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“Nobody’s been using it anyway,” said Umbo. He meant it to sound jocular. Instead it sounded self-pitying.
But Param didn’t rush to reassure him, which would have made him seem even more pathetic to himself. “Maybe you and Barbfeather can talk to each other.”
“Maybe we’ll look really pretty to each other,” said Umbo. “Just my luck to find a best chum who has four legs and can’t talk.”
“Four-legged untalking people make the most reliable friends,” said Param. Was there bitterness in her voice?
“I can see you’ve never tried to befriend a cat.”
“I was forgetting cats.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “I can understand why Rigg helped me, back in the capital. He’s my brother. But you—you sat there with me on that rock, holding the others back in that ancient time until Mother’s soldiers were almost on us. And Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko aren’t your kin or anything.”
“Rigg is more my friend than any of my kin,” said Umbo.
“If Rigg hadn’t signaled you to bring him back to the present . . .”
“Then I would have kept him in the past until he did.”
“You weren’t worried that they’d kill you?”
“Of course I was. If they killed me, then I couldn’t have brought them back,” said Umbo.
“What about me?” asked Param.
Umbo shook his head. “See how gallant I’m not? I knew you could take care of yourself.”
“I knew you were in danger. I kept wanting to grab you and make you disappear. But if I did, that might have been the same as killing the others.”
“But you took me away the moment I brought them back to the present,” said Umbo.
“All I could think was, get him off this rock,” she said.
“You saved my life.”
“I almost got us both killed,” she said, shuddering. “I let Mother and the soldiers see which way we jumped. They’d know we couldn’t change direction in midair. So if you hadn’t pushed us back a week—”
“But I did.”
“I jumped without thinking.”
“You had no other choice. You kept us alive in that moment.”
“And then you kept us alive in the next
.”
“So on the whole, I think we saved each other,” said Umbo. Then, on a whim, he pulled away far enough that he could turn to face her and make a joke. “My hero,” he said.
Only she must have had the same idea for the same joke, because at the exact same moment she said, “My hero.”
But she wasn’t sarcastic. Or maybe her sarcasm was so thick that it sounded like sincerity.
Well, either she was joking or not. All Umbo could do was react the way he would to either. “Don’t count on its happening again,” he said. “I’m not really the hero type.”
She playfully slapped his face—just a tap with a few fingers. “Can’t let somebody thank you, is that it?”
At the moment, all Umbo could think was—well, nothing, really, because he was beyond thinking. She had taken his arm and leaned close against him, she had bantered with him, thanked him, praised him. Called him her hero, even if it was kind of a joke. And now she was teasing him. He was in heaven. And yet he was also totally focused on everything she said and did so that he could respond.
“Thank me all you want,” he said. “As long as I can thank you back.”
