Read Chapter 34: The Forced March

The stern was gone. Not burning, not smoldering—gone, the great curve of oak and iron swallowed by a furnace that had already eaten the mizzenmast and was working its way forward through the sail locker. Harlow stood on the foredeck, the heat licking at his face despite the cold, and watched the flames claw toward the main hold where the remaining powder was stored.

“We can’t fight it,” Macready said, swaying where he stood, his arm bound in a blood-darkened sling. “The fire’s got the run of her. And whoever those bastards were, they’ve got the guns and the dark to hide in.”

Harlow turned from the blaze. Behind him, on the ice, the scattered remnants of his crew—twenty-three men, most of them wounded or exhausted—watched the ship they’d called home for eleven months turn to ash. The strangers who had taken the armory had vanished back into the ship’s guts when the fire broke out, either dead in the blaze or hiding below, waiting to pick off whoever remained.

“Powder’s forward,” Harlow said. “If she blows, she takes the whole bay with her.”

“Then we go now.” Captain Wentworth had appeared at his elbow, face blackened with soot, a cut seeping through the bandage on his temple. “We haul what we can onto the ice and get clear before she goes.”

Harlow nodded. It was the only play. The ice would not break for weeks, maybe months. The ship was dying. Mercer had the channel charted and a whaleboat, but Harlow held the tide tables—his only advantage, if he could find a way to put them to use.

“Davies, strike the tents from the hold,” Harlow ordered. “Peterson, take four men and haul every cask of biscuit and salt meat we can carry, hands and knees if you have to—get it on the ice before the fire reaches the stores.”

“What about the strangers?” Liam stood at the edge of the gathering, his face pale beneath its crust of frost. He had not flinched when the fire broke out. He had not flinched when Harlow had brought him before Mercer and watched his father disown him on the ice. But now his voice shook. “They’re still aboard.”

“They’re not coming out,” Harlow said. “They didn’t come to survive. They came to stop us.” He looked at Liam, then at the faces of his men—men who had followed him through ice, through mutiny, through the slow grinding death of hope. “We don’t give them that satisfaction. Get what we can, and we abandon her.”

The work was chaos, but ordered chaos. Men hauled sledges across the ice, their breath pluming in the orange light of the dying ship. The Discovery groaned behind them, timbers shrieking as the fire found new fuel, and Harlow kept his eyes forward, counting the loads, calculating what they had. Two tents. Twelve casks of biscuit. Eighty pounds of salt pork. Medical chest, though half its contents had been burned. The chronometer, wrapped in canvas, and Mercer’s tide charts, pressed flat against his chest beneath his coat.

And thirty-seven men on the ice, including Mercer’s deserters, who had drifted back to the ship when the whaleboat had pulled away without them. They stood apart from Harlow’s loyalists, uneasy and armed with nothing but their guilt.

“They’re a liability,” Macready said, jerking his chin at the deserters. “They’ll eat our rations and slit our throats come the first bad night.”

“They’re not our enemy,” Harlow said. “Mercer is. And the men who burned our ship are. These men made a mistake, that’s all. We need hands, not grudges.”

He found Peterson, who had lashed the last sledge and stood watching the ship with loose shoulders and a grief Harlow recognized. “Make the course north by northeast, toward the sound. If Mercer’s tide charts are right, there’s open water past the shear zone, no more than twenty miles.”

“Twenty miles,” Peterson repeated. “On this ice, that’s a week. Maybe ten days.”

“Then we start walking.”

They did. The sledges groaned across the pressure ridges, ropes dug into shoulders through layers of wool and oilskin, and the Discovery burned behind them until the bay was a bowl of molten gold and black smoke. Harlow did not look back. He could not afford to.

The first day, the ice held firm beneath them, blue-white and solid as the deck of a ship. The men moved in ragged columns, the wounded in the center, the deserters on the flanks where Harlow could watch them. Liam walked beside him, silent for miles, and Harlow let the boy find his own pace. He had forced Liam to face a father who had denied him. That was enough for one day.

By midafternoon of the second day, the weather changed.

The wind shifted north, and the sky went from a pale, endless white to a bruised and rolling gray. Harlow felt the temperature drop through three layers of wool, felt the air turn brittle against his cheeks. Old ice underfoot—cracked and weathered, safe as bedrock—began to give way to the duller sound of new ice beneath the man-hauled sledges. He stopped the column at the edge of a plain of it, a flat sheet extending to the horizon.

“This is young ice,” Macready said, kneeling to press his hand against the surface. “Three inches, maybe four. Won’t hold a man, let alone a loaded sledge.”

Harlow pulled out the tide charts, unfolding them against the wind. The paper snapped and fluttered, but the pencil marks were clear—a series of leads, sketched during Mercer’s own reconnaissance months ago. There was a route south, marked as a string of channels that might connect to the open sea. But to reach it, they’d have to cross this young ice or go around, adding days they didn’t have.

“We go across,” Harlow said.

“We’ll go under,” Macready said.

“We spread out. Lighten the sledges. Haul in relays, one at a time, each man fifty feet apart so the weight’s not concentrated.” Harlow folded the chart and tucked it back inside his coat. “We’ll cross in daylight hours, and we’ll cross in groups of three. If the ice gives under one man, the others can pull him out.”

“And if it gives under a sledge?”

“Then we lose the sledge, not the men.” Harlow looked at Macready. “I’m not leaving anyone to the water, and I’m not leaving the charts to rot on a burning ship. We cross.”

They made the crossing in the dying hours of the light, the ice groaning beneath them like a living thing in pain. Men moved in thin, single-file lines, ropes tied around their waists and stretching between them like the strands of a spider’s web. The sledges came last, dragged across the thin sheet with agonizing slowness, the ice creaking and bowing under each load.

Three times the ice cracked. Three times the men hauled the last of their supplies forward before the black water surged up to swallow the trail behind them. And when they reached the far side, the last light of day bleeding across the horizon like a wound, Harlow looked back and saw the smoke of the Discovery still hanging over the bay, a black smudge against the sky.

“We made it,” Liam said, collapsing onto the snow.

“We made it,” Harlow said. He looked at the horizon to the south, where the open water was waiting, cold and black and endless. “But we’re not done yet.”

He turned back to the sledges to check the loads, and that’s when he saw it. A figure on the far edge of the column, standing apart from the men, wrapped in a coat that Harlow knew better than any coat should have known. The figure was watching him. And when the light caught its face, Harlow felt the blood drain from his own.

It was Mercer. Not with the whaleboat. Walking. Walking across the ice, behind them, alone, with the slow and terrible patience of a man who had nowhere else to be.

Liam saw him too. “Father,” he whispered.

Mercer did not approach. He stood at the edge of the camp, a silhouette against the burning sky, and raised his hand in a gesture that was almost a wave. Then he turned and walked south, not toward his channel, not toward the ship, but toward the same open water Harlow had charted.

And he was carrying his own tide charts, folded and tucked into his coat—Mercer’s maps, which Harlow had thought he’d secured. The man had kept copies.

Harlow stood in the wind and watched the captain walk away, and something cold that had nothing to do with the ice settled into his chest. Mercer was not trying to escape. Mercer was going to the same place they were going.

And he would get there first.