Pathfinder

CHAPTER 5 Riverside Tavern

“Has anything happened yet because I made the decision to go ahead with the fold?” asked Ram.

“Yes,” said the expendable. “You remained in command of the ship.”

Ram was a little irritated to learn that the decision had been a test of him rather than a real decision. “So you were going ahead no matter what I decided?”

“Yes,” said the expendable. “It’s in our mission program. You never had a choice about that.”

“Then what am I here for?” asked Ram.

“To make all the decisions after the fold. Nothing is known about what happens after we jump. If you had proven yourself timid before the jump, you would be regarded as unfit to make decisions afterward.”

“So if I was too timid, I would have been replaced. By you?”

“By the next crew member we awakened and tested. Or the one after that.”

“So when does the real jump happen?”

“In a week or so. If we don’t blow up before then. Spacetime is being very naughty right now.”

“And nothing I might do can stop it?”

“That’s right, Ram.”

“And what if none of the crew turned out to be capable of making a decision that would satisfy your criteria?”

“Then we would command ourselves until we got to the target planet.”

“‘We’ . . . meaning the expendables?”

“We the ship. All the computers together.”

“But the ship’s computers don’t agree on anything.”

“That’s one of the many reasons we were all hoping you’d do the right thing.”

Ram hadn’t missed the one bit of information the expendable had given him. There was zero chance that it had been an inadvertent slip. “What do you mean, spacetime is being naughty?”

“We keep generating fields and forces, and things change. They just don’t change the way anyone predicted.”

“And when was I going to be told that?”

“When you asked.”

“What else should I ask in order to find out what’s going on?”

“Whatever you’re curious about.”

“I want to know what spacetime is doing.”

“It’s stuttering, Ram.”

“What does that mean?” asked Ram.

“There seems to be a quantum system of timeflow that has never been seen or suspected before.”

“Meaning that instead of a continuous slide into the fold, we’re finding that spacetime reforms itself in a series of discrete steps?”

“It’s going to be a bumpy ride, Ram.”

After three weeks on the road, Rigg and Umbo had long since exhausted the food they brought with them, and hunting for small game was taking more and more of their days. Just because Rigg could see the paths of the animals didn’t mean that setting traps would catch them. In this part of the world, the animals were far more wary of humans than they had been up in the wild highlands of the south.

So they were hungry as Rigg led the way to the public house that filled the five or six rods of land between the river and the road.

“This doesn’t look like much of a place,” said Umbo doubtfully.

“It’s all we can afford,” said Rigg. “If we can afford it.”

“It isn’t much of a town, either,” Umbo added.

Rigg looked around him. The buildings were all fairly new, and had the look of shabby construction. A thrown-together kind of town. But from the paths weaving through the area, Rigg could tell that it already had a lot of people. “You could drop Fall Ford into the middle of it and nobody could tell.”

“Well, my standard of a good-sized town has changed a little over the past three weeks.”

“And my standard of a good-sized meal has changed, too,” said Rigg. “If I set traps we might have some squirrel or rabbit by morning, or we might not. They’ve got food in there right now.”

By now they stood outside the door of the tavern. A couple of burly rivermen brushed them aside as they went in. “Out of the way, privicks.” Rigg had heard that term more than once, as they passed through towns they couldn’t avoid. At first the word had been whispered, but lately it was openly used to insult or diminish them. It might have been more effective if Rigg had had the slightest idea what it meant.

“So let’s go in and see if we can afford the food at this public house,” said Umbo. “Or stomach it.”

A riverman came lurching out of the tavern, cursing over his shoulder at someone inside. He took a swipe at Rigg, who was inadvertently blocking his way. Rigg dodged aside, but fell, and several men standing not far off laughed at him.

“Privick’s got himself covered in mud!”

“Trying to plant himself to see if he’ll grow.”

“Hey, privick, better go wash yourself!”

“Privicks don’t know about washing.”

“Then let’s duck him in the river and show him how it’s done!”

Umbo helped Rigg rebound to his feet, and they dodged inside the door. Rigg had no idea whether the rivermen really meant to do anything to him, but he didn’t want to stay and see. They were all big men. Even the shortest of them had massive arms and barrel chests from poling and rowing up the river. Rigg knew how to defend himself, even without weapons—Father had seen to that—but only one at a time, and he knew that if they took it into their minds to hurt him, he couldn’t stop them. That knowledge put a cold knot of fear in his belly, and it didn’t go away just because a door closed between them.

