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him. He picked up his sand-scoured glass and with a gentle movement of his wrist sent the pale wine into a slow whirl. After watching it a moment he raised his gaze to where his half brother sat, the great emerald winking evilly on his chest.
    "Do you know," said Devon, turning an interested gaze back to the wine, "I think it's beginning to separate."
    "The scum coming to the top," said the pale-haired boy next to the pirate captain. "I told you. American wine tastes like it was fresh from a pig's ..."
    A raucous burst of laughter from the next table covered the end of his sentence. Rand Morgan reached out to pluck the wineglass from the younger man's fingers and casually tossed the contents onto the tavern's dirt floor. Refilling the glass from his own bottle, he handed it back and said, "Try the rum instead."
    "Oh? Is it better?"
    "It's worse." The pirate captain smiled. "But it's quicker."
    Devon returned the grin and lifted the glass. "To my speedy intoxification."
    The rum was worse, as it happened. Devon mentally tipped the hat he wasn't wearing to his misspent youth, which had forged his iron palate.
    The unease of the crowd had altered little since their arrival, save perhaps that the stares had become both more frequent and surreptitious. Devon was used to being stared at. His position in life had made it inevitable, and even in those remote places where he was unknown, his looks had made him far from inconspicuous. What he saw here was different. Here they were afraid. What a heady, corrupting power it was, to have men fear you, and his half brother had been years on this coast, flashing his emerald and nourishing his reputation for stone-hearted savagery. Morgan had come here to terrify, and before the night was over, he surely would. However different Devon's purpose, their interests were hardly incompatible. He looked back into Morgan's sleepy gaze.
    "How do you like the natives?" asked the pirate captain, sending a slow survey around the room that made the other tavern patrons look as though they would have liked to crawl under their chairs.
    Devon shrugged. "I've seen them before. In Cadiz, in Le Havre. The mongrel waterfront."
    The boy looked up from his ale and said in the purring, even voice that was the closest he came to good humor, "We can't all of us be blue bloods. Listen, Dev, have you got the horn colic, or what?"
    It was, all in all, the kind of remark one might expect from a boy who had lived his first twelve years in a Caribbean brothel. Devon took a pull of rum and smiled. "No more than usual, 1 don't think. Why? What am I doing?"
    "You've looked four or five times at the copper-headed wench by the puppet box."
    Amused, he said, "Four or five? Is that so many?"
    "It is for you. Especially considering the size of her belly."
    "Poor Cat," Morgan murmured. "Look at her again. She's a beauty."
    The boy leaned his head back and shook his hair vigorously from his shoulders. "She is if you say she is. They all look alike to me."
    As Devon watched, the girl looked at him, met his gaze, and turned quickly, fearfully away, as though in shame. She was drinking nothing, and her clasped hands lay on the table before her, the fingers fervently knit. He was too far away to see whether they trembled. He supposed she had heard by now of Morgan's identity and was wondering what it might mean to her. There was tension in the slightly averted profile, with its Venus-on-a-seashell oval frame, and soft rose-petal lips.
    "If you want her, she's yours," said Morgan in a quiet, bored voice.
    Once, long ago, there had been a man inside Devon that would have been shocked by the suggestion, though even then he would have had the poise to hide it. The sophisticated corruptions of his young manhood in the years before he met Morgan had been many and varied, but raping women in an advanced state of pregnancy had not been among them. Perhaps it was the rum, but he wondered what other things he had destroyed inside himself as he