Read Chapter 11: The Frozen Dead

The cold had settled into a thing that breathed, each exhalation a gust that stung the eyes and crackled in the beard. Harlow stood at the edge of camp, watching the gray dawn bleed across the ice. He had not slept. The memory of Cummings’s face—twisted in defiance, then fading into the dark—was a splinter he could not work free.

“Sir.”

He turned. Bryant stood behind him, rifle cradled across his chest, breath pluming in the frigid air. The steward’s expression was unreadable, but his eyes flicked toward the empty tents, the thin line of men who remained.

“We need to go after them,” Bryant said. It was not a question.

Harlow looked past him, at the crew. Eleven men left. They stood in small clusters, shoulders hunched against the wind and against each other. Cole was among them, face like stone, arms folded. Harlow had not missed the way Cole had stepped aside when Cummings made his move. He had not missed the way Cole’s eyes followed him now, measuring.

“We do,” Harlow said. “They took provisions enough for a week, but they’ve no charts worth the name and no compass that works in this godforsaken place. They’ll be dead by nightfall if they’re lucky.”

“And if they’re not?”

Harlow didn’t answer. He turned and walked toward the supply tent, Bryant falling in beside him. The canvas flap was torn where the mutineers had ripped it open, and the interior was a wreck of scattered crates and trampled snow. But there was rope, and there was a coil of wire, and there were three lanterns still full of oil. Harlow gathered them without speaking.

Cole appeared in the tent opening, blocking the meager light. “You’re going after them.”

“I’m going after what’s mine,” Harlow said. “The supplies. And the men, if they’ll come back.”

“They won’t.”

“Then they’ll be buried proper, at least.”

Cole’s jaw tightened. He stood aside as Harlow stepped past him, but Harlow caught the look that passed between Cole and Bryant—brief, knowing. He filed it away.

The search party set out an hour later. Harlow, Bryant, and two men Harlow trusted least but needed most: the sailmaker, Webb, and a sullen deckhand named Petty. They followed the mutineers’ trail south, a faint scar of boot prints and sledge runners cutting through the drifts. The wind had already begun to erase it, but the tracks were fresh enough—tarred canvas and wool, the smell of men who had not washed in weeks, oil and sweat and fear.

They walked for three hours. The sun climbed but gave no warmth, a pale coin lost in the white sky. Harlow kept his eyes on the tracks, but his mind was elsewhere—on Liam, hidden in the cutter with his cryptic warnings, on the compass with its scratched inscription that refused to yield its meaning, on the weight of the revolver at his hip that he had not fired when he should have.

“There,” Webb said.

He pointed ahead. A dark shape lay sprawled in the snow, a hundred yards off—a man’s body, twisted and still. Harlow quickened his pace, the rime crunching beneath his boots. As he drew closer, the shape resolved into the form of Miller, one of the stokers who had followed Cummings. He lay on his back, arms flung wide, as if he had been thrown there. His face was a ruin of frozen blood, clawed and torn.

Harlow stopped. He heard Petty retch behind him.

“Bears,” Bryant said quietly. “They must have circled back.”

Harlow forced himself to look. The body was not whole. One leg was gone at the hip, the frozen wound jagged and black. The snow around him was a field of churned red, now hard as granite. He had not died quickly.

“Spread out,” Harlow said. His voice was steady, which surprised him. “Find the others.”

They found them in a shallow depression a quarter mile on, where the mutineers had apparently made camp. The sledge lay on its side, its contents scattered—food bags torn open and devoured, a lantern crushed, the canvas cover ripped to ribbons. Bodies were everywhere. Three men lay together, as if they had tried to form a last defense before the bears broke through. Their rifles were empty, their hands frozen around the barrels.

Cummings was apart, propped against a hummock of ice. He had died on his knees, it seemed, his back against the mound and his arms crossed over his chest. His face was calm, almost serene—the expression of a man who had made his peace in his final moments. But his hands were gone, severed cleanly at the wrists and taken.

Harlow stood before him and felt nothing. That was the strangest part. He had hated Cummings for what he’d done to the crew, to his command, to the fragile hope that held them together. Now he only saw a dead man who had made the wrong choice, and the ice had taken him for it.

“They got one,” Bryant said. He pointed to a bloody smear leading off to the east—a drag mark, wide and deep, where a wounded bear had hauled itself away.

Harlow nodded. “Good.” He turned to the others. “Gather the bodies. We carry them back.”

“Carry them?” Petty’s voice cracked. “Sir, that’s five men. We can’t—”

“We are not leaving them for the bears,” Harlow said. “We bury them at the camp, in the ground if we can break it, under the cairn if we cannot. They were our men. They died our deaths.”

The argument died in Petty’s throat. They worked in silence, wrapping the bodies in canvas from the torn sledge cover, lashing them to the overturned runners. The work was brutal, cold, and slow. Harlow’s fingers went numb inside his gloves, and his back screamed from the weight of the frozen dead. But he did not stop, and neither did the others.

The return journey took four hours. The sun had begun its long descent toward the horizon, painting the ice with bands of orange and violet, when they stumbled into camp. The remaining crew gathered in a loose circle as Harlow and his men lowered the canvas-wrapped bodies to the snow. No one spoke. The wind whistled through the rigging of the Discovery, a mournful sound that seemed to hang in the air.

Harlow looked at the men. Their faces were hollow, lit by the orange glow of the dying day. He saw fear in some, exhaustion in others, and in a few—Cole’s among them—a hard, calculating glint that he did not like.

“We will dig their graves in the morning,” he said. “The ground is soft enough near the floe edge. They will rest in the sea, as sailors should.”

“They were mutineers,” Cole said. His voice was flat. “They abandoned us. They stole our food and walked out to die. Why do we honor them?”

Harlow met his gaze. “Because they were ours once. Because if we stop being men who bury their dead, we are no better than the ice.” He paused. “And because we may yet make the same choice, any of us. We should hope that someone remembers us for who we were before that choice, not after.”

Cole’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. The circle broke apart, men drifting back to their tents, their duties, their private fears. Harlow remained in the center of the camp, the snow rime collecting on his shoulders. He felt the weight of five dead men pressing down on him, and of one who had walked away whole.

Bryant came to stand beside him. “You did the right thing, bringing them back.”

“Did I?” Harlow’s voice was quiet. “Cummings was right about one thing. I didn’t have the nerve to stop him. I let him walk out with enough food to keep these men alive if rationed properly, and I did nothing but watch.”

“You held your fire because you didn’t want to kill your own crew.”

“And now they’re dead anyway.” Harlow turned to face him. “The ice doesn’t care about my principles. It takes what it wants, and it took them. And it will take more of us before this is through.”

Bryant was silent for a long moment. Then: “What do we do now?”

Harlow looked past him, toward the camp, toward the ship, toward the invisible line that led to the cutter where Liam waited. The compass in his pocket felt heavy, its hidden message burning against his thigh.

“We wait for the thaw,” he said. “And we prepare. Because when the ice opens, we have one chance to sail through it. And I will not waste it.” He paused, and his voice dropped. “But first, I have a question that needs answering.”

Bryant frowned. “What question?”

Harlow did not answer. He walked away, leaving Bryant in the gathering dark, and made his way toward the edge of camp, where the cutter lay covered in snow. He had promised himself he would not expose Liam. But he could no longer carry Mercer’s secrets alone. The boy held the key, and Harlow needed to turn the lock.

He paused at the cutter’s tarpaulin, hand raised to pull it back, and listened. The camp was quiet. The men were settling. No one watched.

He pulled the tarpaulin aside and climbed in.