What Umbo wanted to ask was for a time, not long after the moment when Umbo took his walk away from Leaky’s roadhouse, when nobody would be present in this shop, so he’d have a safe moment to jump back to undiscovered. If he had Rigg’s and Noxon’s gift, he could look for paths and pick a time when the carpenter stepped out. Instead, he’d have no choice but to guess and hope he picked a good moment. If he guessed wrong, then he’d jump again so quickly that the observer wouldn’t know for sure what he had seen, if anything at all.

He walked into the back room, which was mostly used for storing boards and tools and hardware, and closed the door behind him. He looked for a place that would be unlikely to have furniture moved into it during the intervening years, and settled on a spot just inside the locked outside door.

Then he jumped back to a time six hours after the moment he had come from. It had been first dark when he left; now it was the deepest of dark night, a few hours before dawn. He stood in silence, holding the silent baby in the dark, listening. An old man’s breathing from a room upstairs. The breath of sleep.

Umbo had assumed he would have to go out the front, but no. This was a simpler time, before General Citizen had imposed his authority as King Haddamander. There was no lock on the back door, only a simple latch, clearly visible in the ringlight coming through a high window, which had been left uncurtained and unshuttered.

He raised the latch. It was a fine carpenter’s latch, and a fine carpenter’s door. Everything moved silently and smoothly. Umbo closed the door behind him and then carried the baby behind the row of shops to where the alley debouched into the square. Umbo did not hurry and did not act furtive. He walked easily and naturally to the roadhouse door.

It was barred, of course—no reason to invite thieves or ­burglars. Ordinarily, Umbo would simply have jumped the fence around the kitchen garden, but that wasn’t likely to work out well with a baby in his arms. Umbo walked around the corner of the fence to a spot not visible to passersby on the square, nor from any windows in the nearby shops and houses. Then he shifted himself back to the afternoon, a few moments after he walked into that copse a mile or two out on the south road.

Now the roadhouse was open for business, people coming and going, and this early in the night it was safe for him to pull the rope that rang a bell in the kitchen, announcing a delivery.

He could hear Leaky start cursing in the kitchen. Then she bellowed out the back door. “Come back tomorrow! No more deliveries tonight!”

“I’ll just leave it at the gate then!” he shouted back.