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satisfied. Their honour wasn’t going to be questioned then.
    “Ye no’ goin’ to eat that?” Dougal asked, lifting his brow in question.
    Both boys looked at the biscuits in their hands, as if surprised to see them there. They instinctively thrust the food into their mouths, then the blond stopped chewing. He frowned, pulled a small piece back out of his mouth, and held the morsel out for Dougal.
    “Would ye have some yerself, sir?”
    Dougal considered it. He was, after all, as hungry as anyone else. The boy swallowed.
    “Nay, lad. I thank ye. I’ve had my supper.” He turned back toward his regular spot where John sat, watching the proceedings.
    “Lovely, that,” John said with a nod. “Ye’ve a dead wicked temper. I’d best remember that.”
    “Aye, ye should.”
    “Decent of ye, helpin’ out those lads. Poor fellows, barely old enough to leave their mother’s teat.”
    “Oh, they’re older than that. Only small. But quick, aye? Ye can see they’re canny.”
    John pinched his thumb and finger against his scalp, grimaced, then flicked a small bug onto the floor between them. “They’ve no family, ye ken.”
    Dougal hadn’t known that. He’d tried to get inside the boys’ heads but had gleaned nothing. He thought maybe the two were so closely entwined with each other, they had no thoughts to spare for anyone else.
    He ground the heel of his boot on the bug. “No? Like us then?”
    John smiled. “I suppose. Only I’ve heard they never had family. Lived wild in the woods, the two of them.”
    They watched the boys for a while. “Handsome wee things,” Dougal said, then grinned. “They’d best watch their arses around here.”
    “True enough,” John said, digging for another mite. “The men are tiring of each other’s company, I reckon.”
    The possibility prompted Dougal to move their places closer to where the boys stayed. So when it happened a couple of days later, neither Dougal nor John were overly surprised. Dougal had always slept light, his restless sleep disturbed by other men’s voices wandering through his mind. When he heard the creaking of nearby boards beneath someone’s feet, followed by a muffled cry, he was in a fighting crouch in the blink of an eye.
    The men’s hands were firmly clamped over the boys’ mouths, pinning their struggling bodies to the floor. The rest of the ship writhed in its customary noisy discomfort, some sleeping, others resorting to whatever they could on which to hook their last threads of sanity. The craft moaned with her movements on the sea, with its captives, with its misery. Few heard the panicked cries of the two boys.
    Dougal did. He was on his feet and shoving one man away before they were even aware of his presence. John awoke beside him and interrupted the second man’s frenzied attempts to grab at the dark-haired lad. There wasn’t much of a fight after that. The attackers were still lost in the fog of lust and attempted rape, the defenders blistering with righteous fury. The intended victims sat shaking, white as the stars they couldn’t see.
    In the morning when Dougal awoke, he held a crust of bread in his hand that he couldn’t recall having seen before. A biscuit lay on the floor by John’s hand as well. Dougal peered toward the boys, who were blissfully asleep, curled around each other like overgrown puppies.
    A thank-you
, he thought, and nodded to himself. He crunched into the bread, hard as the wood on which he lay, and felt the tiny morsels disintegrate on his tongue then travel down his gullet.

CHAPTER 5
    Tilbury Fort
    Dougal never did find out exactly where the stolen treasures came from, but he suspected the boys were more slippery than he’d thought. If they were, indeed, orphans who had lived as animals throughout their young lives, they would be well versed in the art of self-preservation. Dougal never mentioned the food to them, and they never said a word about it to him.
    Attacks on the boys continued for a