Men with blue crystal skin, and fingertips that looked like they were carved from shards of ice, stood in a line and looked south. Winter Brothers. Like soldiers they checked one another’s belts, ensuring they were looped and tied with their braids facing outward for others to see, proclaiming their victories, their names, and their deeds.

    Bronwen stood behind them, no one to check his belt. His braid was simple, his loops few, and his list of accolades short. Tonight would change that. He had earned the right to run with his brothers, and today he would earn his place at the front of the winter lines.

Bare chested in the snow, a strap of deer leather cut a brown line across their torsos and held bags which would bring plunder to their families. They would battle with honor against the Landed who would deny the simple truth that the Brothers sought to free them and teach them a better way.

    Three years. In three years he had learned the hunt, the brace of winter’s cold between his exposed toes, dripping from his nose and the beauty of a world through snowflake-burdened eyelashes. But in three years he had brought his elder brothers no honor. They cared for him, but he had not repaid their favor. He’d been Landed once, trapped in stale air and stagnant smoke beneath rotting timbers, cooped up like a caged bird which had forgotten how to sing.

    He spit in contempt. Durogen looked back at the sound, and waved a deep blue palm at him to be calm and breathe. Bronwen obeyed and his elder brother nodded. How had Bronwen thought himself complete before?

    No. He would earn honor tonight. He would hunt well, and had planned this for many weeks.

    The township sat squat and newly built over the ridgeline, far from the dilapidated broken cities of the old world, on the banks of a pond rich with fish and the verge of a forest which offered plenty. Yet these Landed people huddled, as he once did, in their homes, afraid to step out into winter, living off the dried remains of their harvests, praying for the next strong sun.

    No. He and his prayed to the true power of winter herself, and her embrace.

    The Brothers knelt together, though no signal told them to do so. They grasped the tails of their belts, brought their weaves to their lips, and then started their jog in unison to the south. The Landed’s homes waited, where the arc of fading blue sky turned purple to meet the arc of the white and blue snow.

    Two dozen strong, they made no sound but that of a passing breeze. Bronwen smiled in satisfaction as he passed within two feet of a squirrel, which paid him no mind, and continued to burrow away at the hidden nut it smelled below the hardened soil. As they approached the closest houses they split up and went their separate ways. Like winter shades, they drifted from snow pack to snow pack, crawling and burrowing like cold-impervious voles. Experienced Brothers went unnoticed by Landed eyes when motionless, and if they timed their movements with the bluster of wind, townsfolk perceived them as little more than another swirl in the squall.

    The wind cut through the passages between the houses; its fierceness disrupted by the piles of firewood and fences. Tonight, he would earn Durogen’s kindness of years. The Brothers' plan was to rapidly infiltrate the houses, shocking the inhabitants and seizing their larders. His tribe skittered along walls of homes finding handholds as they jumped and moved like humanoid spiders, each making no more sound than a rustle of wind through the pines. They tested windows, gently twisted doorknobs, and when none allowed admittance, they drifted to the next home, and tried again. There was always an entrance.

    Those Landed who were young enough to still learn the lessons of winter as he had been, would be freed to turn their skin blue through lessons of the ice. The rest would learn hardship, and the return to the clean air and the hunt, when their stores were taken, and they were forced to again experience what being in harmony with nature meant, the give and take of hunted and hunter.

    Durogen disappeared into one of the first homes, but Bronwen passed them by, and passed the next row and the row after that. Bronwen scaled fences with no more effort than climbing a set of stairs. Toes, a sickly dark blue-black of frostbite, yet still perfectly functional, found purchase on the small rough patches of the tall fences that marked boundaries between private property and public spaces.

    Like his elder Brothers, Bronwen found his target. A two-story home, dimly lit, perhaps one candle burning somewhere in the recesses. A family round a fireplace? Or reading together? He would surprise them with his speed, his arrival unexpectedly from the second story. Perhaps he'd even find a new younger brother or sister of his own?

Bronwen’s fingers found purchase. He lifted a window open, snow blew into the room, and he quickly and silently followed the flakes. He had planned to be in the room no more than a moment, and left the window open, allowing the arctic air to fill the house with its familiar presence. Landed families deserved to be reminded of the sweet taste of winter’s air in their lungs.

    His pupils dilated in the dark indoor space, bereft of moonlight. A bed filled the corner, with sheets neat and straightened. His breath billowed into the room and hung in clouds about his head, drifting slowly on the thermal currents. Walls protected the inhabitants from the biting winds, and while to a Landed it still would have been intolerably cold, to Bronwen the room was with suffused uncomfortable warmth from its wooden sinew.  No fire crackled below. No guttered candles in the room blew out with the wind of his arrival.

