The wind held steady out of the southeast for the better part of a week after they cleared Governor's Harbor, the kind of wind that made a captain's job easy and his mind restless for exactly that reason, nothing to correct, nothing to trim, only the waiting. Lou spent most of it at the charts, working the same stretch of coastline over and over by lantern light until the paper had gone soft at the folds, measuring distances against a memory of Sorrel's voice in the dark of the brig, a cove east of the passage, provisions and powder traded off a contact who doesn't ask questions.

"You've read that chart enough times to have it memorized," Nate said, coming up behind him on the second evening with two tankards of small beer, thin and warm and better than nothing. "Man could recite it in his sleep by now."

"I'd rather know the water before I trust it." Lou took the tankard without looking up. "Cortez's people chose that cove for a reason. Rocks on both sides, narrow mouth, easy to watch and easy to defend. If Dutch Aariq's half as careful as Sorrel made him sound, he'll have a man posted somewhere with a clear line on anything coming in."

"Then we don't come in loud."

"We don't come in loud." Lou finally set the chart down, rubbing at eyes gone tired from too many hours of lantern light. "Quiet enough that whoever's watching thinks we're just another hull working the coast, right up until it's too late for looking to matter."

Vincent had taken to spending his evenings near the bow rather than below with the rest of the crew, a habit that had started somewhere around Governor's Harbor and hadn't broken since, and Lou found him there again that night, arms folded over the rail, watching the dark water slide past with the particular stillness that had come to mean, more often than not, that something was working through him he hadn't yet decided how to say out loud.

Lou didn't press him on it, not tonight, not with Dutch Aariq somewhere ahead of them and a cove still to find. He settled beside him instead, content to let the silence be what it was, and it was Vincent who broke it first, unprompted, in a voice quieter than his usual guarded flatness.

"He knows the ring," Vincent said, not looking over. "The man in Governor's Harbor. I've been turning that over since we left, and it's the part that doesn't sit right. A stranger doesn't recognize a mark like the Undertow at a glance, not unless he's worn one himself, or watched someone close to him wear it." He turned the thought over a moment longer, jaw working. "That's not nothing. That's a door I didn't know was still open."

"You think he's coming looking for it."

"I think he already knows exactly where it is." Vincent's hand found the pocket where the ring still sat, the same small gesture Lou had come to recognize by now. "Whether that means he wants it back, or wants to see who's carrying it, I couldn't tell you yet. But it's closer to an answer than I had a week ago."

Lou let that sit between them, weighing it against the letter in his own coat and the cove waiting somewhere ahead of them in the dark. "Then we'll be ready for him, whichever it turns out to be."

"I know we will." Something in Vincent's voice eased, fractionally, at that. "That's mostly why I'm telling you anything at all."

They stood together a while longer in a silence that had stopped feeling like a thing that needed filling.

They raised the cove's outer headland a little after dawn on the third day, a low dark shoulder of rock exactly where the chart said it would be, and Lou gave the order to strike sail early and bring her in on oars alone, the Widow's Debt creeping the last mile like something that had learned patience from the tide itself rather than any captain's teaching. She sat exactly where Sorrel had promised, low and dark against the pale morning, sails struck, no colors flying, a single figure at her rail with shoulders broad enough to match everything a captive man had told them in the dark of a brig three days past.

"That could be him," Nate said, low, no humor left in his voice at all. "Dutch Aariq."

Lou lowered his shading hand slow, feeling the old coal in his chest shift from warm to something considerably harder to name. "Oars," he said, not raising his voice above what the water needed to carry it. "No lanterns. We go in slow, and we go in dark, and we don't give him cause to look twice before it's already done."

The crew rowed her in on muffled oars, close enough along the rock face that Lou could smell the salt-crusted stone before he could properly see it, and for a stretch of minutes that felt considerably longer than it was, nobody aboard spoke above a whisper. The sentry at the rail didn't turn from his post until they were nearly alongside him, and by then it was already too late for turning to matter. Nate went up first, quick and silent in a way that unsettled men far tougher than a single startled sentry, and had him down and bound before the man's own shout had finished leaving his throat.

The fight, when the rest of it came, was shorter than Lou expected and considerably less clean. Dutch Aariq's crew below decks put up more resistance than a resupply watch had any business mustering. A pistol went off somewhere below, close enough that the smell of powder reached the passage before the sound of it fully died away, and a man screamed once, high and short, cut off by something Lou didn't stop to name. Lou's boot skated in blood he hadn't seen yet on the planking, and for one bad half second there was nowhere behind him to give ground to, only more of the same fight pressing in from both directions at once.

Lou found himself trading blows in a cramped hatchway with a man twice his width, taking a glancing cut along the forearm before Vincent came up from behind and put the man down with the particular efficiency he reserved for moments when strength wasn't an option and cleverness had to do the work instead. Dutch himself fought last and hardest, cornered at the stern rail with his back to open water and a flintlock pistol he never quite got the chance to level. He caught sight of Vincent in the same instant Lou closed on him, and something crossed his face that had nothing to do with the fight at all, a half second too long spent looking at a boy he had no business recognizing, before whatever it was went wherever men bury things they don't have time to feel. He said nothing about it. Lou closed the last of that distance himself, sword arm burning, and put the big man down with a blow that cost him nearly everything he had left to give it.

They took him alive, bound alongside what remained of his crew, and searched the ship's hold for the better part of an hour after, finding powder, provisions, and a manifest confirming everything Sorrel had already told them, a resupply point and nothing more, no further word yet of where Cortez himself meant to go once the trading was done. Dutch said little under questioning beyond what his own captured papers already made plain, and Lou left him bound in the Debt's own brig alongside Sorrel, two names now accounted for out of three, and only Cortez himself left standing somewhere ahead of them in waters Lou had not yet learned to read.

It was well past midday before the ship settled back into her ordinary rhythm, canvas set again, oars stowed, the crew tending wounds and coiling rope with the particular quiet exhaustion that followed a fight decided in their favor. Nate came up from below sometime in the middle of it all, having gone down for water and come back instead with a peach in one hand, soft and a little past its best days but still good enough to eat. He was reaching past the crate for a second one when his fingers caught on something tucked flat beneath the straw at the bottom, a folded scrap of paper with his own name written across the front in a hand he clearly recognized on sight.

He unfolded it right there in the narrow passage, peach still in his other hand, and read it through once in silence, his eyes moving quickly over the first portion in a way that put an unguarded, private smile on his face, the kind of look Lou had rarely seen from him in all their years sailing together. He kept reading, and somewhere past the middle of it his mouth twitched again, sharper this time, a low snicker escaping him before he'd finished the last line, the particular sound of a man who had just found something considerably more entertaining than he'd bargained for when he went looking for fruit.

He folded the letter closed without a word, tucking it inside his own coat, and said nothing at all about what was in it, only stood there a moment longer with that same half-smile still working at the corner of his mouth, clearly enjoying whatever he now knew and was in no particular hurry to share.