"We need to go into town," Richard said, more than half to himself. He would have been a lubber if he could. He didn't love the sea the way Edward and Henry did. But he was a fisherman's son, and so he sailed with them.

The St. George squeezed into a place at the quays just ahead of a Basque boat. The Basques, dark, blocky fellows with eyebrows that ran straight across their foreheads with no break above the nose, shouted what sounded like abuse in their peculiar language. People said the Devil himself couldn't learn it. Edward didn't know about that, but he knew he couldn't-and, besides English, he could get along in Dutch and French and, not quite so well, Breton.

"First things first," he declared. "We get the salt. We bring it back to the boat. Then we worry about everything else."

Nobody told him no, which only showed how much the crew respected him. The fishermen were men-they wanted to gamble and drink and whore before they sailed off into the wild wet wasteland of the Atlantic. They'd already had a rough passage around Cap Finistere-Land's End, the same name as the westernmost tip of Cornwall-to get here. They'd earned relief. And they would get it…once they did what needed doing.

Master Jean Abrgall sold the best salt in Le Croisic. The flower of salt, he called it-none of the gray, ordinary stuff mixed in. "Hello, you old thief," Radcliffe greeted him in Breton when the fishermen came up to him. Abrgall spoke perfect French, too, but he preferred the tongue he'd spoken since he was a baby.

"Yer mat, gast Saoz," he replied in that tongue. Cheers, whore of an Englishman, it meant-something like that, anyhow. Radcliffe bowed, as if at a compliment. Abrgall gave him a thin smile: the equivalent of another man's guffaw. He went on, "So the sea serpents didn't bite you and the mermaids didn't drag you under, eh?"