The tavern was dark inside—the shutters were nearly closed against the cold outside, but no lanterns had yet been lighted. A dozen men looked up at them, while two dozen more kept their eyes on their mugs, their bowls, or their cards and dice.

Rigg walked to the bar, where the taverner—who looked to be at least as large as the largest of his customers—was setting out a half dozen bowls of a thick stew that made Rigg almost faint with hunger, though it had only been two days since he last ate. But the hunger didn’t drown out the fear that had begun outside and got worse in here.

“We serve men here, not boys,” said the taverner, sounding more bored than hostile.

“We’ve been walking three weeks down the road from the south,” Rigg began.

The taverner chortled. “You have ‘upriver’ writ all over you, no need to tell a soul.”

“We need a meal,” said Rigg. “If you won’t serve us here, then maybe you could tell us where we could buy bread and cheese for the road.”

“Boys nor beggars,” said the taverner. “I don’t get up in the morning wishing to see much of either.”

“We’re not beggars. We’ve got enough coin, if your price is fair.”

“I’m surprised privicks even know what money is,” said the taverner, “let alone what ‘enough’ might be.”

Umbo usually kept still when they had to talk to people, since Rigg could put on a higher dialect than the one they spoke here, and nobody had to ask Rigg to repeat himself. But Umbo spoke up now, sounding a little annoyed. “What’s this ‘privick’ they call us?”

“It’s just an old word,” said the taverner. “It means ‘upriver folk.’”

Umbo sniffed. “That’s all? Because it sounds like an insult.”

“Well,” said the taverner, “privicks aren’t too famous for being smart or talking well or dressing like decent folks, so there might be a bit of contempt in it sometimes.”

“We’re decent enough not to pee in the river for downstream folk to drink,” said Umbo, “and we don’t have no insult for travelers from the north.”

“Why would you?” said the taverner. “Now, are you going to show me your money or am I going to throw you out?”

Again, the knowledge that this man could force Rigg to do whatever he wanted filled him with dread. Instead of feeling in his purse for a single jackface, Rigg filled his hand with all the coins from the moneypurse tucked into the waistband of his trousers, meaning to look through them quickly to find the one he wanted. The taverner reached out at the moment Rigg was opening his fist to show the money, and their hands collided. All the coins were jostled out of Rigg’s hand and hit the counter. They sounded so loud in the quiet room. There were too many of them.

The taverner’s eyes grew narrow and he looked out into the room. Rigg didn’t turn around. He already knew that all eyes were on him, that everyone in the room had mentally counted the money. If only he had not let fear make him hurry; if only he had taken the time to feel for the single coin with the money still in his purse. Now he felt panic surge through him, knowing he had already done something stupid, and chance had made it worse.

Rigg could hear his father’s voice saying, “Don’t let the other man control what you do.” And, “Show little, say less.” Well, he hoped he was keeping his fear well-hidden. But he couldn’t think of anything to do, not before the taverner flung out his hand, scooped the coins to the edge of the bar, and dropped them into his other hand. Then he walked to the end of the bar, where he opened a door.

“Follow me,” said the taverner.

Rigg wasn’t sure whether he meant for them to clamber over the bar and go through the same door, or find another way. Before he could decide, a door on their side of the bar opened and the taverner beckoned. He led them to a tiny room with nothing but a table and two chairs in it, and some books and papers on the table.

The taverner poured their coins out of his hand onto the table. “You bring whole new worlds of meaning to the word ‘stupid,’” he said wearily.

“It was you knocking into my hand that spilled the coins,” said Rigg.

The taverner dismissed his words with a wave of his hand. “Who did you rob and why do you think I won’t turn you in?”

Don’t let the other fellow control what you do—it might be too late, but he could obey it now. So instead of defending himself against the charge of thievery, Rigg moved the conversation back to his real business here. “So it’s enough money to buy a meal and lodgings.”

“Of course it is, are you mad?”

“Seven rivers have joined the Stashik since we left Fall Ford,” said Rigg. “It’s so wide now we can hardly see the other side sometimes, and it seems like the price of everything gets bigger right along with the river. Last town where we ate, a baker charged us a jackface for a small loaf of stale bread, and he wanted two kingfaces for a night’s lodging.”

