The morning was clean and easy, the kind that made a man forget, for an hour or two, that the sea had ever tried to kill him. Blue water, a steady wind off the larboard quarter, gulls trailing the wake in lazy loops looking for scraps that weren't coming. Lou stood at the rail with a cup of something the cook insisted was small beer, watching the horizon out of habit more than hope.

Nate came up beside him, chewing on a strip of dried meat, and Vincent trailed a few steps behind, close enough to be part of the conversation and far enough to still look like he was deciding whether he belonged in it.

"You're still doing that," Nate said.

"Doing what."

"Watching the water like it owes you an apology." Nate nodded at the horizon. "It doesn't. Sea doesn't owe anybody anything. That's sort of its whole nature."

"Feels like it should, after the last one."

"Feels like a lot of things should happen that don't." Nate grinned, easy, the kind of grin he used to talk men out of fights and women out of their better judgment. "Ask Vincent. He's had worse luck than either of us and he's still standing here smelling like tar and bad decisions."

Vincent huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "Charmed, as always."

"You did good work back there," Lou said. He didn't look over when he said it, kept his eyes on the water, but he meant it plain enough that Vincent went still for half a second before answering.

"It's just a lock."

"It's not just a lock and you know it." Lou finally turned his head. "You picked it clean, kept your head when Nate was about to jump out of his own skin, and you handed over the one piece of information you could've held over me for months. Man doesn't do that unless something in him wants to."

Vincent didn't have an answer ready for that. Lou watched him search for one anyway, watched the careful, calculating look Vincent wore like armor slip for just a moment before he found his footing again.

"Didn't seem right," Vincent said finally. "Holding it. Not after."

"After what?"

"After you didn't ask me what it was worth to me." Vincent's jaw worked. "Everyone I've ever dealt with asks that first. What's it worth to me. You didn't."

Nate, for once, had the good sense not to fill the silence that followed. Lou just nodded, slow, and let it sit there between them, honest and a little uncomfortable, the way things worth saying usually were.

It was the lookout's shout that broke it.

"Sail! Two points off the starboard bow!"

All three of them were at the rail in a breath.

The ship was a good half hour out and closing, low and dark in the water, her hull painted the color of old iron and her sails cut in the sharp, raked style that Lou had spent four years learning to recognize in taverns and shipping ledgers and the memory of men who'd survived crossing paths with Cortez's people and lived to describe it badly.

"That's one of his," Nate said, low, no humor left in him now. "Has to be."

"Could be anyone flying dark canvas."

"Could be. Isn't." Nate's hand had already found the hilt at his belt, an old habit that meant his mind was elsewhere, already running through what came next. "You feel it too. Don't lie to me."

Lou did feel it. Four years of asking after a name in a hundred ports had trained something in his chest to recognize the shape of a threat before his head caught up to why, and every part of that training was screaming now, low and insistent, a coal going from warm to white-hot in the space of a breath. It could be him. It could finally, after everything, be him.

He didn't say that out loud. He never said things like that out loud. But he gave the order anyway, and his voice came out steadier than anything happening in his chest had any right to allow.

"Beat to quarters. Run out the guns. We're taking her."

The ship came alive around him, the particular controlled chaos of men who'd done this before and knew exactly what their hands were for. Nate was already moving, barking orders with the easy authority he never seemed to have to reach for, and Vincent, Lou noticed, didn't hesitate either, didn't ask what his job was, just found a length of rope and a marlinspike and made himself useful in the way of a man who understood that in this kind of moment, usefulness was the only currency that mattered.

The fight, when it came, was short and ugly in the way real fights were, nothing like the drawn-out clash of steel that men liked to sing about after. There was the run-up, the warning shot across the bow that the other ship ignored, the exchange of cannon fire that left splinters raining down across both decks, and then the grapple and the boarding, and after that it was only men in close quarters doing the worst things men were capable of doing to each other.

Lou fought like something had come loose in him. He always did, in moments like this, but there was a particular edge to it now, a focus that narrowed the whole world down to the deck in front of him and the possibility, however unlikely, that the man he'd spent four years hunting might be standing somewhere behind the next line of enemy sailors. He moved through them without wasted motion, cutting a path with a kind of grim efficiency that made even his own crew give him room.

Nate fought beside him the way he always had, since they were twenty-one and stupid enough to think the world owed them something, quick and vicious and laughing in a way that unsettled the men on the other end of his blade more than any snarl could have. Between the two of them they cleared the quarterdeck in a matter of minutes, and Lou would think later, in the quieter hours, that it hadn't felt like a fight so much as a debt finally being called in, four years of grief and rage finding somewhere to put itself down.

