The Widow's Debt put into Nassau three days later, low on fresh water and lower still on the kind of patience a crew needed before a hunt, and Lou had learned better than to run either debt too far into the red. Nassau in 1596 was not a port so much as an argument that had been going on so long everyone had forgotten how it started, pirates, wreckers, half-ruined Spanish claims, and English settlers who called the whole arrangement a colony because the alternative was admitting nobody was in charge of anything. It suited men like Lou. Nobody in Nassau asked too many questions of a ship riding low with silver in her hold, so long as that ship spent freely enough at the taverns to make the asking not worth anyone's trouble.

Nate was ashore within the hour, which surprised no one, and back within two, which surprised Lou considerably, Nate returning early from a port town was a phenomenon on the order of a solar eclipse, rare enough that Lou actually looked up from the quartermaster's ledger to ask what was wrong. Nothing was wrong. That was, Lou would come to understand, precisely the problem. Nate had the particular look of a man who had walked into a dockside tavern for rum and walked out having acquired an entirely different set of priorities, and it took him three attempts to explain that the priorities in question were named Isabela Reyes, ran her father's chandlery near the harbor, and had, in the space of one transaction involving rope and pitch, informed Nate that his flattery was wasted on a woman who could out-haggle a Genoese trader and did not care for men who thought a smile did the work of an honest price. Nate relayed this information with the reverence of a man describing scripture.

"You're in love," Lou said, not quite a question.

"I'm in commerce," Nate said. "There's a difference. A significant difference. I need forty fathoms of good line and she has the only chandlery in this port that isn't selling rope that rots in a fortnight, and if in the course of that entirely legitimate business I happen to also think she's the finest thing I've seen since we left Charleston, that is a separate matter entirely and none of your concern, Captain."

Lou let it go, because arguing with Nate in this particular mood was like arguing with weather, and because the crew needed water and provisions regardless of whose heart Nate had misplaced in the process of arranging them. He went ashore himself the following morning, partly to oversee the loading and partly, though he would not have admitted this even to Nate, because four years of hunting men who didn't want to be found had left him with very little appetite for sitting still on a ship while his quartermaster conducted a courtship. Nassau's waterfront market was its usual chaos of shouted prices and stolen goods sold as legitimate salvage, and Lou was three stalls deep into it, haggling over salt pork with a merchant who had clearly never met a customer he couldn't overcharge, when the trouble found him instead of the other way around, which was generally how trouble preferred to operate.

It arrived in the shape of four men, and one of them recognized Lou with a slow and unwelcome dawning, as the captain who'd relieved a particular Spanish merchantman of her silver three days prior. Word traveled fast on the water when silver was involved. The largest of the four, a barrel-built man with a scar of his own bisecting one eyebrow, put a hand on Lou's shoulder with the friendly weight of a man who intended it as anything but friendly, and suggested that perhaps the Widow's Debt owed the honest privateering trade a debt of its own, he'd had that Spanish merchantman circled for weeks before Lou decided to interrupt.

Lou did not raise his voice, which was, as Nate liked to say, always the moment to worry about Lou rather than for him. "You circled her for three weeks and never once closed," he said, "and I took her in an afternoon. That's not theft. That's arithmetic." The barrel-built man did not appreciate the correction, and the market square went from haggling to brawling with the particular speed of a port town where half the population had been waiting all week for an excuse. Lou put the first man down with an elbow and the second with the flat of a belaying pin he'd lifted off a nearby stall specifically for the purpose, and it was going reasonably well right up until the moment a chandlery door banged open behind him and a woman's voice, sharp, furious, entirely unbothered by the violence unfolding twenty feet from her shopfront, informed the entire street that the next man who put a boot through her father's barrels over a dockside grudge would be paying for them out of his own hide, captain or privateer or king of Spain himself.

It was, Lou noted afterward, an extremely effective way to end a brawl. Every man in the square, pirate and privateer and passing fishwife alike, turned to look at Isabela Reyes standing in her doorway with a boat-hook in one hand and an expression that suggested she had broken up more waterfront fights than the local watch had, and the sheer novelty of the interruption did what neither Lou's fists nor the barrel-built man's threats had managed, it stopped things cold. Nate, arriving at a dead run from the direction of the harbor with his shirt half untucked, took one look at the scene, Isabela commanding the street, Lou bleeding faintly from a split lip, four privateers nursing bruises, and said, with the particular delight of a man whose priorities had just been thoroughly vindicated, "See, Captain. Commerce."

They left Nassau the following dawn with water casks full and forty fathoms of good line coiled belowdecks, courtesy of a discount Nate swore up and down had nothing to do with his conversation with Isabela and everything to do with volume purchasing. The promise came from Isabela herself, delivered across the counter of the chandlery with the same flat directness she'd used to end the brawl, she'd take Nate's coin for the rope, she said, but the Debt would put back into Nassau before the season turned, or she'd assume the captain and his charming quartermaster had gone down with all hands, and grieve accordingly, which was to say not at all. Nate had agreed before Lou could object, and Lou found, standing at the rail as the harbor fell away behind them, that he hadn't much wanted to.

What Lou did not mention, in all of it, was the second piece of information he'd gathered in that market square before the fighting started: that one of the four privateers, cursing in Spanish as he'd staggered back to his feet, had done so under a name Lou recognized from the same quiet asking that had given him Cortez's, a name belonging to the second man on his list. The hunt, it seemed, had found them before they'd even properly begun it.