“I travel alone,” said Rigg.

“Now that’s just stupid,” said Umbo. “You’ve never traveled alone, you were always with your father.”

“I travel alone now.”

“If you can’t have your father, you won’t have any companion?”

Then, as Father had trained him, Rigg thought past his feelings. Yes, he was hurt and angry and grieving and filled with spite and bitter at the irony of Umbo now asking him for help, after nearly getting him killed. But that had nothing to do with deciding the wisest course.

Will Umbo be trustworthy? He always has been in the past, and he seems truly sorry for accusing me falsely.

Does Umbo have the stamina for the road I travel? He doesn’t have to. I have money enough to stay at inns if the weather turns bad.

Will he be useful? Two strong young striplings would be much safer on the road than one boy alone. If there came a time they needed to keep watch at night, there’d be the two of them to divide the task.

“Can you cook anything?” asked Rigg. “I can always catch some animal we can eat, but . . . meat begs for seasoning.”

“You’ll have to do it,” said Umbo. “I’ve never cooked meat.”

Rigg nodded. “What can you do?”

“Put a new sole on your shoes, when you wear a hole in them or the stitching comes out. If you provide me with the leather and a heavy needle.”

Rigg couldn’t help but laugh. “Who brings a cobbler along on a journey?”

“You do,” said Umbo. “For the sake of the old days, when I kept the other boys from throwing rocks at you for being a wild boy from the woods.”

It was true that Umbo had looked out for him when they were much smaller, and Rigg was seen as a stranger among the village children.

“No promises,” said Rigg, “but you can start the journey with me and we’ll talk about how well or badly it’s working at the end of each day.”

“Yes,” said Umbo. “Yes.”

Rigg strode boldly into the great stream of ancient paths that flowed up and down the road like a river going both ways at once. Rigg thought of what he had seen at the top of Stashi Falls—how everything had slowed down and the paths had become people rushing by. Now he understood that all these paths still contained a vision of the real person passing, a vision that could become real. Now he was plunging into that flow of people up and down the road, swept onward with half the current and yet at the same time fighting his way upstream against the other half.

“Are you in a rush?” Umbo asked when he caught up and began to jog alongside Rigg. “Or have you changed your mind and you’re deliberately leaving me behind?”

Rigg slowed down. He had merely been walking as fast as he and Father always did on every journey, but few adult men and no boys Umbo’s size could match the pace without real exertion. Umbo was strong and healthy, only a little smaller than Rigg, but he was a cobbler’s son, a village boy. His legs had never tried to cover distance this way before, taking long strides every hour, day after day.

Rigg almost answered as heartlessly as Father always had: “Keep up if you can, and don’t if you can’t.” But why should he speak like Father? Rigg had always resented his utter unwillingness to make any concessions to Rigg’s age and size.

So instead of giving a snippy, cold answer, Rigg simply slowed down and walked at Umbo’s version of a brisk pace.

They said very little for the two hours until dusk obscured the path. The silence felt wrong—and when Rigg realized it was because in times past Kyokay had always been with them, keeping up a stream of chatter, it felt even more wrong.

At last, though, it was dark enough that while Rigg could still find his way among the paths, Umbo could not.

“It’s dark,” said Rigg. “Let’s get some sleep.”

“Where?” asked Umbo. “I can’t sleep while I’m walking, and I don’t see an inn or even a barn.”

“You can sleep while walking,” said Rigg, thinking back to all-night pursuits of fleeing animals. “Or something like sleep, and something like walking. You just aren’t tired enough yet to fall asleep on your feet.”

“And you’ve done that?”

“Yes,” said Rigg. “Though it isn’t very efficient, since you can’t see your way and you fall down a lot.”

“Which has nearly happened to me three times in the last five minutes.”

“So we’ll go off the road a few yards—far enough that anyone on the road will fail to see us.”

Umbo nodded and then, because it was dark, added, “Good plan. Except the part about leaving the road and walking in the dark among the brambles.”

“We’re coming to a side road,” said Rigg. He knew it was there because he could see the paths of quite a few recent travelers take a turn from the highway. Wherever they had gone, they all came back the same way and rejoined the road. He couldn’t explain how he knew any of this without telling Umbo about his pathseeing, and so he made no explanation at all. Umbo must have thought Rigg was familiar with this area, since he didn’t ask how Rigg knew they were coming to a path.

They walked only a dozen yards into the woods beside the road and found themselves standing before a very small temple—or a very substantial shrine. It had stone walls and a heavy flat wooden roof topped with living grass to keep it cool.

None of the paths that came here was much more than two hundred years old. This was a fairly recent shrine.

“The Wandering Saint,” said Umbo.

“The what?” asked Rigg.

“We used to play the game—you’d be the Wandering Saint, or I would, or Kyokay, and the others would try to push him off the cliff, over the falls. You know.”

But Rigg did not know what Umbo was talking about. It can’t have been very important or surely Rigg would remember. And what a horrible game, anyway—to play at falling off the cliff! If that’s how Umbo and Kyokay played when Rigg wasn’t there, no wonder Kyokay thought it was all right to dance around on the edge of the falls.

Umbo stared intently at Rigg’s face. “Are you insane?” asked Umbo. “It’s our local saint.”

“What’s a saint?” asked Rigg. “You swore by one before—the same one? This wandering one?”

“A holy man,” said Umbo impatiently. “A man some god has favored. Or at least some demon has been merciful to.”

Gods and demons Rigg had heard about, but Father had no patience with such ideas. “There are some gods and some demons whose stories are based on real things that happened to real men,” Father had taught him. “And some that are completely made up—to frighten children, or get them to obey, or to make people feel better when something goes terribly wrong in their lives.”

Now a new category had been added: saint.

“So this saint isn’t a god, he just has a friend who is.”

“Or a demon who favors him. Like a pet. They go out hunting or whatever. Ordinary people just stay away from the gods and demons as best they can. It’s the saints we talk to, since they’re so thick with the powerful ones. But you know this, Rigg. You went to Hemopheron’s lessons same as me.”

Rigg knew Hemopheron, the schoolteacher for the boys whose parents could afford the tuition. Rigg had gone with Umbo now and then, but Father had ridiculed him for it, pointing out that if Hemopheron knew anything, he wouldn’t be teaching in Fall Ford. “I’ll teach you everything you need to know,” Father had said. But he hadn’t, after all. He had held back some of the most important bits. In fact, Rigg wondered if Father had mostly taught him things he didn’t need.

“Come inside,” said Umbo. “We can stay here—it’s a sanctuary for travelers, all the shrines of the Wandering Saint are. The only curse on it comes if we desecrate the place.”

“Desecrate?” asked Rigg.

“Poo or pee,” said Umbo. “Inside it, I mean.”

They were standing there in nearly complete darkness, just a bit of starlight seeping in through the door. There were walls. There was a floor.