Vincent made the decision on a morning that looked no different from any other. Later, he would think that was exactly the kind of morning decisions like this tended to arrive on: unannounced, without the courtesy of feeling significant until it was already too late to talk himself back out of one. He found Lou at the charts before the sun had properly cleared the harbor mouth, and said the thing plainly, the way he'd learned plain was usually kinder than careful.

"I know where he is," Vincent said. "Out past the point. I've known since the tavern. I've simply been finding reasons not to go."

Lou set down the chart without hurrying, the same unhurried attention he gave most things that mattered. "And today you've run out of reasons."

"Today I've run out of patience with myself for having them." Vincent's jaw worked once, the old tell Lou had learned to read as certainty rather than doubt. "I'm going. I'd rather you came than not, though I'll manage either way."

"I'm coming." Lou didn't make it a question, and didn't make it an argument either, and there was nothing in the way he said it that left room to mistake it for reluctance or duty. He set the chart aside entirely rather than merely down, the whole of his attention already turned. It occurred to Vincent that Lou had never once made him wait for that attention, whatever else had been sitting on the table when Vincent finally decided to speak. "I'll stand where you tell me to stand, and say nothing you don't ask me to say. This is yours to have, Vincent. I'm only there so you don't have to have it alone."

Vincent looked at him a long moment, something working behind his careful eyes that he didn't put words to, and nodded once, and that was the whole of the arranging it took.

The point sat a mile past the harbor's proper edge, a spit of rock and scrub where the port's ordinary business gave way to something quieter and considerably less advertised, a scattering of low buildings that kept no signs and wanted no casual trade, and Vincent led them to the third one without hesitation, the particular certainty of a man who'd once known a place well enough that his feet remembered it before his mind had finished deciding to go there.

The door was old wood gone soft at the edges, and it opened before Vincent had raised a hand to knock, which told him, in the instant before he saw the face behind it, that he'd been watched crossing the last stretch of open ground and had simply not troubled himself to notice.

Kestrel had aged in the way men age when the work itself keeps them lean rather than the years, silver through hair still thick at the temples, a face weathered rather than worn, and eyes that found Vincent's face and went very still in a manner that mirrored, almost exactly, the stillness Vincent had felt in the tavern three days past.

"You found me, then." Kestrel's voice was exactly as Vincent remembered it, flat and unhurried, a voice built for calming frightened things in the dark. "I wondered how long that would take, once I heard a boy matching your description had come through with a hunting captain's crew."

"You knew I was here."

"I make it my business to know most things that matter, in a port this size." Kestrel's gaze moved past Vincent to Lou, cataloguing him with the same unhurried thoroughness, and something in his expression suggested he'd already worked out considerably more than either of them had told him. "Captain Cyphir. Your reputation's outrun you a little, this far south. I'd ask you in, but I expect you'd rather stand where you can see the door."

"I would."

"Sensible." Kestrel stepped back anyway, leaving the door open behind him, an invitation rather than a demand, and Vincent went in first, the way he'd always gone first into rooms he wasn't certain of, and Lou followed a pace behind, close enough to matter, far enough not to crowd, exactly as he'd promised.

The room inside was sparse in the particular way of a man who'd learned young not to own more than he could abandon quickly, a single table, a cot, tools of a trade Vincent recognized without needing to ask after them, and Kestrel settled into the room's one chair without offering either of them the other, not from rudeness, Vincent understood, but from the plain fact that he hadn't expected company and owned little enough to share it properly.

"You've grown," Kestrel said, studying him. "Taller than I'd have guessed. You were built for smallness, the last I saw you. Useful smallness, for the work."

"I'm aware of what I was built for." Vincent's voice stayed level, though something underneath it had gone tight. "I've had years to consider it."

"I expect you have." Kestrel didn't look away from that, didn't flinch from it either, which was, Vincent noted distantly, more than he'd expected. "I won't waste what time you've given me pretending I don't know why you're standing in my doorway with a captain at your back instead of a knife in your hand. You want to know why. I've had the answer ready longer than I'd like to admit, and it's never once sounded better for the practicing."

"Then say it plainly. You taught me that much, if nothing else."

