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“Then you do it—you look back and forth.”
Loaf reluctantly did as Umbo asked, looking back and forth. It bothered him deeply to be seeing duplicates of these one-of-a-kind gems. But he finally identified the missing jewel. He pointed. “That one.”
“So take it,” said Umbo.
Loaf felt very strange as he reached out and picked up the jewel and put it from one bag into the other.
“Now take another,” said Umbo. “Please, let’s see what happens!”
“No,” said Loaf.
“What can it hurt? Either the stone will disappear from the new bag or it won’t.”
“Umbo,” said Loaf, “I don’t know what it can hurt. But I also don’t know that it can’t hurt, and there’s too much at stake to play around. We have to get to Aressa Sessamo to help Rigg, if we can.”
Umbo sighed petulantly and retied the old bag—he had never seemed so young in all the time Loaf had known him. “Fill up the hole,” said Loaf as he counted all eighteen jewels, together again at last, retied the new bag, and dropped it back down into his trousers.
Then he disguised the real hiding place as he had disguised Umbo’s previous mistaken one.
“Done,” he said. “Now take us back into the present.”
“We never left it,” said Umbo. “We were perfectly visible in both times.”
“I mean make the past go away.”
And just like that, the bright-colored leaves of the autumn woods turned back into branches newly a-bud with spring.
“All right,” said Umbo. “We’re done. Let’s get to Aressa Sessamo.”
“No,” said Loaf. “You have to go leave your messages in the past for Rigg and you to see.”
“Of course I don’t,” said Umbo. “No more than I had to actually go back in time and tell you to stop Leaky from killing that drunk.”
Loaf sat down on a low stone wall and leaned his forehead on his fingers. “I know I sound like Leaky, but Umbo, we have to do it.”
“I don’t even remember what I said to myself,” said Umbo. “I never knew what I said to Rigg.”
“Whatever you say now will be what you said then.”
“No,” said Umbo. “Because now I’ll be saying it without any sense of urgency. It’s going to be different. Look, I already said it. The proof of that is the fact that the jewels were buried behind the latrine, because that’s what my message to Rigg told him to do. And we have the kni
fe, because I told myself to get it and hide it. We live in the version of these events in which my messages were already given!”
“Then why did we have to wait in Leaky’s Landing until you learned how to go back in time?”
“Because we had to get the jewel! And because it’s a useful thing for me to know how to do. It would be stupid to just know that I had learned how to do it in order to deliver those messages, and then not learn how to do it just because those messages were already delivered!”
Loaf shook his head. “I know I was on your side when we argued with Leaky about it,” he said. “But now . . . too much is at stake.”
“That’s right,” said Umbo. “Too much is at stake for us to go to all the trouble of talking our way back into the very rooms we stayed in before so I can stand at the foot of my bed and deliver a message to myself while I’m sleeping there. Or for us to go stand where Rigg was paying the coachman so I can give him a message he already received. It’s dangerous to do either of those things—we might be recognized at the foot of the tower, and we would certainly be recognized at our rented lodging! For all we know, the city guard would be called and we’d be arrested and then we couldn’t possibly go to Aressa Sessamo to help Rigg!”
“We know we weren’t arrested because . . . because we weren’t!”
“But we don’t know anything of the kind,” said Umbo. “And remember—this time if we get arrested we have the . . . stones.”
He had caught himself and said “stones” instead of “jewels” because of the warning look Loaf gave him. Somebody had come around the corner of the latrine.
Soldiers. Two of them. Sauntering—seemingly not on any urgent business. But why would they be back here? Had somebody seen them digging while they were watching the past instead of the present? It had been foolish for Umbo to bring him into the past; he should have stayed in the present in order to keep watch.