Vincent didn't fight like either of them. He fought like a man who'd learned to survive rather than to win, quick and low and dirty, using the deck and the rigging and the confusion of close quarters instead of strength he didn't have. Lou caught sight of him once, mid-fight, dragging a wounded sailor's blade wide with a length of cord and putting a knife through the gap it left, and thought, distantly, that he understood now how Vincent had survived among the men who had left him on the barrels.

It ended the way these things usually did, all at once, the fight going out of the enemy crew like a candle pinched between two fingers, hands going up, weapons hitting the deck, the particular silence that followed real violence settling over the ship like weather.

Lou went looking for the captain himself, moving fast through the wreckage of the aft cabin, sword still up, half expecting the man to come at him from behind an overturned chart table. Instead he found him cornered against the stern windows, a lean man with a scar through one eyebrow and blood running from a cut along his jaw, still gripping a sword with no crew left behind him to make it matter. Lou's whole body went tight at the sight of him, some old, starved part of himself already asking the only question that mattered before his mouth had caught up to it.

"Where's Cortez," Lou said. Not a question. A demand, four years of asking compressed down into two words.

The man laughed, short and humorless, and spat blood onto the deck.

"Cortez," he said, "is somewhere you'll never find him. I'm not him. Name's Sorrel, if it means anything to you."

It meant everything to him. Lou felt the name land like a physical blow, Sorrel, a name he had been chasing in pieces since the night his father died on the tideline with a boat-hook still in his hands, one of the men who'd stood on the deck of an unmarked ship and watched the Cyphir shipyard burn to embers.

Lou's grip tightened on the sword until his knuckles ached. He stood there with the blade still wet in his hand and the taste of four years' disappointment thick in his throat, and somewhere behind him he heard Nate go very quiet, the particular quiet that meant he'd worked out exactly who they were looking at too.

"You were there," Lou said. "The shipyard. A moonless Tuesday, five years back."

Something shifted in Sorrel's face, not quite fear, something closer to recognition. "You're the boy," he said slowly. "The Cyphir boy. Christ. You've been hunting us this whole time."

"Every day since."

"Then you should know," Sorrel said, and there was something almost like pity in it, "that finding one of us was never going to be the hard part." Lou's breath caught hard in his chest, and his hand closed around the sword hilt so tight the leather creaked under his grip.

They took the ship's papers, her cargo, and Sorrel himself in chains, and left the rest of her crew with enough of the wreck to limp toward the nearest port under Vincent's watchful, entirely unsentimental eye while Lou and Nate went through what they'd found belowdecks.

It wasn't Cortez. It would never have been that easy. But among the ship's papers was a manifest with a heading marked for a rendezvous point three weeks out, a place Lou had never heard named before, and beside it, in handwriting he was starting to recognize even in strangers' logs, the same name that had haunted every port he'd walked into for four years running.

Lou found Vincent that evening at the rail, alone, in the particular stillness he wore when he thought no one was watching him.

"You did well today," Lou said.

Vincent didn't turn. "Killed a man for the first time in a fight that wasn't about my own neck for once. Didn't think that would sit different. It does."

"It's supposed to."

They stood there a while, the sea gone dark and quiet around them, the captured ship's lanterns bobbing somewhere off the stern.

"I've been thinking," Lou said finally. "About what you said this morning. About no one asking what it's worth to you."

Vincent went still again, the way he had at the rail that morning, like he was bracing for something.

"I'm not going to ask you that," Lou said. "I'm going to ask you something else instead. Stay. Not as cargo we picked up off a wreck and not as a debt we're working off. As crew. Full share, full say, same as Nate and me."

Vincent's jaw worked, but nothing came out for a long moment, and Lou let him have the silence, understanding, in a way he hadn't fully understood that morning, that a man who'd spent his whole life learning that nothing came without a price needed a little time to believe it when something finally did.

"Full share," Vincent said at last, testing the words like they might not hold his weight.

"Full share."

"Then I'm in," Vincent said, and something in his voice cracked just slightly around the edges, "before you come to your senses."

Lou almost smiled. Almost. It was the closest either of them had come to it in longer than he could remember, and it lasted right up until Nate came aft from the hatch, wiping tar from his hands, with a look on him that put Lou back on his guard before he'd said a word.

"That's the last of Sorrel's crates across and stowed," Nate said. "Most of it's what the manifest says it is. Two of them aren't on it at all, and one of those is nailed shut twice over."

Lou looked from Nate to the boy beside him, who had already gone still in the way that meant he was listening to every word.

"Tomorrow," Lou said. "When there's light enough to see what we're looking at."

Off the stern, the captured ship's lanterns went on bobbing in the dark, and below Lou's feet, in the hold of his own ship, under a lid nailed down twice, something that had been hidden a long time went on waiting to be found.