-- by the frost in my blood and the chill in my bones

down, down, down, down, a northerly wind blows.

The old maps never lie. Here there be monsters. In the lands far to the north where the sky meets the ice, I saw them. I was hardly old enough to shave then, tying knots and scrubbing the decks of the Skybound Jenny under the watchful eye of Captain Searly. Not that I was much good at it; how could I be, when the water froze in the instant it touched the deck? I learned fair early that my fingers were of more use to the captain and myself if they weren’t black with cold, and kept them in my pockets when they weren’t strictly necessary.

I wondered with some frequency why the captain should sail us so far north. The cold bit like a savage, and on the worst days I thought my eyelashes would freeze together. There’s not a place on the globe quite so hostile. Oh, but the north called to Captain Searly like a siren in the rocks, and was just as deadly. He flourished out there. Strange, it was. Uncanny.

He was an iceberg of a man, the captain. I thought it every day as we navigated around the frozen behemoths, shearing deadly close to their jagged ribs. He would storm about the decks, looking every bit as colossal and every bit as mighty. The bergs can put a hole in a ship like nothing else, and the captain could, too. He was quick with a gun and quicker with a word. He snuck up on you when you daydreamed, scaring the wits out of you when he was suddenly towering over you. He had little patience for tomfoolery. If ever a man had eyes like the ice, it was him. Naturally, I wanted to be exactly like him.

The rest of the men were a different tangle of rigging altogether. Not a soft soul among them, but on the days where it wasn’t too cold to speak, they’d throw tales across the deck. Sometimes I’d get so caught in the stories that the captain would come up beside me and kick over my bucket, a none-too-subtle reminder to get back to work. Oh, the stories they told! They spoke of sirens in the southeast, and selkies in the west.

“What about the north?” I asked once. That afternoon, we were caught between a pair of ice floes; it had been hours since we’d moved an inch. Mother Nature gave us the grace of fair weather that day, and weak sunlight was straining its way through the clouds. The captain was hopeful that we’d be moving before morning.

McCrea winked at me. He thought he was a charming devil, although he wasn’t quite a packet of brains, and not many years older than myself. “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you, trog?”

Old Frankie waved his hand absently. He was in his sixties already, which made him the oldest person I had ever met. This was to be his last voyage. “Never ye mind, lad,” he said. “There’s nothing can survive this frost.”

McCrea winked at Marlowe and then started whistling. You couldn’t accuse him of being good for much, but he could whistle fit to summon the selkies. Marlowe grinned, comically tugging his pipe out of his tobacco-stained teeth to pick up the melody. Others joined in, and soon their strange, throaty chanting echoed off the icebergs. Their words, if they were words at all, weren’t in any language I knew; I could make no heads or tales of them. Eventually, they raked to a halt with a cacophony of laughter.

“What does it mean?” I asked, loud enough to be heard over their lively chatter.

Still chortling in that ungainly way of his, Marlowe held a half-blackened finger before his lips. “Shh-hhh,” he sputtered at me. “Don’t want to wake the gil’he-moahr.”

“The what?” I asked, already halfway enraptured.

Old Frankie dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “The gil’he-moahr,” he repeated. “It’s a fairy story, lad. Never ye mind, I says.”

McCrea swooped down on us with his coat stretched open like wings. He was hardly wider than a rope underneath it. Paired with his inability to wear his clothes properly, it was a mighty wonder that he hadn’t yet frozen to death. “They sleep in the bergs most of times,” he said, a wicked grin on his face. “But when a ship comes through and the winds come down from the north, they can sniff out skinny little trogs like yourself and it gets their appetites a-running. The air’ll go so cold, and they’ll swoop in and snatch you right off the deck. Don’t even care about smashing the ship.”

“Smithereens,” Marlowe added enthusiastically.

“If it’s trogs they’re after, they’ll take the lot of you,” the captain bellowed. The men all scrambled to look busy, but the captain paid them no mind. He was looking right at me. I could feel his eyes on me as I fixed mine on my bucket, waiting for the captain’s boot to topple it. I couldn’t quite move; the air seemed a thousand times colder than it was before. My sodden rag twisted into a tight ball in my fists, mimicking the knot of terror in my belly.

Captain Searly tapped my bucket with his toe, his shadow crashing over me like ill omens. A little scoff trailed out of him, and he popped his knuckles. “Get up, lad,” he boomed. I did.

He waved me over to his cabin, and I followed, tripping over my own feet like a trog. The cabin was barely warmer than the rest of the ship, but he shed his great oiled coat and tossed it over the back of his chair. “The gil’he-moahr isn't a myth,” he said bluntly, hauling a wide volume off the shelf and flipping it open on his desk. The paper was oiled to proof it against the sea spray, and it was translucent as a result. He turned the book toward me and tapped the page with a thick forefinger. “See that?”

I squinted at the writing on the page. I couldn’t even begin to make out what it said. “I can’t read,” I confessed.

Captain Searly snorted. “Some catch you are,” he muttered. “Give me the book.” He didn’t wait for me to comply, turning it back toward himself. He skimmed the page briefly, then snapped the book shut. “They aren’t after trogs,” he concluded. “When they wake, the wind blows from the north and the gil’he-moahr can smell out the damned.”

“How?” I asked, awestruck.

“Beats me,” the captain said shortly. “I’ve filled my ship with the best of men I could find. They’re trogs, right enough, but they’re harmless trogs. With any luck we can pass by without the attention of the gil’he-moahr.”

Another question flared up on my tongue, but I can’t remember what it would have been now, because I never got to saying it. Trailing his coat in his haste, the captain flung the door open and gestured for me to leave. I complied, of course. What else could I do?

The second my boots hit the deck, the Jenny lurched and shuddered, and she was moving again. A great, rousing cheer rose from the men, and the captain started barking orders. Night was reaching down, at which we would normally lay anchor and wait out until we could see by natural light, but the captain was strangely animated. “We’re close,” I heard him say. “We’re so close.”

The floes crunched under her keel as the Jenny rolled forward. We were moving again, moving toward the northwest. The air went thick with excitement, so heavy I could taste it. Well into the night, we navigated the channels between the hulking masses of ice that rose and fell in the dark like a bad ghost story. My washing bucket had long since frozen over, but I jogged about the deck, trying not to slip and spill the precious coffee I was handing out by order of our cook. It was a night to rejoice, Pat had told me. If the captain thought we were close, we must be, and that was a thing to celebrate.

I was delivering a small cup of the precious liquid warmth to Old Frankie at the stern of the ship when Marlowe let out a startled yelp from the rigging. “Captain!” he warbled, his words oddly strangled. “Bow starboard!”

I whirled around, squinting in hopes of seeing what Marlowe was squawking about, but I hardly had need to. Directly ahead of the Jenny’s starboard rigging, reaching out of the dark like a skeletal hand, there lay a half-splintered mast from some ship lost to the bergs.

The captain’s head whipped toward the port side of the ship, where we were barely scraping past the rough edge of an iceberg whose spine was nearly of a height with the Jenny’s mast. There wasn’t enough room to steer clear of the mast without falling prey to the bergs, and not time to throw anchor. Before the Captain could reach a decision, there was a deafening crunch as the crippled mast struck the forward mast of the Jenny. She ground to a staggering halt. Low, agonizing groans rose again from her depths, followed by a sound that convinced shivers out over my skin. The grinding, creaking cacophony of splitting wood, and the Jenny’s forward mast crashed through the railing and into the berg on our port side, effectively wedging us between the ruined ship and the wall of ice.

I had never heard such profanity as the chain of words that spilled from Captain Searly’s mouth.