Act III, Chapter 13: Cael's Letter That No One Reads

The cold came in under the door.

Cael had wedged a strip of oilcloth along the threshold three weeks past, and it helped, and the cold came in anyway — not as a draft but as a quality of the air itself, a density that had nothing to do with the wind and everything to do with what lay on the other side of four hundred feet of ancient ice. He had stopped mentioning this to Harwick, who slept in the next berth and had learned, in eleven months, to sleep through most things. Harwick slept through the cold. Harwick slept through the sounds that came, irregularly and without pattern, from the northern dark — sounds that the senior wardens categorized as ice-shift and the junior wardens categorized as ice-shift because the senior wardens had, and no one had yet devised a more useful word.

Cael did not sleep through them.