BEING A HEROINE IS NOWHERE NEAR THE FUN FOLKS MAKE IT OUT TO be. Oh, it’s nice enough at first, when everybody is offering congratulations and making a fuss, but that doesn’t last long. And when the thing they’re congratulating you for is getting rid of a bunch of bugs, which you didn’t do all by your own self anyway, it feels pretty silly. Not to mention that it annoys the other people who ought to have come in for some of the credit.

The one it mainly annoyed was my twin brother, Lan. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a pretty strong magician. It was his spells that held the mirror bugs off of the Little Fog settlement long enough for Wash and William and me to get there. I thought that was a lot harder than what I’d done, but the only people interested in talking to Lan much were the magicians at Northern Plains Riverbank College, and even they were more interested in me than in my brother. What Lan had done was something they understood, but what I’d done was a mix of the Avrupan magic I’d learned in school and the Aphrikan magic I’d studied outside regular hours. The professors all said it was a new thing and got very excited. Even Papa.

Everyone from the North Plains Territory Homestead Claims and Settlement Office to the Mill City Garden Club was only interested in me, Eff Rothmer.

I wasn’t used to it. The only folks who’d paid me much mind before were the ones who thought I was evil and unlucky because I was thirteenth-born. I didn’t believe they were right, not anymore, but I still didn’t like all the attention. I didn’t like strangers asking me questions or staring at me when I walked down the street. I didn’t like people asking me to make speeches and getting cross with me when I said no. I didn’t like folks expecting me to do absurd things for them, like the lady who showed up one day with a train ticket to Long Lake City, saying she wanted me to put a spell on her prize roses to get rid of the aphids. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and Papa had to come out and be stern at her. And it wasn’t even a round-trip ticket.