The taverner shook his head. “You were cheated, that’s all. And who wants to stay in some tiny fleabitten room in a baker’s house? You pay me one fen and you can stay two nights, or stay one night and I give you five shebs in change.”

Rigg touched the coins in turn. “You call this a ‘fen’? And this is a ‘sheb’?” Rigg knew the names of all the coins—including denominations so large that Father said they never actually minted the coins—but it had never occurred to him that the same money might be called by different names just because he had walked a few weeks on the Great North Highway.

“Why, what do you call them?” asked the taverner.

“‘Kingface’ and ‘queenface,’ but we stopped calling them anything when people laughed at us.”

“I’m surprised you’re still alive to tell the tale,” said the taverner, “the way you spread that money out for all to see.”

“You knocked it out of my hand,” said Rigg. “I thought you did it on purpose.”

The taverner covered his eyes. “It never occurred to me you’d bring up more than one coin out of your purse.” He put his hand atop Rigg’s head and turned his face so they were eye to eye. “Listen, boy, maybe nobody killed you back south, but you’re right aside the river here, and this is a river tavern, and these are rough men who wouldn’t think nothing of tipping you into the river to take a pair of shebs out of your pocket, never mind a fen. And they’d do it for a ping if you riled them somehow. Now every man in that room knows you have a lot of money and very little brain.”

“None of them could see,” said Umbo stubbornly.

“You think they’re deaf? Every man of them could name all the coins you dropped by the sound alone.”

Rigg understood now, well enough. Rules were different here. In Fall Ford a man’s money was safe in his pocket or in his palm, because no one would think to take it. But that was because everybody already knew how much money everybody else was likely to have, and if somebody popped up with more of it after somebody else got robbed, it wouldn’t take much of a guess to solve the crime. Here, though, in towns like this, the citizens couldn’t know but a tiny number of their fellows, and the rivermen came and went so that nobody knew anybody. Not known means not caught, if they weren’t taken in the moment of the crime, because the rivermen could be many leagues away by morning—or merely asleep on their boat, and their fellows reluctant to admit it or let a stranger go on board to search.

Father had warned Rigg how the rules changed when you traveled far, and he always warned that the bigger the city, the lower the level of civilization, which had seemed to make no sense to Rigg until now. Because the rules of civilization might be obeyed by however so many people you choose, it only took a few who despised those rules and you’d be in danger. “The worst of predators is man,” Father had said, “because he kills what he does not need.”

“Like us,” Rigg had said. “We leave the meat behind, most of the time.”

“The meat feeds the forest scavengers,” Father had answered, “and we need the pelts.”

“I’m just agreeing with you. We kill like men,” Rigg had said, and Father had replied in a surly voice, “Speak for yourself, boy.”

Now Rigg was seeing it for himself. “Seems to me,” said Rigg, “the baker who cheated us harmed us more than anyone here.”

“That’s because you haven’t left my tavern yet. They wouldn’t dare attack you in here, but I can promise you’ll have many companions joining up with you the moment you leave the place, and you’ll be lucky if they only turn you upside down to shake out the coins and leave you with your skin and bones unbroken.”

“How does anyone get through here alive?” murmured Umbo.

The taverner turned sharply, his hand flashed out, and this time his hand was not so gentle resting on a boy’s head. “To get through here safe, two boys wouldn’t be traveling alone—they’d have adults with them. They wouldn’t be barefoot, and dressed in oafish privick homespun. They wouldn’t come any nearer the river than the road out there, and that in daylight only. They’d never enter a riverside tavern. They’d never spread coins across the bar or take out more than was needful. And if they break all these rules, they still survive if they happen to run into me on a day when I feel particularly magnanimous. Now, the supper rush is about to begin, and then it’s a night of drinking and whoring for rough men whose money I mean to have, with a minimum of breakage. You’re going to stay in this room.”

“In here?” asked Rigg. “What do we do in here?”

“One of you lies on the table, the other underneath it, and you sleep if you can, but you don’t sing, you don’t talk loudly, you don’t show your face at the window, and you don’t—”

“What window?” asked Umbo.

“If you can’t find the window, I guess you can’t show your face at it, so you’ll actually obey me,” said the taverner. “The last thing is, when I lock the door from the outside, you don’t panic, you don’t start thinking I’m making you my prisoner, you don’t scream for help, and you don’t try to escape.”

“Isn’t that exactly what you’d say if you were holding us for ransom?”

