So he accepted her smile because it wasn’t mocking, it was honest—it really was funny that in trying to be serious, he had knelt on a root and wrecked it. Only it hadn’t wrecked anything, if he decided not to let it.

He pulled his shirt off over his head, shook it open, and held it between them. “Param, I’ve loved you since I first came to know you. At first it was the princess, the idea of a princess, but that was long ago, and now it’s you that I love, so far as I know you, and you that I want to marry, if you’ll have me.” He held out the shirt to her.

She took the shoulders of his shirt in her hands, and pulled the cloth over her head to make a tent. Umbo leaned closer and drew the bottom of the shirt over his own head, so it was only the two of them, face to face, under that small tent. He lightly kissed her cheek. She kissed his lips, just as lightly.

Then she pulled the shirt off her head and handed it back to him. “Next time you propose to a girl, you might bring a nice shawl or even a towel instead of a shirt you’ve already been wearing for hours.”

“If you can’t stand the way I smell,” said Umbo, “this whole marriage thing isn’t going to work.”

“So this wasn’t just a proposal,” she said. “It was your first test of my love.”

She had said the word “love.” He wanted to dance with happiness. Instead, he pulled the shirt back on over his head. “At least you don’t have to wear it,” he said. He got to his feet. “You two still have work to do, and I’m going to go take Loaf home to Leaky.”

He took a few steps away before Param said, “Hurry home.”

Umbo stopped and half-turned back to her. “Oh, I’ll be home before you even notice I was gone.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. Then she made a shooing-away gesture and slid a little closer to Noxon. Umbo could hear the two of them getting back to trying to teach each other unteachable skills as he walked away.

A royal marriage—the personal part could never be allowed to keep them from their duty.

CHAPTER 4

Homecoming

Even though Leaky had known right from the start that Loaf would go off with Umbo on a mad mission to save Rigg from the People’s Collection of Twits, and had even urged him to go, it still made her angry that he had done it; and she didn’t try very hard to be civil when she saw her husband and that strange time-traveling boy out the door. She threw a lettuce at them as they left, then made a point of closing the door, rather loudly, long before they were out of earshot. There’d be no backward glances to see her standing in the doorway gazing wistfully after her man.

She couldn’t help it that Loaf was a good man—that was part of why she married him and, in her weaker moments, admitted she loved him. She only wished he could be more selectively good—good for her, then good for the inn, and maybe even good for himself. After that, other people could suck on Ram’s left elbow before she thought Loaf should sacrifice anything for them.

Nice and hopelessly naive as those boys were, they were worth a bit of washing, stitching, and some food for the ­journey—and nothing more. Instead, Loaf had gone off with them to O, gotten himself arrested, and made his way home with Umbo. Well, wasn’t that enough? But no, Umbo had to go and teach himself how to do something he had only been able to do in combination with Rigg—send messages into the past. And now, armed with this dubious “weapon,” Loaf and Umbo thought they could take on the People’s Revolutionary Cushion-squatters.

So after shutting the door firmly—not slamming, since when she slammed a door it usually needed repairs—she had a bumptious half hour, deliberately doing everything with too much force, which terrified the customers eating or drinking at such an early hour. Most of them gulped down whatever they were eating or drinking, paid without arguing the price, and hightailed it through the still-functioning front door.

Once everyone was gone, Leaky realized how foolish it was to go on handling everything so roughly. For one thing, she would have to pay for anything she broke—which included two eggs, a lettuce, and a clay pot. For another thing, there was nobody there to see, not the customers and certainly not the people she was actually annoyed at—Umbo for being so sweet and needy, Rigg for getting himself arrested as a royal, and most of all Loaf for being so abominably fatherly.

If he’s going to be fatherly, then he should start by begetting a child on her so he could be father to their own.

Not a thought she allowed herself to think more than once or twice a week. She went back to bumptiousness for a moment, to punish herself for such a wicked thought. After all, she might be the barren one, and him not sterile at all. She had never asked him whether he had sired any children during his soldiering days—she didn’t really want to know the answer anyway—and he had never volunteered the information. “You know, Leaky my love, it’s obvious you’re the one as can’t conceive, seeing that I’ve fathered children in fourteen towns, and them’s only the ones I know about.” No, Loaf would never burden her with such information. Nor could Leaky ask, “Were you chaste as a soldier, my big old bear? Or have you by any chance noticed that you never left a bit of seed behind?”

She locked the front door of the roadhouse and went out back to chop wood for a while. Chopping wood was always useful, not least for working off some anger.

She had the ax back over her shoulder, ready to swing, when she saw someone standing right in the path of her swing. She only just stopped herself. “Fool! Are you trying to get—”

Then she saw that it was Umbo.

“Back already? And snuck up on me like that?”

Umbo only shook his head. “Look at me,” he said softly.

She looked. He was different. Completely different clothes, for one thing. And taller. Not just a little, a lot. A man’s height. Getting to be a tall man’s height. And his face—was that a flash of fuzz on his chin and cheeks?

“Are you really here or is this just a message from the future?” she asked suspiciously.

“I’m alive, Loaf is alive, and Rigg got saved along with his sister Param. We all escaped Aressa Sessamo and left the wallfold and it’s been several years.”

“Years! How irresponsible! It was supposed to be only a few—”

“Hold your tongue for a moment, if that’s possible,” said Umbo. “This is the fifth time I’ve tried to have a conversation with you but you never shut up long enough to hear me out.”

“Of course I don’t listen when you—”

“This is the last time I’ll try,” said Umbo. “If you don’t hear me now, I will not bring Loaf home to you.”

“How dare you, after—”

“Still talking,” said Umbo.

“You have no right to command—”

Umbo shouted now. “If you don’t listen to me you will never see your husband’s face again. Do you understand that? Can you control your anger long enough to realize that your entire future with Loaf is at stake?”

Leaky fell silent, but she was even more furious than before.

“I can see you’re angry,” said Umbo, “but believe me, this isn’t the way I spoke the first time I tried this. It was—would have been—about a week from now, and I didn’t come as a vision like this, I came in person.”

“You can do that?” she asked.

“In the past several years, yes, I’ve learned a few things. I’ve changed. So has Loaf.”

“What aren’t you telling me? Spit it out—has he lost a leg?”

“Shut. Up. Now.”

She thought she’d burst with rage at his domineering, dis­respectful attitude.

“I’ve been through this confrontation and everything failed. I tried hearing you out, but when you rage, Madam Leaky, you make yourself angrier and less reasonable. So this is my final attempt. Loaf agrees with me. If you can’t listen and accept what I’m going to tell you, he’s going to figure it’s as if he died on our journey and he’ll never come home to you. So what’s at stake now is this: Can you be silent, or do you want to never see your husband again?”