At the time, he had thought he was going into the past, but now he understood the difference, and could do both. When he needed to push himself back to a few weeks before he and Rigg had left Fall Ford, it was easy to shift back within a day or two of the time he wanted. He didn’t have to be more precise than that.

And even though he had fretted about whether he might be asleep or doing something else when the exact moment of Kyokay’s death approached, on the day he simply knew it was the day, and at the time, he looked up to see Kyokay running toward the stairs—but why? There by the waterfall he could hear nothing. Why had he looked at that exact moment?

Because he knew. When he was in the future, he knew how to come back to a time before that event, and then when he reached that moment again, coming from the other direction, he knew it before his eyes could confirm it.

I have a map of time in my mind, just the way a blind man might learn to keep a map of his house in memory.

And he relied on that map all the time to travel into the past. It wasn’t precise to the second, but after so much experience, when he needed it to be, it was precise to the hour, or the half hour, or the ten minutes. He didn’t think of it that way—he just concentrated and got more careful when the exact time mattered.

No, he didn’t just concentrate. He sped up his perceptions—or slowed down time, as he had always thought of his talent as a child. The more precise he needed to be, the more sharply he made himself perceive the world, and the slower time seemed to flow for him. The map of time got sharper and clearer, the faster his perceptions were working.

He closed his eyes for a few moments at a time, trusting the dragging oar to keep them in the middle of the river, pointed downstream, and slowed time in order to examine his map. It wasn’t visual. It really was like the way you can feel your limbs without looking, or your tongue inside your mouth.

He couldn’t see the past—he wasn’t Rigg—but he could remember it. Not every second of it, but the key moments. Mostly times when he had sent messages or time-shifted, but also a few other events. The death of Kyokay. Jumping off the rock with Param. The moment when he accepted Param’s proposal of marriage.

He couldn’t see the future—nobody could. How could he have markers in times he had never lived through? But the next few years, though they lay ahead of him at this moment, had once been part of his past. No, they had often been part of his past.

Those few years that he had already lived through more than once were part of his map. If he were ahead of them in the stream of time, he’d have no hesitation in time-shifting back to them. Couldn’t he use that same timesense to shift to other remembered points in time, even though at this particular moment they now lay in his future?

He had always thought of shifting into the future as a leap off a cliff. Not knowing what the future felt like, what was happening there, to jump into it would be insane. What if he jumped ten years into the future? By then the Destroyers would have come, and the future he entered would be an uninhabitable wasteland. And if by ill luck he should jump into the exact moment in the future when they were burning Garden to a cinder, he would probably die before he could realize that he’d better jump out of there.

But no, not now. Because he had already lived through that time. He had stood on the beach in Larfold and watched the fires begin, before they all jumped back to a safer time.

That moment—the end of the world—was one of those markers in the future that he remembered with all the certainty of the most important times he had lived through or visited in the past.

And because his time map had nothing to do with place—it was a map of whens, not wheres—he could jump to any particular moment in the past, no matter where he was. He’d still be however many hundreds of leagues away that he had been before the time-shift, but he would be when he wanted, even if he wasn’t yet where he wanted. Just as he had done in jumping back to the time before Kyokay’s death.

Now Kyokay was alive again, but the day Umbo saved him was the same marker as the day he had failed to save him the first time around.

Maybe I can jump into the future. Not slice into it, a fraction of a second at a time, invisible to everyone, yet vulnerable to enemies. Jump to it.

Not while I’m out in the middle of the river. I don’t want to arrive at exactly the moment a boat is passing through this exact spot.

And what if for some reason the boat didn’t come with him? Even if he could shift into the future, there was no guarantee he could take anything with him in that direction. Umbo could swim, but he didn’t relish a soaking.

As he pulled the boat onto a firm landing place, it occurred to him that if he couldn’t take the boat, what about clothing? The jeweled knife?

No, no, these were foolish fears. Param jumped into the future all the time. A microsecond at a time, but she skipped forward with clothes and whatever she was carrying on her. I’ll have everything with me when I get there. If I get there. Won’t I?

He stood on the bank, then decided that he’d better do this sitting down. And not just sitting, but sitting inside the boat, holding on to the knife with one hand and the rim of the boat with the other. Just to make it clear to whatever force in the universe controlled time-shifting that this was his stuff and he wanted it with him.

Then he slowed down time—sped up his perceptions—and found the marker he was looking for. He sharpened his awareness even more, and then chose a time a little bit this side of the time when he left Loaf and Leaky to come on this errand.

And then he jumped.

He opened his eyes. Nothing had happened.

Well, that was disappointing.

He sighed and rose to get out of the boat.

The boat shifted and slid awkwardly under him. He nearly fell.

The solid ground at the riverbank was muddy now. It hadn’t been muddy when he landed. He looked at the sky. It was sunny, but he could see the clouds that must have just finished dumping rain here not an hour ago.

It had rained two days before they got to Leaky’s Landing.

Of course everything looked unchanged. He was sitting on the riverbank looking at the river. What, exactly, had he thought would be different?

But his timesense didn’t lie. When he checked to see when this moment was, he could sense the marker looming only a ­couple of days from now.

Since he didn’t know how far upriver he was from Leaky’s Landing, if he was going to arrive when he said, he would have to hurry.

Then he laughed at himself. If he arrived late, he could easily jump back to the right time.

I jumped into the future. Not slicing, jumping. To the time I chose. Nobody else can do that. With no external paths, only the map of time I unconsciously formed while doing all this jumping, I was able to jump into a future I had already lived through.

As he got the boat back out into the middle of the stream, he checked his markers again. The end of the world was the farthest in that direction. And in the past, the farthest he had gone—well, the farthest he had pushed anybody—was to almost the exact time when Ram Odin’s nineteen ships crashed into Garden, destroying native life almost as thoroughly as the Destroyers would. Rigg had chosen the moment by attaching to the path of the last animal to pass through the space where the Wall would be. Rigg had chosen the animal thinking that it would be the last moment before the Wall was created, but no. After the crash of the nineteen ships, there were no large animals to leave paths through the wall. So Rigg had inadvertently taken them almost to the exact moment of the previous destruction of life on Garden.