Since the second week, Isabela had taken to climbing the rise above the harbor every morning. Each day she told herself the horizon would be no different from the last nine, and each day she climbed anyway. A habit built on hope was still a habit, whatever a sensible woman thought of the odds. The view from up there took in the whole curve of Marrow's Reach, the crowded jetties, the customs shed with its perpetually crooked flag, and beyond all of it, the open water where a ship might, on any given morning, simply appear.

Brigid had stopped asking why she bothered somewhere around the fifth morning, which Isabela had taken as its own kind of kindness. There were things a friend let you do without comment, and climbing a hill every dawn to watch an empty horizon for a man who'd made no promises was apparently one of them, at least as far as Brigid was concerned, whatever she actually thought about the wisdom of it.

This morning the horizon gave something back. A sail, then two, working in against a wind that wanted to push them wide of the harbor mouth. A hull riding low enough to be carrying real weight. And something in the particular set of her canvas that Isabela recognized before she could have explained how, the way a person recognizes a voice through a wall before they've made out a single word of what it's saying.

She was down the hill and onto the jetty before she'd properly decided to run, skirts gathered in one fist, and it was only once she'd reached the crowded dockside proper, breathless and considerably less composed than she generally preferred to be in public, that she made herself stop and simply watch the ship come the rest of the way in under her own power.

Aboard the Widow's Debt, Vincent stood near the bow with a stillness that had nothing to do with the calm morning around him. He had known, from the moment Nate first said the name Marrow's Reach aloud back on the night of the confession, that the port sat close enough to certain waters he'd rather not think too hard about, and the closer they'd come these last few days, the more that knowledge had settled into something he couldn't quite shake loose of.

"You've gone quiet again," Lou said, coming to stand beside him, squinting at the harbor mouth though there was little left to scout this close in.

"This port's not unknown to me." Vincent kept his eyes on the approaching jetty rather than on Lou. "Not the good kind of known, either. There's a man who calls this water home, or near enough to it, and I'd not put it past chance to have him somewhere in that crowd waiting on the docks."

"The one from Governor's Harbor."

"The same." Vincent's jaw worked once. "I don't know that he's here. I only know he could be, and knowing that's enough to put a man's back up walking into a place like this."

Lou studied him a moment, then nodded once, the particular acknowledgment he gave things he intended to take seriously without making a show of it. "Then we keep eyes open. Yours more than most."

"Aye." Vincent didn't say anything further, and Lou let the silence stand, understanding well enough by now that pressing rarely got him anywhere Vincent wasn't already prepared to go on his own.

The Debt came alongside the jetty to the ordinary chaos of any harbor taking in a new arrival, shouted lines, the thump of the gangplank finding its footing, and it was Nate who spotted Isabela first, standing near the customs shed with her arms crossed in a poor attempt at looking like a woman who hadn't just run the length of the harbor to get there in time. Whatever careful composure either of them had planned to manage lasted exactly as long as it took Nate to clear the plank, and then there was considerably less dignity involved on either side than either of them would likely admit to later.

Lou came down after, slower, and found Brigid a short distance off, exactly where he somehow already knew she'd be, arms crossed in a mirror of her friend's posture but with none of the run left in her breathing, watching Nate and Isabela's reunion with an expression that softened, briefly, before she caught Lou's eye and rearranged it back into something more careful.

"You came back," she said, which wasn't quite a greeting.

"Said I would."

"You said not today. Wasn't quite the same as a promise." But something in her voice had lost its edge since Governor's Harbor, and Lou found, standing there on a jetty crowded with gulls and shouted cargo counts, that he didn't much mind the way she was looking at him now, considerably less like a mistake she'd spotted early.

They fell into the easy work of resupply through the better part of the morning, water and rope and the general business of a ship that had been at sea a month, and Nate and Isabela had long since disappeared toward whatever remained of her chandlery ambitions in this new port, leaving Lou, somewhat to his own surprise, walking the market stalls with Brigid rather than with anyone else.

It hadn't been arranged. She'd simply fallen into step beside him after the crates were unloaded, muttering something about making certain the crew didn't get robbed blind by every merchant in the Reach who could smell new coin, and Lou had let her stay without remarking on it, the way a man doesn't comment on weather he's grateful for.

"You haggle like a woman who's been cheated before," Lou said, watching her walk a fish merchant down to half his asking price without once raising her voice.

"I haggle like a woman who's watched every man on this coast assume a woman alone will pay whatever's asked because she's too polite to argue it." Brigid didn't look up from counting coin into the merchant's palm. "Turns out I'm not especially polite."

