If Param had been with him, she could have sliced them forward to the right time. But she was off with Noxon, learning how to time-shift without leaving herself vulnerable to assassins with iron bars. That was more important than the fact that Umbo was now stuck having to live through almost half a year.

No, not “almost half a year.” He had a much clearer idea than that.

Umbo couldn’t have said the exact number of days, because time wasn’t actually divided like that. It wasn’t divided at all, except into the huge number of separate causes and effects that determined the direction, if not the speed, of the flow of time. But without being able to name it, he knew the amount of time that lay ahead of him. He knew the “place” of those events in the forward sweep of time.

He had visited that narrow period of time often enough—his and Loaf’s departure from Leaky’s Landing, then his messages to Leaky and his return with Loaf—that it was now a firm anchor in his sense of the flow of time.

He couldn’t have charted it on paper—this many days, on this particular date. He didn’t keep a calendar in his head, and besides, whatever this time-shifting talent was, it couldn’t depend on literacy or calendars because presumably it would simply work, like sight and hearing. Yet he knew, the way you know where your hands are when your eyes are closed, just when in the future that day would come.

Was that real? Could he use that, the way Rigg used his paths, to journey to that time?

He thought back to the weeks in the roadhouse when he was struggling to find a way to send messages to the past without having Rigg to help him. When he finally began to have success, that was just the beginning. Then the trick was to get a sense of how far to reach back in order to send a message to arrive at the right place and time. Gradually, through trial and error, he had learned to have pretty good precision in throwing his image into the past and keeping it there.

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.