“Yes,” said the taverner. “But who’d pay?” He walked to the door, closed it behind him, and they heard the chunk of the lock as he turned the key.

Immediately Rigg was on his feet, scanning high along the walls.

“Looking for the window?” asked Umbo.

“Found it,” said Rigg. He pointed up, high on the wall above the door. It might be facing toward the inside of the tavern, but what was coming through the slats of an old shutterblind was daylight.

“How did you know it wasn’t on the outside wall?” asked Umbo.

“I can see the paths of the builders. Few others have climbed that high on the walls, but now and then someone does, and that’s where they went.”

“It occurs to me,” said Umbo, “that your little talent with pathfinding only works to see what people did, not to help us with what they’re about to do.”

“True enough,” said Rigg. “But what’s your little talent good for, either, when it comes to defending ourselves?”

“I slow down time,” said Umbo.

“I wish,” said Rigg. “That would be useful.”

“I think I know what I do!” said Umbo.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Rigg. “You weren’t slowing down time for me—I walked at the same speed as the man I saw.”

“And picked his pocket—”

“Do you want me to find him and put it back?”

“If I don’t slow down time, what is it I’m doing when I make it so you can see paths turn into people?”

“You speed up my mind.”

Umbo threw his hands in the air and sat down. “Speed you up, slow down time, it’s the same thing. I already said so from the start.”

“You’ve lived with it all your life, Umbo, you decided what you thought it was when you were little, and you’ve never had a need to change your mind. But think about it. When you slowed me down, and I walked along with other people, what did it look like to you? You could still see me, couldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Did I walk slower? Or faster?”

Umbo shrugged off the proof. “Then what am I doing? Because I’m sure doing something if you can see people that you never ever saw before I did it.”

“You’re speeding up my brain. The speed at which I see things, and notice them, and think about them. All those people who left those paths behind them, they’re always there, but only when my brain starts seeing and thinking faster can I actually see them. And only when I really concentrate on one person can I touch him and take things from him and pry up his miserable fingers to try to get to Kyokay.” Saying that, Rigg felt the grief of it rise inside him again, and he stopped talking.

Umbo closed his eyes and thought for a while. Finally: “So I make you smarter?”

“I wish,” said Rigg. “But I can see things that I couldn’t see before, and touch things I couldn’t touch.”

Umbo nodded. “I always thought of it as slowing down time, because when I first started doing it around other people, they’d say things like, ‘Everything slowed down’ or ‘the whole world started going slower.’ They didn’t know I was doing it, they thought it was something that just . . . happened. And that’s how it seemed to me, too. And then your father heard my mother talking about a time like that, and he looked at me and somehow he knew that I had done it. That’s when he took me aside and started helping me learn how to control it. To be able to affect only one person. Myself or somebody else. Whoever I chose.”

“At the falls, you were aiming at Kyokay, and you got me, too, by accident.”

“I didn’t say I got to be perfect at it. You and Kyokay were kind of far, and I was climbing up the cliff, and I couldn’t even see you most of the time.” Umbo leaned his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. “But what good is it, anyway, whatever it is we do. If you can only see the past and I can only make other people think faster, then what can we even do with it?”

“I got a knife.”

“A nice sharp one,” said Umbo, holding up the palm he had cut with it, now mostly healed, though the scar was red. “Can you fight one of these rivermen with it? What about three of them?”

“If you really could speed me up,” said Rigg, “I could run around so fast they wouldn’t see me, and I could kill six of them before they knew what was happening.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” said Umbo. “Meanwhile, they’re beating me up because I’m just sitting there, so as soon as one of them hits me, I stop speeding you up, so then they catch you.”

“Well, it’s a good thing we can’t do it, then, isn’t it?”

Through the walls Rigg could hear the noise from the common room of the tavern. Nothing angry-sounding, but lots of talking. Shouting, really. When he could make out words, they were cheerful enough. Even horrible curses sounded like joking between friends.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if he brought us food?” said Umbo.

“Suppose somebody beats us up. But doesn’t kill us,” said Rigg.

“Let’s hope for that.”

“But then later, we go back to the place and I find the path they took to get to us. You slow down time—”

“I thought you said that wasn’t what I—”

“That’s what I’m used to calling it,” said Rigg impatiently. “You do that thing, and I’ve got a sledgehammer and as they’re stepping toward us, ready to beat us up, then one by one I smash them in the knees. Every single one who takes a step toward me.”