Kestrel's mouth moved, something that wasn't quite a smile, closer to old grief finding a familiar shape to sit in. "I owed a debt. Old, and considerably larger than a man in my trade should ever let himself owe. The kind the Undertow collects on, one way or another, and doesn't much care which way a man prefers." He said the word plainly, without ceremony, and Vincent felt something cold move through him at hearing it spoken aloud by the one man who'd have every reason to know its true weight. "I had little worth taking. A boy quick with his hands and quicker with a lock was worth considerably more to the men I owed than anything else I had left to offer. I told myself it was a trade you'd thank me for eventually. Passage into a life with a future in it, rather than a dead man's apprentice with none. I told myself a great many things that winter, Vincent, and precious few of them were true."

"You gave me away."

"I sold you." Kestrel didn't soften it, didn't reach for the gentler word Vincent had offered him. "I'll not stand here and call it anything prettier than what it was. I paid a debt with the only thing valuable enough to satisfy it, and the thing was you, and I have not, in all the years since, found a way to make that arithmetic come out kinder no matter how many times I've done the sum again."

The silence that followed sat heavy in the small room, and Lou, standing where he'd promised to stand, said nothing at all, though Vincent felt his presence there like a hand at his back he hadn't asked for and was, despite himself, grateful for anyway.

"Why tell me now?" Vincent said finally. "You could have stayed hidden. You knew I was in port and you let me find you rather than vanish, which means some part of you wanted this conversation as much as you claim to dread it."

"Some part of me has wanted this conversation for longer than you've been old enough to have it properly." Kestrel's hands, Vincent noticed, had gone still on the table, the particular stillness of a man forcing calm onto something that wanted badly to shake. "But I'll not pretend guilt's the whole of why I let you find this door instead of running from it. The Undertow's circling again, Vincent, closer than they've circled in years, and a debt like mine doesn't stay paid forever once the men holding the paper decide they want more than what they were owed the first time. I have reason to think they mean to collect on me again, one way or another, and I'd rather you heard that from me than found it out by being caught standing too close to me when they finally do."

"You're warning me off you."

Vincent's own words caught up with him before Kestrel could answer, the shape of it arriving whole in his chest a half-breath ahead of anything Kestrel might have said to explain it. "The ring."

"The ring." Kestrel's eyes held his, steady despite everything else about him that had gone unsteady in the telling. "It means something to men who'll come looking for it regardless of whether I'm still breathing when they arrive. I'd rather you know what you're standing near before it costs you the way it cost me. That's the whole of it, Vincent. Guilt, and a warning, and precious little else I've got left worth giving you."

Vincent stood a long moment in the small, sparse room, turning the whole of it over, the debt, the sale, the warning, and found that none of it landed the way he'd braced for it to land, not vindication, not the clean fury he'd carried in his chest for years like a coal he'd been careful never to let go cold. What he felt instead was considerably more complicated, and considerably harder to carry.

"You used to hum," Vincent said, and his voice had gone unsteady in a way he hadn't planned for at all. "When you worked. Something without words. I haven't heard it since, and I've caught myself these last years humming it without meaning to, not knowing where it came from until just now, standing here."

Something moved across Kestrel's face at that, sudden and entirely unguarded, the first crack in a composure Vincent suspected had taken years to build as carefully as it had. "I didn't know you'd kept that." His voice had roughened considerably. "I didn't think you'd kept anything of me worth keeping, after."

"I didn't think so either." Vincent's jaw worked once more, and he turned toward the door before whatever was rising in his own chest could finish arriving where Kestrel could see it plainly. "I don't forgive you. I want that said clearly, so neither of us mistakes this for something softer than it is. But I heard you. That's more than I came here planning to give you."

He left without waiting for an answer, and Lou followed a pace behind, silent, exactly as he'd promised, and it was only once they'd cleared the point and the low buildings behind them that Vincent finally spoke again, his voice steadier than his face currently was.

"The Undertow's circling him," Vincent said. "Which means they're closer to the ring than we'd accounted for."

Lou glanced back once toward the point. "How close?"

Vincent kept walking, and didn't slow his pace to answer. "Close enough that I'm done assuming we have time."