“I don’t think anybody’s ever lived on this island,” Jace said to Katryn, as he helped her assemble a camp after having made a cursory exploration of the wooded crescent.
“What makes you say that?”
“There aren’t any buildings,” he said. “Not even tents or things.”
Kat laughed.
“Did you expect there would be?” she asked him.
“Well… you said the mutineers were left here,” he said. “They would have made shelters, right?”
“Yes, probably little more than canvas and wood, if they were lucky enough to have canvas,” she said. She gestured at the first of the two tents they had put together. “Do you think this would still be standing a week after we left? A month? Past the first really good storm?”
“Well, no, but it would still be there,” Jace said. “Unless it got completely swept out to sea, but something further back in the trees wouldn’t.”
“Everything falls apart eventually,” Kat said. “Everything rots.”
“Keeper’s Cove was started by marooned sailors,” Jace countered. “Some of the stuff they built is still there.”
“I’m sure it is, if people kept using it, building it up, making repairs,” Katryn said. “But Keeper’s Cove hasn’t even been there a hundred years, and whole cities have vanished in less time than it’s been since the mutineers were left here.”
“How does a city vanish?”
“Wood rots, mortar crumbles, stones erode,” Kat said. “The wind shifts sands, and plants reclaim the land we’ve cleared. That’s what happened to a good deal of the world in the time since the Great Empire fell. Whatever shelters the mutineers build wouldn’t have taken long at all to collapse after they died.”
“What if they were rescued?” Jace asked.
“Then we’d be out of luck,” Kat said. “But the account we’re following meshes with another account, one left by survivors of the treasure fleet disaster who went back seven years later to try to rescue the mutineers, out of guilt or camaraderie. They found no survivors, so they left behind a memorial or marker of some kind and then moved on. That account didn’t contain a location, but everything else matches with the one that Sheiral translated.”
“So… how does any of this help us find where the fleet went down?”
“If we can find some trace of the memorial, some sign of the mutineers… something to confirm that this was the location, then that gives us a dot on the map… a place the treasure fleet definitely passed,” Katryn said. “We find enough of those dots and we can maybe start drawing some lines.”
“And what if there’s no trace left? What if it’s like those cities?” Jace asked.
“Then this is still sadly one of the better leads… we proceed like we think the fleet might have stopped by here, but we keep our eyes and our minds open to other possibilities,” Katryn said. “The worst thing you can do when you’re hunting a treasure is to be too certain of something you’re not certain of. You can follow the directions exactly from step two to the end, but if you don’t have step one right you’re as likely to follow them off the edge of the world as anything else.”
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