“I’m still not in love with raiding, even if it works,” said Rigg. “I’m not really a killer. I only did it once, and I didn’t like it.”

“But that’s the whole point,” said Olivenko. “If it’s always a surprise, you might be able to arrange every raid so that you don’t have to kill anybody. You can look for a time of minimal wariness. Nobody watching. Everybody drunk or half the garrison out of town. Or it could be a herd of cattle being driven to where the meat will be butchered to feed Haddamander’s army.”

Umbo laughed. “Oh, I think we’re going to love trying to move whole herds of cattle through time.”

“We still have to get them across all this country,” said Loaf. “With all the times we’ve used the flyers, you may not understand yet how very big each wallfold is. If you raid on the opposite side, it can take weeks. And the whole country is settled.”

“It’s settled now,” said Rigg. “But we could move the herds or the soldiers or the families or the weapons far in the past. During the years when the colony was new. Nobody would discover us because we’d slice time a little, just enough to disappear.”

“There’d be a stretch of country where all the grass was gone and cow pies were everywhere,” said Loaf. “You’ve never seen the ground behind a military supply herd.”

“By the time any colonists see it,” said Rigg, “it’ll be nothing but meadows with some very fertile patches.”

“Exactly,” said Olivenko. “By shaping time the way you do, you can avoid all the things that make rebels angry and desperate. You can keep killing to a minimum. But it will happen. Somebody will be a hero and you’ll have to kill him. This is war, and no matter how careful we are, people will die. And not always soldiers who oppose us. Besides, plenty of soldiers will wish they could join us, but they’ll still have to fight us when we show up.”

“I’m trying to imagine this,” said Umbo. “Say we’ve done fifty raids, and the most recent one, as far as Haddamander and the queen are concerned, is really the very first one we did. When we did it, we took the garrison completely by surprise, because they didn’t even know there was a rebellion, because they knew of no previous raids. But now it’s the fiftieth raid, so they had to be aware of it—and yet the actual events can’t be changed, because the timeshaper was there and so the outcome can’t be undone.”