Umbo was smiling. “I bet after a couple of them fall over screaming with their knees all bent the wrong way, the rest hop away like ebbecks.”

“And we don’t get beaten up after all,” said Rigg. “So actually we’re perfectly fine.”

Umbo laughed. “It’s better than revenge, because we stop them before they do it in the first place!”

“The only thing I don’t get is how it could possibly work,” said Rigg. “The only reason we’d be doing it is because they beat us up. But then afterward, we can’t remember why we attacked these guys, because we don’t have a bruise and they never laid a hand on us.”

Umbo thought about that for a while. “I don’t mind that,” he said. “Who cares if we remember? We’ll just trust ourselves that we wouldn’t do that kind of thing unless we had a good reason.”

“But if all we remember is smacking people with sledgehammers, and never the reason why . . .”

“Well, don’t worry about it,” said Umbo. “With any luck they’ll kill us, so we won’t be able to go back in time and stop them, and so we won’t remember anything cause we’ll be dead.”

“That eases my mind,” said Rigg.

Then something dawned on Umbo. “You remembered growing up without any stories of the Wandering Saint, right? So you still remembered the way things were before you changed things in the past.”

“And you didn’t.”

“I think that’s convenient,” said Umbo. “One of us will remember how it was before we changed things, and the other one will remember the way it went after we changed it.”

Something still bothered Rigg about Umbo’s analysis, if he could only figure out what it was. “So let’s say we get beaten up, like I said. I don’t forget the part about getting beaten up. So I remember all the things we did after getting beaten—how we hid, how somebody nursed us back to strength, and then how we went back to the place and got even. But you don’t remember. All you remember is the new way, where they almost beat us up but some of them fall over with their knees broken and the rest run away. So . . . you didn’t go anywhere to recover from your injuries, because you never were hurt. So in this new story, where you didn’t have to recover from injuries, what did you do instead? And why did you end up coming back with me to prevent something from happening, when you don’t remember it happening at all? It’s just impossible.”

“Here it is,” said Umbo. “We both do both things. Only right at the moment where you break their knees, you lose one memory and I lose the other.”

“It still doesn’t work,” said Rigg, “because if we both see the bad guys fall over and we walk away, then we have to somehow do the things we did before so we end up at the place at the right time to break their knees. How will we know when that is?”

Umbo leaned over and started beating his forehead softly against the table. “I’m so hungry I can’t think.”

“And it’s too cold in here to sleep,” said Rigg.

“And we’ve still got the ability to change the past together, only whatever we do, we just figured out that it can’t be done.”

“And yet we do it,” said Rigg.

“We’re like the most useless saints ever. We can do miracles, only they’re pretty worthless.”

“We can do what we can do,” said Rigg. “I won’t complain about it.”

“Remind me why we didn’t go back in time and rob enough people in the past that we could afford passage on a downriver boat?”

Rigg lay down on the floor. “Ack! It is cold.”

“So get back up on the chair where it’s warm.”

“We’re going to die in this room,” said Rigg.

“That solves all our problems.”

The door opened. A woman almost as large as the taverner came in carrying two bowls with spoons in them.

“Speaking of saints,” said Umbo, “here’s one with the miracle of food.”

“I’m no saint,” said the woman. “Loaf will tell you that.”

“Loaf?” asked Rigg, smelling the stew and staring at the bowls. She set them down on the little table and Rigg and Umbo instantly sat down.

“Loaf is my husband,” she said. “The one who locked you in here instead of throwing you and your money out into the street the way I would have.”

“His name is Loaf?” asked Umbo, his mouth already full.

“And my name is Leaky. You think those names are funny?”

“No,” said Rigg, stopping himself from laughing. “But I do wonder how you got them.”

She leaned against the wall, watching them shovel in the food. “We came from a village out in the western desert. Our people name their babies before the next sundown, and they pick the name because of what we do or look like or remind somebody of, or from a dream or a joke or any damn thing. And we have to keep that name until we earn a hero name, which almost nobody ever manages to do. So Loaf looked like a big loaf of bread, somebody said, and I drooled and puked and peed in a continuous dribble of something so my father started calling me Leaky and he wouldn’t let my mother change it on my naming day, and I’ve beaten about a hundred people into the ground for laughing at my name. Do you think I can’t handle you?”

