"There isn't any faster way to Dorcastle, except on a Roc, and I didn't dare try to hire a Roc Mage in Danalee," Kira told Jason. The woman was back at the tiller, nursing the baby as she steered the barge, out of earshot if Kira and Jason spoke quietly. Her husband and the other child were asleep inside the deckhouse. "Too many Mages know what my mother looks like, and Father said other Mages might be able to sense who I am if they get right next to me."

"How could they do that?" Jason asked, shuddering as he put aside his empty bowl.

"I don't know. It's some skill that Mages have—" To detect the presence of Mages powers. No way should she be telling Jason about that.

Jason, not seeming to have noticed Kira's abrupt ending to her sentence, squinted toward the riverbank. "At least I haven't seen any drones, so my mom's search probably hasn't expanded this far north. Why isn't there a rail line along here, running between Danalee and Dorcastle? I don't even see any signs of one being built."

"Mother has been involved in that," Kira said, hugging her knees as she looked at the passing traffic on the road. "Trying to work out something. It's the people who work the barges, and have done so for a long time. They think if a rail line gets built it will take a lot of their work away, and Mother says they're right. A lot of the families on these barges wouldn't be able to make a living anymore."

"Yeah," Jason said, "but you can't just keep things the same."

"Jason, how do you tell someone whose family has worked barges on this river for generations that things have to change and they have to find some other work somewhere else?" Kira bit her lip hard. "Sometimes I can understand why some people are angry at Mother. She couldn't just change the things almost everyone wanted changed. She also had to make things change that people liked."

He nodded, giving her a somber look. "That's the way it's been back home. Always. Stuff changes."

"It's hard to imagine," Kira said. "But Father says if Mother had failed, the storm would have come."

"Storm?"

"That's what the Mages called it, the visions that they saw," Kira explained. "The common people sort of going crazy, rioting in mobs, destroying everything. It's hard to believe that could ever happen, but the Mages saw it."

"I can believe it," Jason said, surprising her. "That's happened sometimes back home. Not a whole world, but parts of cities, even entire cities and sometimes countries. Everybody stops believing it will get better, everybody loses hope, everything falls apart."

"So you think the Mages were right?"

"I thought you were the one who believed in foresight," Jason joked. "But yeah, centuries of being forced to serve someone else, your guilds preventing any change, I'm amazed it didn't all blow up earlier."