the material. The woman and the pale man wore a coat of plates: thick pieces of black Artifact plate held together by black rings of chainmail, and both suits looked badly scarred. The woman was half-Spanish, with black hair tied in a braid, an old scar on the side of her face near her eye, and another on her chin marring an otherwise comely face, in frame lean as a wolf herself. An older wolf, I amended; she looked to be in her late-thirty’s, if she was a day.
    General Montejo gave her a disgusted look. “Captain Cholula, we did not come here for you to indulge your pleasures.”
    Captain Cholula spoke in a husky voice. “Why not? At least I’d have something to do besides standing around looking fierce.” The three of us reached the gateway, and she stepped in front of me. “I take it you’re the healer known as Tomas?” I nodded, and she moved closer to inspect me, her breath smelling of rum as she felt my arms and frame with hands tough as old tree roots. She wore an Artifact cutlass at each hip, carried a steel dagger at her cracked leather belt, and had another sticking out of each boot. “Too thin,” she continued, “but he’s got muscles.” She ran her thumb over my palm. “And callouses.”
    Alfonzo pulled me away from her. “He got them from his apothecary work.”
    “Oh really,” Captain Cholula said with a hard smile. “When I was a young girl, growing up in New Spain, the first piece of advice my mother gave me about men was...they lie. Every single man not a Dragon will lie to you with a straight face.”
    “Mistress,” I blurted out, “it’s not a lie.”
    She turned her smile on me, and it became...hungry. “You don’t have to call me mistress, just captain, at least until you’re sharing my bunk. Then I’ll tell you what you can call me.”
    I froze in shock as Alfonzo pulled me back beside him, his hand on his sword hilt. “Tomas and I came here to heal the chief’s son, not for you to paw him like a sailor’s whore.”
    An angry mutter began from the men behind her as the pale man stepped out to meet him. Strapped to his back, the bald man had two Artifact weapons: an axe with a curved spike on the other side, and a military hammer with a straight spike. He had a hand on the shaft of each, and kept them there as Alfonzo stopped, the pale man stopping