"I am but recently returned to Selgaunt," the pretender said eagerly, "after years as a captive then a loyal servant of the Talendars, at their holdings in the distant land of Amn. I–I came to owe Presker Talendar the value of a ship that was wrecked on rocks near Westgate, as I was captaining it for the Talendars."

Clever. Thamalon took care that none of the dark anger gathering in him showed in his face. The downfall of the Uskevren in his father Aldimar's day had been trading with pirates-an offense then as now treated no differently under Sembian law than open piracy itself. Any payment Thamalon might make to this man who claimed to be his brother could be trumpeted by the Talendars as paying a pirate, proof that the Uskevren were again up to their old tricks. False claimant or not, the Uskevren would be ruined. For that matter, this claimant-Perivel or not-could be a pirate himself.

Persons convicted of piracy in Selgaunt were always shunned by citizens anxious to avoid sharing their fate: a month of hard and unpleasant labor (usually harbor-diving to plug leaks in ship hulls, or squaring and hefting quarried stones to repair the city wall), followed by the amputation of one of the convict's hands. The guilty were often sentenced to suffer the breaking of another limb as well by officers of the court, a wound that was left to heal by itself so that, as the saying went, "the pain will be their teacher."

At over sixty years of age, Thamalon would be worked hard for a month, while this pretender disowned him and plundered the family vaults-a family none would dare trade with thereafter, for fear of being thought pirates in their turn. The Uskevren would fall, and the Talendars would seize everything and no doubt make special visits to a whipped and groaning Thamalon Uskevren to torment him with the news of what they'd done with it.