Read Chapter 32: The Negotiation

The steam rose off the coffee in Harlow’s hands, bitter and thin, the last of a ration he’d been hoarding for three days. He stood at the aft rail of the *Discovery*, watching the water creep up the hull seams. She listed seven degrees to starboard now, and every groan of her timbers sounded like a confession.

Liam stood beside him, shivering despite the sheepskin coat Harlow had thrown over his shoulders. The boy looked younger than his sixteen years in the gray cave light, pale as the frost on the rigging.

“You’re certain he was heading for the channel mouth?” Harlow asked, not for the first time.

“He said three days to his depot. That was yesterday.” Liam’s voice cracked. “If he’s moving fast, he’s already through the narrows.”

Harlow nodded slowly. The hidden harbor inside the glacier wall had proved a trap as much as a sanctuary—open water, yes, but the only exit was the tide-driven channel Mercer had discovered, and Mercer’s men controlled it now from a rocky spit a quarter-mile across the bay. Between them and the channel sat twenty yards of black water and a whaleboat that Harlow’s party had dragged ashore for repairs just before the sabotage was discovered.

The sabotage. The rudder hung limp and useless, its iron fittings sheared clean through. Whoever had done the work had known ships. Had known exactly where to strike.

Harlow turned to face Liam. “You understand what I’m asking you to do.”

The boy swallowed. “You want me to stand in front of him. Claim him as my father.”

“I want you to stand there while I claim him as a father who abandoned his dying wife and his only son to chase a map.” Harlow’s voice was flat. “And then I want you to look him in the eye and not blink.”

Liam’s jaw tightened. A good sign. The boy had spine, even if his hands shook.

“He’ll deny me,” Liam said. “He always has.”

“I know.”

“Then why—?”

“Because denial is easier when there’s no audience.” Harlow set down his coffee and adjusted his coat. “Your mother and I go back a long way, Liam. I knew her before Mercer did. And I know that she kept your father’s letters, every one of them, in a cedar box beside her bed. Letters that mention you by name.”

Something shifted in the boy’s face—a small crack in the armor of his cynicism. “You’ve seen them?”

“I’ve read two of them, years ago, when your mother asked my advice about a man who promised her the world and delivered only a child and an empty bed.” Harlow put a hand on Liam’s shoulder. “He may not be a good man. But he is your father, and before this is done, I will make him choose what that costs him.”

They rowed across the bay in the damaged whaleboat, Harlow at the oars with two of his most loyal men—Samuel, the ship’s carpenter, and Davies, a harpooner with arms like hawsers. Liam sat in the bow, his face a mask of forced calm. The water was unnaturally still here, sheltered from the wind that howled across the open leads beyond the glacier. The air smelled of brine and something else, something mineral and sulfurous, as if the earth itself were breathing beneath them.

Mercer’s camp came into view around a shoulder of basalt: three tents, a cookfire, and the captain himself standing at the water’s edge, watching their approach with the unblinking patience of a man who had learned to wait for exactly what he wanted.

Behind him, five men—the five who had sided with him, Harlow noted, cataloguing each face. Roberts, the bosun. Clancy, the cooper. Two hands whose names Harlow knew but whose loyalty he’d misjudged. And the fifth, Morgan, who had once claimed to owe Harlow his life.

That one hurt. But Harlow filed the hurt away for later.

Mercer raised a hand as the whaleboat grounded on the rocky shore. “James. I wondered how long you’d take to come begging.”

“I’m not begging.” Harlow stepped out, boots crunching on the frost-covered stones. “I’m negotiating.”

“Negotiating requires leverage.” Mercer’s smile was thin and humorless. “Your ship is crippled. Your men are divided. Your supplies are on my boats, heading for open water. What exactly do you think you have to offer?”

Harlow gestured to Liam, who had climbed ashore and now stood a few paces behind him, hood down, face bare to the cold. “Him.”

Mercer’s eyes flicked to the boy and away. A microsecond of recognition, quickly suppressed. “The stowaway. I wondered when you’d realize he was mine.”

“Your son,” Harlow said. “Your only child. The boy your wife Eleanor is dying waiting to see in Portsmouth.”

Mercer’s face went carefully blank. “Eleanor’s condition has nothing to do with this.”

“It has everything to do with this. You faked your death to get to this passage. You sabotaged my ship to keep me from following. You left your crew to starve in the ice while you chase glory.” Harlow took a step forward. “But you didn’t tell your own son. You left him on my ship, spying for you, not knowing whether you were alive or dead.”

Liam’s voice came out steadier than Harlow expected. “You told me you’d send for Mother. You said once you found your passage, you’d go back and make it right.” The boy’s chin trembled, but his eyes stayed dry. “You lied.”

For a long moment, Mercer said nothing. The only sounds were the wind and the distant creak of ice. Then he laughed—a short, sharp bark that echoed off the basalt.

“You think I’m moved by sentiment, James? You think a boy and a dying woman are leverage against what I’ve found?” He gestured at the channel behind him, the narrow throat of water that pulsed with the tide. “This is a door that opens once every twelve hours. When it opens, I go through it. When I go through it, I sail into history. And no child, no wife, no memory of a softer life will stand between me and that.”

Harlow felt Liam’s posture falter beside him. He reached back and gripped the boy’s arm, steadying him.

“You said once,” Harlow said quietly, “that the only thing you feared was being forgotten. That’s why you took this commission. That’s why you abandoned everything else.”

Mercer’s eyes glittered. “And I’ll be remembered. Not as the captain who froze in the ice, but as the man who found the passage.”

“You’ll be remembered as the man who left his son to die.”

“The boy will go with you when you figure out how to free your ship. Or he’ll stay. I don’t care.” Mercer turned away, dismissing them. “Take him back to your frozen coffin, James. Tell him whatever story you like. But if you come near my camp again, I’ll consider it an act of war.”

He was already walking away, his men closing ranks behind him.

Harlow stood in the cold, Liam’s hand clutched in his own, and felt the weight of his failure settle onto his shoulders like the ice itself. He had bet everything on Mercer’s humanity. He had lost.

And then Liam whispered, so softly that only Harlow could hear: “He doesn’t know about the rudder.”

Harlow blinked. “What?”

“The rudder. I didn’t sabotage it. And neither did anyone on your crew.” Liam’s eyes were wide, the pieces forming visibly behind them. “I was belowdecks when I heard it. Four men, voices I didn’t recognize. They weren’t from the *Discovery*. They were already on the ship, James. They were waiting for us.”

The cold that ran through Harlow then was deeper than any Arctic wind. He looked at Mercer’s retreating back, at the five loyalists who flanked him, at the channel that led to the open sea.

If the rudder hadn’t been sabotaged by Mercer’s men—

Then who had done it? And where were those four men now?