The Widow's Debt rolled beneath him like something breathing, and Lucian Cyphir had long since stopped minding the difference. Four years at sea did that to a man, turned the deck into the only ground that made sense anymore. He stood at the rail with a spyglass pressed to his eye, watching a fat Spanish merchantman wallow low in the water off the Florida shoals, and he did not think of his father's shipyard, or the mud, or the fourteen months his mother had spent dying with her eyes open. He had trained himself not to think of those things while working. Working required a clear head. The remembering came later, always later, in the black hours when the crew slept and the sea had nothing left to say to him.

"She's riding heavy," said Nathaniel Crowe, dropping down beside him with the particular boneless grace of a man who had never once in his life worried about falling. Nate had a gull's feather tucked behind one ear for reasons he refused to explain, and a grin that had talked them both out of at least three hangings that Lou knew of. "Silver, you think? Or sugar?"

"Silver doesn't sit that low," Lou said, snapping the glass shut. "Sugar doesn't sit that low either, not on a hull that size. That's something heavier. Ballast-heavy. Could be ore." He handed the glass over so Nate could see for himself, though Nate's opinion on cargo weight was worth exactly nothing and they both knew it. Nate looked anyway, because looking at things through Lou's glass was a habit from boyhood neither of them had bothered to break.

"Could be nothing," Nate said. "Could be a trap. Governor's been putting bait ships out since March."

"Could be." Lou didn't argue the point, because Nate wasn't wrong to raise it, three months back a merchantman off Nassau had turned out to carry forty marines below decks instead of cargo, and the Debt had lost six good men learning that lesson. But Lou had been watching this particular ship since dawn, and something in the way she moved, sluggish, unescorted, riding a course too close to the shoals for a naval trap, told him she was exactly what she appeared to be. Frightened. Alone. Carrying something her captain didn't want to lose.

He gave the order low, the way he always did, and the crew of the Widow's Debt began the quiet work of becoming a threat. Sails adjusted by degrees so as not to spook a lookout scanning the horizon. Gunports left shut until the last possible moment, Lou had learned that much from three years under Captain Josiah Kell before the old man had finally drunk himself into the sea, rest whatever passed for his soul: a ship with her teeth showing was a ship that got fought instead of surrendered to, and Lou preferred his engagements to end with words rather than powder whenever the choice was his to make. Words were cheaper. Blood, once spent, didn't come back into the purse.

It was Nate who noticed the flag change first, the Spanish merchant colors dropping, replaced by nothing at all, which in its own way said more than any flag could have. A ship that struck her colors rather than raise a white one was a ship whose captain had already decided he'd rather not die today, formalities be damned. Lou allowed himself something close to satisfaction, the flat, functional satisfaction of a plan executed cleanly.

The boarding went easier than the fight before it usually did. Twelve Spanish sailors, a merchant captain who wept with relief rather than rage when Lou promised him his life and his longboat, and belowdecks, packed in crates marked as ships' fittings, enough silver bar to make even Nate go quiet for a full ten seconds, a personal record. Lou walked the hold himself, running a hand along the crates, doing the arithmetic he always did without meaning to: enough to keep the crew fed and armed for the season, enough to keep the Debt seaworthy, and never, not once in four years, enough to buy back a burned shipyard or two graves on a Carolina hillside. Some debts didn't price out in silver. He'd learned that particular lesson standing over his mother's coffin, and no amount of Spanish treasure had managed to unteach it since.

It was the merchant captain, babbling gratitude and terror in equal measure as they lowered him into his longboat, who said the name that changed the shape of Lou's evening. "You are merciful, señor, more merciful than the men who took the Aránzazu last spring. Cortez does not leave men alive to be grateful." He said it the way frightened men say things they think will earn them favor, a compliment disguised as comparison, and he had no way of knowing that the name had landed on Lou like a struck flint. Rafael Cortez. One of three names Lou had carried in his chest since he was nineteen years old, written there in a hand steadier than his voice had been the night he'd first heard it spoken plainly, one thread among the many he'd pulled at, in taverns and shipping offices, in the long quiet asking that had filled the year after his mother died.

Lou did not let his face change. Four years of this life had taught him that much, at least, that the men worth fearing were the ones who gave nothing away. But when the longboat pulled clear and Nate turned to him grinning, already halfway into a joke about their haul, he found Lou staring out toward the empty southern horizon with a flat, functional stillness Nate hadn't seen in a long while, not since a night in a Charleston tavern when Lou had first told him, quiet and flat and final, the names of the three men he intended to kill before God or the gallows caught up with him first.

"Lou," Nate said, the grin fading. "What is it."

Lou didn't answer right away. He was thinking of a burned shipyard, and a woman by a window, and the particular shade of gray the Carolina sky had turned the morning they'd buried her. Then he turned to Nate, and his voice, when it came, was the coldest thing on that ship.

"Change of course," he said. "We're going hunting."