Something is coming down the high ridge behind him.

Crozier turns the oil lantern up and sets it on the ice. The circle of golden light reaches barely fifteen feet and makes the darkness beyond all the worse. Using his teeth, he pulls off his heavy mitten, lets it drop to the ice, leaving only a thin glove on that hand, shifts the boat pike to his left hand, and pulls his pistol from his coat pocket. Crozier cocks the weapon as the rustle of sliding ice and snow on the pressure ridge becomes louder. The line of shadow from the iceberg blocks the moonlight here and the captain can make out only the huge shapes of ice blocks seeming to move and shift in the flickering light.

Then something furry and indistinct moves along the ice ledge he has just descended, some ten feet above him and less than fifteen feet to the west, well within leaping distance.

“Halt,” Crozier says, extending the heavy pistol. “Identify yourself.”

The shape makes no sound. It moves again.

Crozier holds his fire. Dropping the long boat pike, he grabs up the lantern and thrusts it forward.

He sees the rippling fur moving and almost fires, but checks himself at the last instant. The shape slides lower, moving quickly and surely down onto the ice. Crozier lowers the hammer on his pistol and sets it back in his pocket, crouching to retrieve his mitten even while keeping the lantern extended.

Lady Silence walks into the light, her fur parka and sealskin pants making her look like some short, rounded beast. The hood is pulled forward against the wind and Crozier cannot see her face.

“God-damn it, woman,” he says softly. “You came a horny seaman’s second from being shot. Where the hell have you been, anyway?”

She steps closer, almost within reaching distance, but her face remains veiled by darkness within the hood.

Feeling a sudden chill along the back of his neck and down his spine – Crozier is remembering his grandmother Moira’s description of a banshee’s transparent skull face within the folds of its black hood – he raises the lantern between them.

The young woman’s face is human, not banshee, the dark eyes wide as they reflect the light. She has no expression. Crozier realizes that he has never seen an expression on her face, other than perhaps a mildly inquisitive look. Not even on the day they shot and killed her husband or brother or father and she watched the man choke to death on his own blood.

“No wonder the men think you’re a witch and a Jonah,” says Crozier. On the ship, in front of the men, he is always polite and formal to this Esquimaux wench, but he is not on the ship or in front of the men now. It is the first and only time he and the damned woman have been away from the ship at the same time. And he is very cold and very tired.

Lady Silence stares at him. Then she extends a mittened hand, Crozier lowers the lamp toward it, and he sees that she is offering him something – a limp grey offering, like a fish that has been gutted and boned, leaving only the skin.

He realizes that it is a crewman’s woolen stocking.

Crozier takes it, feels the lump at the toe of the sock, and for a second is sure that the lump will be part of a man’s foot, probably the ball of the foot and the toes, still pink and warm.

Crozier has been to France and known men posted to India. He has heard the story of werewolves and were-tigers. In Van Diemen’s Land, where he met Sophia Cracroft, she told him of the locals’ tales of natives who could turn into a monstrous creature there they called the Tasmanian devil – a creature capable of tearing a man limb from limb.

Shaking the stocking, Crozier looks into Lady Silence’s eyes. They are as black as the holes in the ice through which the Terrors lowered their dead until even those holes froze solid.

It is a lump of ice, not part of a foot. But the stocking itself is not frozen hard. The wool has not been out here for long in −60-degree cold. Logic suggests that this woman has brought it with her from the ship, but for some reason Crozier does not think so.

“Strong?” says the captain. “Evans?”

Silence shows no reaction to the names.

Crozier sighs, stuffs the stocking in his coat pocket, and lifts the boat pike. “We’re closer to Erebus than Terror,” he says. “You’ll just have to come with me.”

Crozier turns his back on her, feeling the chill along his neck and spine again in doing so, and crunches off through the rising wind toward the now-visible outline of the Terror’s sister ship. A minute later he can hear her soft footsteps on the ice behind him.

They clamber over a final pressure ridge, and Crozier can see that Erebus is more brightly lit than he’s seen before. A dozen or more lanterns hang from spars just on this visible port side of the icebound, absurdly lifted, and steeply canting vessel. It’s a prodigious waste of lamp oil.

The Erebus, Crozier knows, has suffered more than his Terror. Besides bending the long propeller shaft last summer – the shaft that had been built to be retracted but hadn’t done so in time to avoid damage from the underwater ice during their ice-breaking in July – and losing the screw itself, the flagship had been mauled more than her sister ship during the past two winters. The ice in the comparative shelter of the Beechey Island harbour had warped, splintered, and loosened hull timbers to a greater degree on Erebus than on Terror; the flagship’s rudder was damaged in their past summer’s mad dash for the Passage; the cold has popped more bolts, rivets, and metal brackets in Sir John’s ship; much more of the iron icebreaker cladding on Erebus has been torn free or buckled. And while Terror has also been raised and squeezed by the ice, the last two months of this third winter have seen HMS Erebus lifted on a virtual pedestal of ice even while the pressure from the sea pack splintered a long section of the starboard bow, port stern, and bottom hull amidships.

Sir John Franklin’s flagship, Crozier knows – and its current captain, James Fitzjames, and his crew also know – will never sail again.

Before stepping into the area lit by the ship’s hanging lanterns, Crozier steps behind a ten-foot-tall serac and pulls Silence in behind him.

“Ahoy the ship!” he bellows in his loudest dockyard-commanding voice.

A shotgun roars and a serac five feet from Crozier splinters into a shower of ice chips catching the lantern’s dim glow.

“Avast that, God-damn your blind eyes, you fucking lubbing idle-brained shit-for-wits idiot!” roars Crozier.

There is a commotion on Erebus’s deck as some officer wrestles the shotgun away from the shit-for-wits idiot sentinel.

“All right,” Crozier says to the cowering Esquimaux girl. “We can go now.”

He stops, and not just because Lady Silence is not following him out into the light. He can see her face by the reflected glow, and she is smiling. Those full lips that never move are curling up ever so slightly. Smiling. As if she had understood and enjoyed his outburst.

But before Crozier can confirm that the smile is real, Silence backs into the shadows of the ice jumble and is gone.

Crozier shakes his head. If the crazy woman wants to freeze out here, let her. He has business with Captain Fitzjames and then a long walk home in the dark before he can sleep.

Tiredly, realizing that he’s not felt his feet for the past half hour at least, Crozier stumps his way up the ramp of dirty ice and snow toward the deck of the dead Sir John’s broken flagship.