Since my visit to the captain’s cabin, I had begun to see him as a man. But now he again became an iceberg, as towering and frigid as the one we were wedged against. He seethed about the deck, howling his rage. I thought that if the cold didn’t puncture my eardrums, the captain’s bellowing surely would.

Morning light seeped over the tattered, ruined rigging where it lay heaped on the deck. Over the course of the night, the men had dragged Marlowe out from underneath it and he now lay whimpering in the middle of the deck with several jagged splinters of wood protruding from his right leg. It was a gruesome sight, and shortly after setting my eyes on it I turned to the railing and emptied my stomach. From where he crouched at Marlowe’s side, McCrea scowled at me.

“What?” I snapped.

His scowl turned into a bitter smirk. “You’re pathetic, trog.” Periodically, he upended a flask of soured rum, alternating between Marlowe’s mouth and his own.

“Ye’d be best to get ‘im below decks,” Old Frankie advised, squinting at Marlowe’s mangled leg. “The frost’ll take it, else.”

“Hell, I can’t carry him,” McCrea spat, and I had next to no doubt that it was true. Marlowe was a short, sturdy lad, and while McCrea was taller by a number of inches, he was hardly half as wide. “Trog’ll have to do it.”

“His name’s…” Old Frankie began.

“I couldn’t give a piss what his name is,” McCrea interrupted. “He responds well enough to trog.”

A pox on McCrea and his every endeavor. He was right, I supposed. Every time I heard the nickname barked across the decks, I assumed I was being addressed. Well, I wouldn’t. Not anymore, and certainly not to McCrea.

“Where’s the captain?” Jute was gasping like a speared whale as he careened to a slippery halt near us. He was whippish and wheezy and had exceptionally large teeth. At four years McCrea’s elder, he acted like the opposite. He’d a mind like a fishnet, and while he tried his hardest, names didn’t stick. Not once had he called Captain Searly by name, and Old Frankie was commonly referred to as “sir” and “sir” alone. At least he’d never called me “trog.” Even if he had called me a number of other improbable names.

“Cabin,” Marlowe croaked. He licked his ice-colored lips, and McCrea tipped a large swig of rum into his mouth, causing a burst of spluttering and gagging on Marlowe’s part.

“Hellfire, Marlowe, hold your damn liquor,” McCrea cursed. “Liquid warmth, it is. You’re gonna need it, I ain’t sharing your bunk.”

“Captain won’t see no ‘un,” Old Frankie said gently. “What’s the worry, lad?”

“Can see the whole wreck, caught on a berg,” Jute wheezed, a cloud of frozen breath billowing around his head as he pointed starboard. “Captain’ll want to be seeing it.”

“Ain’t we wildly sure of things,” McCrea muttered.

“But it’s got big marks on it!” Jute insisted.

McCrea’s eyes rolled in his head like he couldn’t have stopped them if he wanted to. “It’s a wreck, Jute. It ain’t gonna look like a shiny brig fresh outta harbor.”

Jute turned wide, watery eyes on me. “Gil-he’moahr,” he breathed.

A great sigh heaved out of me. “Go on, then,” I said, exasperated. “Show me the wreck.”

I followed Jute’s slippering steps across the deck. The wind was picking up, hurling fine spray off the surface of the water. The salty spray hardened in the air, stinging as it struck my face. When it froze like that, you couldn’t taste it quite so well as you could when we left home. I craved it, though, the way the salt crusted in my hair and my lips and lived in the crevices of my skin. It had a high hand on the cold. Damn this expedition. I wondered, not for the first time nor the last, why I was here.

“D’you see?” Jute rasped, pointing.

The wreck protruded in several pieces from a smaller berg, putting me in mind of a skeleton. She’d been an old lady already at the time of her demise, which I noted aloud. Old Frankie, who had strolled up behind us, grunted affirmatively.

“But d’you see the claws?” Jute repeated, and I was tempted to slap him for his insistence. But I had no call for dishonesty; sure as the tides, there were several deep gouges in the beams of the wreck that looked odd, undeniably similar to large scratches. I squinted at them for a time, as an attempt to convince myself that my eyes were pranksters after all. I hoped, desperately, but in the end I had to admit that they were ominously claw-like.