"I'd noticed."

"Was that meant as an insult?"

"It was meant as a fact." Lou took the fish off the stall for her, an unthinking courtesy that seemed to catch her slightly off guard, though she recovered fast enough that he might have imagined it. "I've found the two aren't always the same thing."

They walked on a while in something that wasn't quite comfortable silence but wasn't quite its opposite either. It was Brigid who broke it, unprompted, in a voice that had lost some of the flat warning it had carried back on the Governor's Harbor docks.

"You're not what I expected," she said, "for a pirate."

"What did you expect."

"Louder. Prouder. The sort who needs everyone within earshot to know exactly how much he's taken and from whom." She glanced sideways at him, something assessing in it, quieter and more genuine than the flat once-over she'd given him back on the Governor's Harbor dock. "Most captains I've known talk like the sea handed them everything they own out of respect. You talk like you're still faintly surprised it hasn't taken it all back yet."

"It might, one day. I've never seen much use in pretending otherwise." Lou considered the stall ahead of them, more out of habit than actual interest in its contents. "My father taught me that much before I ever set foot on a deck that wasn't his. The sea doesn't care what a man's earned. It only cares what he's prepared for."

"That's a colder philosophy than most men lead with when they're trying to charm a woman out of her good sense."

"I'm not trying to charm you out of anything." Lou said it plainly, without the practiced ease Brigid had clearly braced herself to hear instead. "You told me plain enough, first day I met you, that you'd known men exactly my sort. I'd rather you find out slowly that I'm not, than have me spend the afternoon trying to convince you of it and give you every reason to disbelieve me."

Brigid didn't answer that right away, and Lou let the silence sit, the same patience he spent on most things that mattered, and when she finally spoke again, some of the careful edge had gone out of her voice entirely.

"Isabela thinks you're good for Nate," she said. "Steadies him, she says, without dulling him. I told her that was exactly the kind of thing a woman says about a man right before he breaks her heart wide open." She paused at a stall selling dried herbs, running a thumb absently over a bundle of rosemary without buying it. "I don't know yet what I think you're good for. I'm still watching."

"That's fair. I'd rather be watched honestly than trusted for the wrong reasons."

Something in her face shifted at that, not quite a smile, but close enough to its neighborhood that Lou noticed it and said nothing, understanding without being told that noticing it aloud would only send it straight back into hiding. They kept walking, the market noise settling comfortably around them, and for a stretch of minutes neither of them felt any particular need to fill the quiet with more than what it already held.

It was somewhere past noon, with the crew scattered through the stalls and that same quiet still holding between them, that a voice cut across the market square with the particular carrying confidence of a woman who had never once in her life doubted she'd be listened to.

"Well," the voice said, "I don't believe I've seen you before, and I make it my business to know every interesting face that comes through this port."

She arrived the way certain people arrived in any room, already halfway into the conversation before anyone else had agreed to have it. A woman perhaps Lou's own age, dressed a full notch above the general dockside crowd, dark hair pinned with more care than the heat strictly allowed, and an expression that suggested she had long ago stopped asking permission for anything she wanted and simply proceeded as though the answer were already yes.

"Marguerite," she said, extending a hand as though she expected it to be kissed rather than shaken, and settling for a handshake with only the faintest flicker of disappointment when Lou offered nothing more elaborate. "Though everyone worth knowing calls me Margot. And you are entirely too well-built to be anything as boring as a merchant captain, so I'm going to guess something considerably more interesting."

"Lou Cyphir." He said it plainly, without offering the rest of what she was so obviously fishing for.

"Cyphir." Margot turned the name over like she was tasting it, clearly pleased with the sound of it regardless of whether she knew a thing about what it meant. "I do like a name a woman can say twice without getting bored of it." She smiled, the kind of smile that had likely gotten her exactly what she wanted from a great many men before Lou, and showed no particular sign of expecting this time to be any different.

Lou answered her plainly enough, neither encouraging nor unkind, the way he answered most people who wanted more from a conversation than he was inclined to give it, and if he noticed Margot's attention settling on him with the particular persistence of a woman used to closing whatever distance she pleased, he gave no sign of it at all.

He did not see Brigid's face across the square, where she stood with a coil of rope forgotten in one hand, watching the exchange with an expression she would have hated anyone to see, something sharp and unhappy crossing features that usually gave away considerably less than that, gone again almost as fast as it had come, tucked back behind the same guarded flatness she wore for most of the world. Lou, mid-conversation with a woman who had already decided how this was going to end, saw none of it.