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“Shut up, Rigg. Do we always have to have a joke?”
“Well, I do,” said Rigg.
“So let’s fix it,” said Umbo. “Let’s go back to before your father got killed, and stop him and tell him what happened and then he won’t have a tree fall on him and you won’t be out on the rocks upstream from the falls just when Kyokay—”
“Two reasons why that’s a really bad idea,” said Rigg. “First, if I’m not there, Kyokay falls. Second, you can’t watch him more closely because I’m the one who experiences the time change, not you, so you won’t know anything about what’s going to happen, you’ll just keep doing the same thing. Third, we can’t go back and talk to Father. Or shove him out of his path. Ever.”
“Why not?”
“Because Father doesn’t have a path. He’s the only person—he’s the only living thing—that I’ve ever known that didn’t have a path of any kind.”
“Are you sure?”
“After ten years of seeing and watching and studying paths, you think I might be wrong when I say that the one person I was close to all the time had no path?”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “But I think you and I can both agree that Father was a really unusual man.”
“Why do we have these abilities if we can’t go back and save Kyokay?” demanded Umbo.
“Are you asking an invisible saint or a god or something? Because I don’t know. Maybe we can save him—that time. But how do we know he doesn’t just get himself killed the next day doing some other stupid thing?”
“Because I’d watch him,” said Umbo.
“You already watched him,” said Rigg. “He couldn’t be controlled. And meanwhile, we might change a thousand other things that we don’t want to change.”
“So our gifts are completely useless,” said Umbo.
“We have this knife,” said Rigg.
“You have a knife,” said Umbo.
“At least you’re not suddenly remembering a whole bunch of stories about men who appear out of nowhere and steal fancy knives and then disappear,” said Rigg.
“If Kyokay stays dead, then all of this is useless.”
“All of this,” said Rigg, “us being together, talking, finding out what we can do together—all of this happened because Kyokay went up on the falls and I tried to save him, and failed. So if we save Kyokay, does that make it so none of this happens? Then how would we go back to save Kyokay?”
“You already proved that you can change the past!” said Umbo.
“But I never did anything that mattered,” said Rigg. “Or at least I wasn’t able to accomplish anything I wanted to.”
Umbo reached out his hand for the knife. Rigg handed it to him at once. Umbo pulled it out of the sheath and pressed the point of it against a spot on the heel of his hand. It punched in almost at once, and blood welled up around the blade.
Rigg snatched the knife back. Umbo stared at his palm, making no effort to stanch the bleeding. Rigg wiped the blood off the blade with a handful of dewy grass, but he didn’t say anything to Umbo. Whatever crazy thing Umbo was doing, he’d explain it when he felt like it.
“Now the past is real,” said Umbo softly. “I’ve been wounded by it.” Then he, too, tore up a wad of damp grass and pressed it to the wound in his palm. “That stings like a hornet,” he said.
“I guess now you know why your mother taught you never to poke yourself with a knife.”
“She’s a smart one, my mom,” said Umbo. “Even if she did marry some angry idiot of a cobbler.”
“I hate the way you make a joke out of everything,” said Rigg.
“At least mine wasn’t funny,” said Umbo.
They picked up their things. Rigg dried off the clean blade on his shirt, and slid it into the sheath. Then he tucked the knife he had stolen about two thousand years ago into his belt, and they set off down the Great North Road toward Aressa Sessamo.
