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don’t attack us because they fear us,” Baba had said, “they attack us because they think they can get away with it.”
    But Gyish, perhaps because he had led the family during the last war, took the opposite side. “All the Families are getting weaker and they all blame us. The flames of hatred burn deep and long, Odin—they need to see that we are weak so that their hate for us is satisfied.”
    Apparently Baba had given in to Gyish’s view—or, in Baba’s absence, Gyish had bullied the others into following the strategy of humility.
    â€œAnd this one?” asked the short, slightly heavy woman who seemed to be the Greeks’ chief inquisitor.
    Danny raised his head to look Poot in the eye. Poot said nothing.
    It was Auntie Tweng who spoke. A single word. “Drekka.”
    A little smile flickered on the Greek woman’s face. “And still here?”
    â€œWe still have hope for him,” said Poot, and then turned and walked away. The others followed him, though Tweng took a moment to glare at Danny before she strode behind them.
    That’s all I needed, thought Danny. One more reason for the Family to wish me dead.
    Danny noticed now that there was a girl of about eleven or twelve among the Greek adults. She was the only child that they had brought along; Danny wondered why they had brought any. The girl stayed well back and looked bored. Maybe she was the spoilt child of the woman who always took the lead—certainly the Greek leader took the girl’s arm and hustled her along, which suggested that the girl was her daughter. A bratty child, perhaps, who threw a tantrum when they thought to leave her behind. It pleased Danny to imagine her that way, because as the son of Odin he was always accused of being that way, though he was pretty sure he never had been.
    The children had been told to stay out of sight as soon as they were dismissed, and most of them took this to mean it was a play day, as long as they took their games to remote locations within the compound. The whooping and hollering began the moment they were out of the dooryard.
    Naturally, no one invited Danny along. He made his way toward the schoolhouse as if he intended to study something in the one place where none of the other children would willingly go during a play day, but after entering the school he waited only a little while before he slipped out the back and made his way around behind Hammernip Hill to approach the old house from the most isolated side.
    A steep slope on Danny’s left side led to a runoff ditch on his right. The ditch ran right under the crawl space of the newest wing of the house—it had obviously been dug long before the wing was built, and Danny knew that was more than a hundred years ago. Danny made a point of not checking to see if anyone was watching him. He knew that a glance around would make him seem furtive, whereas if he just ducked under the house without the slightest concern about who might see him, he would seem innocent. If anyone asked, he would say that he liked to nap in the near darkness there. That story was a bit more plausible in summer, because it was so much cooler under the house. In winter, though, it provided shelter from the wind, so he could still make a case for its being his private hideaway.
    And it was, wasn’t it? The only thing he concealed was that instead of lying down on the cold earth of the crawl space, he made his way to the cranny through which he entered the wall spaces.
    He had discovered it first when he was only five, small enough to fit through the passage more easily. But long habit had taught him how to bend his body to fit around tight corners. He had grown quite a bit in the months since he had last crept inside, and he worried that he’d have to turn back at some point, or—even worse—get stuck and have to call for help. But no, he moved smoothly through the familiar passages.
    The leaders of