What I did know was that Hannah and Cassy had worked together towards the end of the Beforetime to prepare the way for me. At what point in their preparations the Great White had come or how Cassy had escaped death was a mystery. The likelihood was that she had taken refuge in one of the shelters the Beforetimers had constructed, and since she had led the kidnapped paranormals to the Land, I had to assume the shelter had been within the Govamen compound where they had been held. But it was all guesswork because my dreams had never shown me the Great White or anything beyond it. All I knew of Cassy’s life after the holocaust had come from unravelling the clues she had left for me on the doors to Obernewtyn, and from conversations with the Twentyfamilies gypsy leader, Swallow, for he, and all of the Twentyfamilies gypsies, were descendants of Cassy and the Beforetime Misfits.

I wanted to go back to sleep, but instead I found myself thinking about Swallow. As far as I knew, the Twentyfamilies gypsy had no idea that the sacred D’rekta of the Twentyfamilies had been a Beforetime girl called Cassy, or that when she was older, Cassy had become the revered Sadorian seer Kasanda. I had put together the clues over time. Cassy had left her final message to me in the Earthtemple, or rather the last sign she had created, not the final sign, for according to the clues, that sign awaited me in the Red Land.

I focused my mind on the sound of the falling rain and tried to order my thoughts. It was my guess that Cassandra’s futuretelling Talent had manifested later in her life, as Misfit abilities sometimes did. How else could she have known, without foresight, where to leave clues for me that would survive until I was born? Hannah might have foreseen much of my life and told Cassy of it. She might even conceivably have foreseen the journey Cassy and the Beforetime Misfits would make to the Red Land, before coming to the Land, but could she truly have seen all that would happen in the long years Cassy would spend in the Land, all the signs she would leave and the creation of the Twentyfamilies, not to mention her capture and removal from the Land by Gadfian slavers? It was my belief that Cassy had developed futuretelling abilities before leaving the Land, and that these had been honed during the time between her capture by the slavers and her arrival in Sador, where she had left her last message for me, knowing I would come there seeking it. Certainly her powers must have been formidable, for a derivative of her name was used in Sador for those who exhibited that Talent.