"Before I was born?" Kira stared at her father in shock. "And nobody mentioned this until now? What was I doing? What am I supposed to do? What—?"

Her father held up one hand, halting her burst of questions. "I do not know the answers to those questions. I do know that you will be equal to whatever challenge arises."

Kira inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself. "I'm not you. I am not her. Just because I look like Mother—"

Her father came closer, his gaze intent. "You are very like her in more ways than you realize."

"Father, I can never be anything like—"

"Have I ever lied to you?"

"No." The word of a Mage was still common slang for something worthless, but when she was younger Kira had gotten into more than one epic fight with peers who thought that saying applied to her father. "All right. I'll go."

"Quickly. Please," her father added. The word please still sounded slightly stilted, a legacy of his early Mage training, when he had been forced to think of all others as merely shadows deserving of no notice. He had only learned to see other people as real again thanks to her mother.

There was absolutely nothing in the world that was not about her mother, Kira thought despairingly.

Kira ran up the stairs to her room, her thoughts tumbling over each other. Foresight about her? And this ship from Urth? I know who the heroes in this family are. My mother and father. Not me. Am I fated to mess things up somehow?

She knew that a lot of people believed she lived in some grand estate. It had been so long since Kira had been comfortable trying to have friends visit, especially after that disastrous surprise twelfth birthday party where Kira had barely known any of the boys and girls who had been invited, that she wondered if anyone she had known remembered the truth. Lady Mari could have had a great house for the asking, but had refused to accept anything other than a decent place with a house, the barn, and the small workshop, as well as enough open land around it to make it easier to protect her family. They wouldn't even have had any of the still-rare electric lighting if her mother hadn't needed the power for the long-distance far-talker her responsibilities required.

Kira ran a finger over the broken portable far-talker she had been fiddling with. Her mother, her aggravating and impossible and difficult mother, had given the valuable device to her immediately when Kira asked if she could try to fix it.