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Then he heard his mama crying. That scared him so he ran away.
    Next day Ephraim brought Cormac to join the daily lessons Lorene gave her younger son. He was the only pupil because the two Frankel children—Elsie, eight, and her five-year-old brother, Tim—who sometimes came weren’t there that day. It was the only time he had ever seen his father in the classroom.
    Ephraim pushed Pohantis’s boy into the seat beside Quent. “Teach him, too,” Ephraim told his wife. “He speaks a fair bit of English, but he needs to learn more. And how to read and write. A little geography wouldn’t hurt either.”
    He had always refused to let her teach the children of the slaves. Now he was bringing her a half-breed. “Why?”
    “Because I promised.”
    Lorene’s blue eyes narrowed and she nodded her head in bitter understanding. “Not her. You’d pay no mind to what you promised her. You promised the village chief, didn’t you? In order to get her.”
    “Clever,” Ephraim said softly. “Too clever for a woman. See he learns.”
    Cormac did learn, and quickly. And he had things to teach as well.
    A few days after Cormac started coming to the classroom both boys were in the woods on a hill above the big house where they’d been sent to gather kindling. Quent spotted a rabbit standing perfectly still with his ears perked straight up and his nose twitching, seeking the danger smells in the biting winter twilight before setting out to feed. But the rabbit was sniffing in the wrong direction. He didn’t pick up the human scent.
    Two years before, a Scot who looked like a barrel on legs and spoke in an accent so strange Quent could barely understand him had come to visit his father. The men spent two weeks riding and rowing all over Shadowbrook. Before he left to return to what he called the “auld country” the Scot gave Quent a dirk; he’d been practicing with it ever since. Now the small dagger flew through the air in a perfect arc almost too swift to be seen. The thin, pointed blade landed in the rabbit’s neck and the creature died instantly.
“Tkap iwkshe,”
Cormac murmured. Well done. It was the first time he’d spoken to Quent in the Potawatomi’s Algonkian language. Quent didn’t understand the words, but he could tell from the tone that they were complimentary.
    Quent gathered his kill so he could bring it home to Kitchen Hannah to skin and clean and cook. She was called that to distinguish her from Corn Broom Hannah, who cleaned the big house. Quent knew names were important, that they told you things about people. “What’s your Indian name?” he asked when he had bled the rabbit and tucked it into the leather bag he’d been filling with kindling.
    “Don’t have one.”
    “Why not?”
    “I was named by my father. For a great warrior among his people.”
    “I thought the clan mothers decided the child’s name.”
    “That’s how it is with the
Irinakhoiw,
the snakes. Not with us. Potawatomi men are strong. They aren’t ruled by women.”
    “The Kahniankehaka aren’t snakes. And they’re plenty strong.” Quent jerked his head toward the distant hills and the land of the Mohawk. “The other
Haudenosaunee
call them the Guardians of the Eastern Door.” He’d been listening to visitors to Shadowbrook tell Indian stories for as long as he could remember.
    “Not as strong as we are,” Cormac insisted. “The Potawatomi are the People of the Place of the Fire. Nothing’s stronger than fire.”
    “Kahniankehaka means the people of the flint. Flint doesn’t burn.”
    “Fire is over everything. The strongest thing of all. You wait, you’ll see.”
    Eventually he did. But in that winter when Pohantis and Cormac came and changed his world, Quent first discovered a number of other truths. Among them, how mean his older brother John could be.
    John was seventeen. Six other children had been born in the eight years between the brothers, but none lived more than a few months. Once Quent heard Kitchen