Kyokay bore the pain well, but the reason was clear. He was trembling, then shaking with cold. The numbness helped him bear the crude bone-setting without screaming. But now Umbo had to get him warm and dry.

As for himself, he was used to the cold water, after all that practice, and the exertions involved in setting and binding the leg had kept him warm. So he worked on getting Kyokay as warm as possible.

Some of the shivering probably came from shock. But Umbo couldn’t do anything about that. If he was going to get help for Kyokay, he’d have to move fast.

He carried the boy swiftly, knowing that every stop caused him pain. But he had to get away before anybody from Fall Ford started searching for the body of the boy who had fallen.

He laid Kyokay on the gravel landing area at the ferry, then went for the cache of blankets and leather-cutting knife. With the blankets he made a kind of bed and then lifted Kyokay and put him back down in the bottom of the boat. With Kyokay’s weight, the boat was now firm on the gravel, though the current tugged at the other end. The rope connecting the boat to the iron ring was slack. So he could cut it without the boat getting away from him.

When the rope was cut—and it took only two swipes with the leather-cutter—Umbo thought of throwing the knife into the middle of the river, so Tegay could never again use it to beat a child. But no, that was one of the tools with which Tegay provided for the family. And in this world, Tegay had not beaten Umbo’s brains out. If this worked, would never beat young Umbo again. So Umbo laid the knife in plain sight in the middle of the gravel, where anyone using the ferry would stumble across it. It would get back to Tegay’s bench.

Then Umbo pushed the boat out into the water. The current took it so swiftly that Umbo had a few moments of fright as he struggled to climb up and over the side to get in it. Nothing deft about that operation. But he finally got into the boat and then laid the rower’s plank across the middle and sat with his legs straddling Kyokay, who wasn’t shivering as badly now, so maybe it had been only the cold and not the shock of the wound that had him shaking so much before.

“How did you get down into the water so fast?” Kyokay asked.

“You fell very slowly,” said Umbo.

“Yes,” said Kyokay in wonderment. “I did. But I still hit very hard.”

And then he closed his eyes. With all that pain, he couldn’t be asleep. Unconscious, then. Exhausted. Maybe in shock after all.

But all Umbo could do was row like a demon. The current was fast—Umbo wanted to go faster. What would have been several days’ journey upstream might be only a couple of hours going down. He had to get to Bear’s Den Crossing before dark, or he’d float right past it and then Kyokay really would be in a dangerous position.

It took till the last light of dusk, but Umbo saw the wharf and tied up at it. The boat he had come up on was gone—of course it was gone, the owner had to keep the boat moving. But when Umbo carried Kyokay into the tavern where he had bought his provisions for the journey to Upsheer, whom should he see at one of the tables but the pilot he had parted with so warmly.

At once the pilot was on his feet, clearing away dishes to let Umbo lay Kyokay on his own table. A bonesetter was called for, and a stitcher too, once they saw the blood-soaked rags binding the wound. The pilot asked no more questions after Umbo said, “I saw him fall, and I knew nowhere to take him but here.”

“What about Fall Ford?” asked the pilot.

“We were already downstream of it,” said Umbo. “And you—your boat is gone.”

“My brother took it back. I’m here waiting for my wife to deliver my firstborn. If she doesn’t hurry, I’ll take the boat you came in and catch up with my brother.”

Umbo didn’t want to lie to this good man, but he knew he had to, for the future’s sake. “This poor boy thinks I’m his brother. Kept calling me by his name. Bobo or something like that.”

“Whereas you’re ‘Ram Odin.’” The pilot’s tone made it clear that he didn’t believe that was Umbo’s name, and probably never had.

“On the river, sir, a man is what he does, don’t you think?”

The pilot only grinned at him and kept working on warming up the boy’s arms and legs.

Next morning, Umbo left a good deal of money with the taverner with instructions to send someone upriver to tell the folk in Fall Ford that they should come fetch one of their children. Umbo knew it would insult the pilot to offer payment to him, and that the man would look in on Kyokay as if he were his own nephew, if not son.

When Umbo got to his little boat, he saw that it had been provisioned for a downriver voyage. A long one. And someone had untied the rope that had once connected the boat to the ring. So it was no longer obvious that it was a stolen ferryboat.

The man didn’t know whether my business was fair or foul, but he abetted me in trust that it wouldn’t bring him harm.

I already repaid him by not undoing the course of events that brought me and Rigg together, and Param, and Loaf and Olivenko. Now it’s their job to go ahead and save the world. I saved my brother’s life, and that’s all I can do, and more than I should have attempted, but now it’s done.

CHAPTER 7

Paths and Slices

Noxon wasn’t despairing yet, exactly. He and Param had accomplished quite a lot. The easiest part was for Noxon to master the stuttering forward jumps that Param did when she sliced time, so that he could race through hours and days in just a few minutes.

But he was not a whit closer to being able to do it backward. Not simply going into the past—he could already make backward leaps just by attaching to some path and joining that person or animal in its time. What he couldn’t do was get time flowing the other direction and then slice through it in that direction. He wasn’t even sure it was possible.

And Param, for her part, was now better at what she already did—she learned a bit from the way Noxon’s facemask helped him slice time in greater and greater swaths. Her gift really was the most remarkable, because alone of the timeshapers she had always been able to make jumps forward rather than back.

The drawback was that her forward jumps were only a fraction of a second at a time; but she did a lot of them in rapid succession, and could keep it up for hours. When she did, though, she remained trapped in the place where she was when she began the process—not visible to others, but if they knew where she was when she disappeared, they could make a good guess where she was now. Her physical movements through space were greatly slowed while she was slicing time, and if someone brought something dense, like a metal bar, and passed it into her body and held it there, she would burn up slowly from the heat of it. And if she came out of her time-slicing with the metal in her, it would tear her apart.

But as Noxon’s facemask helped him learn to make longer jumps between slices, and Param learned to do it along with him, it meant that even with a metal bar held in the midst of her body, she spent far less time with it, and surely the would-be murderer was bound to conclude that nothing was happening because she wasn’t where he thought she would be.

If they accomplished nothing else, that was a good thing. It made her safer. It also meant that when they had need of her ability to race forward through time, she could do it more quickly and efficiently.

But it wasn’t enough. Noxon had half-expected to fail at his task, learning to reverse the flow of time for himself. But he had not expected to fail at helping Param learn how to slice into the past. She wouldn’t be reversing the flow of time—in the moments she spent in realtime, she and her body and clothing and whatever else she held with her would still be progressing in the normal direction of timeflow.