“Well,” I began carefully, “It could be…” But it couldn’t be, it couldn’t be anything.

“We ought to tell the captain,” Jute said, sounding entirely too proud of himself. “He’ll want t’know, won’t he, sir?”

A war of interests played out like a theatre drama on Old Frankie’s face. While Captain Searly was in no manner to be disturbed, surely it would be best for him to know that the monster of his expectations was looming in the icebergs. But what was the cause in adding to his wrath, if we were all harmless trogs? We would pass by the gil’he-moahr unnoticed, wouldn’t we?

Oh, but we wouldn’t be passing by anything. Not until the bergs shifted. And even then, we had lost the foresail. The possibility billowed over our heads; we might never see land again. We would die, one by one, stranded in the frozen waters of the northerly seas. Each of us had fallen hopelessly in love with our captain’s vision, and it would be the death of us all.

Starting, I thought, with Marlowe. I made my way back toward him and McCrea. There was an alarming amount of blood, despite the cold that congealed it on the tattered edges of his breeches, and the skin was angry red. Whether from the injury or the cold, I could not tell.

“Well, who’s gonna tell the captain?” Jute persisted, and it dawned on me then that until the issue was resolved, he would not say a word on any other matter. “He ought to know.”

“He sure does, Jute,” McCrea said from where he knelt. He upended the flask into his mouth again, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “So why don’t you go tell him?”

“Don’t be cruel,” Marlowe croaked. His eyes were caught on the snarling grays of the sky above, but they didn’t seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation, and his mouth made little gasping motions like a fish caught out of water. He appeared like a man stricken to the soul. I wondered briefly if his eyes would ever regain their vitality, or his mouth its reckless grins. Or would Marlowe be the first of us to fade into ice and memory?

Without warning, the Jenny tilted steeply to port, sending us all sliding across her ice-glazed decks. Marlowe let out a wail of pain, and Jute let out a shriek of unadulterated terror. I collided with the railing with enough force to spin my head. Then, as suddenly as she had tipped, the Jenny righted herself and stood stagnant once more.

Captain Searly was on the deck in a moment, demanding an explanation. All equally dazed by the sudden movement, none of us responded to his bellowing. I staggered to what I thought was my feet, but soon discovered it was only my knees. McCrea disengaged his mile-long limbs from the confounding tangle of himself and Marlowe, scowling as he did. It seemed that all of his good charm had vanished when we stopped moving.

“You,” the Captain barked, pointing at me. “What happened?”

I shook my fogged head, finally making it to my feet. “I don’t know, Captain,” I said. “The Jenny tipped.”

He snorted, as if I were the greatest disappointment in his life, and stormed away, Old Frankie trailing behind him. As he did, the wind rose from behind me and blew my over-long hair into my face.

My heart dropped into my boots.

“McCrea,” I said, sharp in my panic. “D’you have a compass? I need a compass.”

“Can you read a compass?” he sneered.

“D’you have one or not?”

“No,” he said, throwing up his hands. “No one’s got a compass, less the Captain. I reckon he’s got a fair dozen.”

“Which way is north?” I pressed urgently. The wind persisted behind me.

McCrea’s face went stale with annoyance. “Well, now, that’s a mighty difficult thing for me to know. Me not having a compass, and all. What’s important about it?”

Marlowe made a low creaking noise, pointing limply past me. The action was packed with effort. “North,” he grunted.

Marlowe was renowned on the Jenny for his impeccable sense of direction. My knees met the deck again. “No,” I gasped.

Realization was a slow delivery on McCrea’s face, but when it came to a close, he scoffed. “Oh, you’re cute, trog,” he said. “Thinking the gil’he-moahr are coming for us because the wind is blowing from the north? They’re not real, trog. Use your head.”

The Jenny’s timbers shuddered beneath us, and I felt a deep vibration in my very bones. Startled chirps rose from the crew. Even McCrea’s smug confidence faltered for a moment. For half a moment, the only sound was Marlowe’s strained, raspy breath. I think the rest of us were holding ours. Then, even in the dim gray light, a shadow fell over us. Looking up, my jaw dropped.

Good God, save us.