“I have a deep abiding faith that you can,” said Rigg, “and I’ll do my best not to earn a beating. But I have to wonder, when you came here why didn’t you change your name? Nobody in these parts knew you, did they?”

“You think we’re the kind of folks to start out in a new place by lying to everybody?”

“But it wouldn’t be a lie if you changed your name. Then you just say, ‘My name is Glorious Lady,’ and since that now is your name, it isn’t a lie.”

“Anybody calling me Glorious Lady is a liar, even if it’s my own self,” she said. “And you’re getting closer to that beating every time you open your mouth. Next time just put food in it.”

Rigg had food in his mouth the whole time he was talking, chewing and swallowing in the pauses, but he knew what she meant.

“You’re sleeping in here tonight,” Leaky announced. “I’m going to bring you some blankets.”

“A lot of blankets, I hope,” said Umbo.

“Plenty, compared to sleeping outdoors on a night like this. Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the past few weeks?”

“But we don’t like it,” said Umbo.

“I don’t mind,” said Rigg.

“And I don’t care what you like or don’t like,” said Leaky.

“I like this soup,” said Umbo.

“It’s stew,” said Leaky. “Trust a privick not to know the difference.” As she left, she relocked the door behind her. They buckled down to the serious business of eating every scrap of food they could see.

As they neared the bottoms of their bowls, they slowed down enough to talk a little.

“I’m still hungry,” said Umbo, “but my stomach is packed solid and I can’t fit anything in.”

“That’s how you get fat,” said Rigg. “Eating even after you’re full.”

“I guess I just remember being hungry so clearly that being full doesn’t wipe out the hunger.”

“If the people of Fall Ford named babies the way Loaf’s and Leaky’s village did, I wonder what your name would have been,” said Rigg. “‘Turdmaker’!”

“Yours would be ‘Crazy Baby.’”

“The craziness didn’t show up till later,” said Rigg. “Mostly since knowing you.”

True to her word, Leaky returned quite soon and seemed surprised that they had already finished eating. She held up their bowls and made a show of looking for some trace of the stew. “If you barf because you ate so fast, make sure you keep it all on the blanket or I’ll have you scrubbing the puke off the floor till it smells like fresh-cut lumber in here.”

“It smelled a lot worse than puke when we got here,” said Umbo. “We’d be improving it.”

“It’s the only reason I’d ever be glad you came here. Strip off those filthy traveling clothes before you get into these blankets. And I mean all of them.” With that she left again. Again they heard the door lock—but only just barely, as it was so noisy out in the common room.

“She likes us,” said Umbo.

“I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.”

“Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.”

“They were delicious.”

Rigg stripped off his clothes and even though he really was cold now, he had the promise of the blankets to encourage him. There was such a great pile of them that he wouldn’t have to curl up with Umbo to stay warm. That would make a nice change, because out in the woods, Umbo had moved around a lot in his sleep, leaving them both to wake up freezing cold five times a night.

The door opened.

“Hey, we’re naked in here!” protested Rigg. Umbo just dragged a blanket up to cover himself.

As Leaky set down a chamber pot, she said, “Don’t splash when you use this, and for the sake of Saint Spider, keep the lid on tight when you’re done or I’ll never get the stink out of this room.” She set a basket of large leaves beside the pot. “These go inside the pot when you’ve used them.”

“We’re from Fall Ford,” said Umbo. “That far upriver, sheeshee don’t stink.”

“You just don’t notice, sleeping with the pigs like privicks do.” She closed the door and locked it again.

They took turns using the chamber pot and when they were done they both agreed that a tight-closed lid was an excellent idea.

“I liked those leaves,” said Umbo. “Way more comfortable than any we used in the woods.”

“I’ll make it a point to find out what tree they come from and pull one along behind us in a big pot on wheels.”

Rigg spread out his blanket, folded it double thick, and then covered himself with two more while Umbo did the same. The light of the Ring came through the high window, which had apparently been angled for just that purpose. There were no branches above them to block it out.

“The leaves outside made for softer sleeping,” said Rigg.

“But there are no stones jabbing me,” said Umbo. “And no bugs or snakes or other vermin crawling all over me.”

“So far,” said Rigg.

He waited for Umbo’s retort—something like “If I don’t see them, I don’t care”—but Umbo said nothing at all.

Can you believe it? thought Rigg. Umbo’s already asleep. And in that moment, so was Rigg.