    He moved to the hallway, stood still, and leaned toward the staircase to listen. The house remained silent. The building’s bones didn’t creak or groan with the wood swelling and shrinking in the night. No snores drifted to the hall from the other bedroom. The door stood wide open down the hall and its bedsheets were tucked tight and unused. No exclamations of aggravation about cold wind blowing through the house filled the night.

Nostrils flared, testing the air like a bloodhound. No lingering scents of garlic or onions reached him. No aroma of roasted meat or pots of soups. The home filled with nothing but the cold snap of winter. Good enough. He had other winters to expand the tribe.

That didn’t mean their larder would be empty. He would not return to the tribe empty handed. That was a loop in the belt he did not need proclaimed.

    He had padded halfway down the stairs toward the first floor of the dwelling, when he heard the rare but distinct bellow of his fellows echoed in the night between the houses in anger or rage. No doubt someone had thought to cling to their meager holdings, unwilling to embrace change. His brothers would teach them otherwise.

    Their love of warm fires and their need for protective walls made them weak.

His world flipped upside down just as his foot touched the last step. He bounced once against the line which had snared him becoming weightless for an instant before a line of thin plastic wire carved into his ankle nearly through skin. In the dark a glimmer off the fishing line showed what held him aloft.

    Standing over his head, a man, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties, stood on the balcony and pulled down with all his substantial body weight. With each pull, Bronwen jerked higher. With a deft, practiced motion, the translucent cord was looped and tied under tension, and his assailant disappeared into the room with the open window. He returned carrying a dancing candle, its flame casting elongated shadows. He wore a coat of long brown leather which matched the tone of his skin. No flush of cold touched his cheeks as he stared down at Bronwen in the warm glow of golden candlelight.

    This was not a Landed man, but a hunter. This man stalked around him, even after he’d strung him up, much as the Winter Brothers hung deer.

    Two long knives, with worn and polished brass handles, where palms rested comfortably, and often, hung on his hips. A small L-shaped club Bronwen had never seen before poked out awkwardly from the man’s rear belt strap from under his coat. Two more objects Bronwen didn’t recognize waited in black worn leather containers on both thighs, with rough handles and a trigger. Deep wrinkles were cut into the skin of his face, around the eyes, spoke of years squinting across landscapes, and his brow furrowed even as they stared each down other in the relative dark of the house. His leathers were similarly worn, and didn’t squeak or creak as sat down on the stairs and looked up at the teenager he had captured.

    “You may call me Dustin.”

    “My brothers will come for me.”

    “Interesting,” Dustin said. “The people of St. Anna Avon said you are all in it for yourselves. Just in case, I left a few surprises around town that should keep them busy and guessing for a while. ”

    Bronwen took in a deep breath and moved to howl as his brothers had done, and found a knife was at his throat.

    “If you yell, I will just ask someone else.”

    There was honor in dying to save the tribe. He would be placed in the bosom of winter’s water with his loops proudly declaring his sacrifice, but his throat caught and his voice died. He wanted to cry out, to do right by his family, but fear took him.

    The man’s brown eyes looked him up and down in slow deliberate stretches, taking in details. His languid blinking reminded Bronwen of the master hunters of the tribe, that spoke of many kills, some forced, others chosen. He felt his own knife lashed to his lower right calf, and entertained reaching for it.

    “You aren’t that fast,” Dustin said, as though he read Bronwen’s mind. “How many of you are there?”

    Blood drained to his face as he hung upside down. He could not disgrace the tribe with such weakness before this fellow hunter!

    “I am Bronwen of the Winter Brothers.”

    “Yes, you mentioned.”

    “What is your clan?”

    “I’m from Texas,” said Dustin. “How many?”

    “I will not betray my brothers.”

    He emphasized the word, ‘not,’ but when hanging upside down the plosive force he meant to ascribe came out as a wheeze.

    “Right.” Dustin took out a small notebook, and jotted down several lines. “Your foot is tied up just above the ankle by fishing twine from an eight-hundred-pound test line. You could bounce here all night on it, it won’t break. In about another three minutes you won’t be able to feel your toes, and in another minute or two after that you will start having trouble moving them.”

    An invisible thread puckered his skin deeply and held him aloft, tied to the banister. Another howl somewhere out in the dark of the town echoed. Dustin breathed a pair of steamy lines out of his nostrils.

    “There is no victory here tonight. The town is empty, so you have all the time in the world to answer me. I would rather not have to hurt you, and I’d rather figure out how to end this whole thing peacefully. But.” Dustin shrugged his shoulders and met Bronwen’s sky blue eyes as he spoke. “Why are you hunting the boys and girls of this town?”

    Only one who lived among the wolves and foxes of winter, and stood here alone against the tribe could understand.

    “We set them free, and give them the opportunity to stand before winter herself. If they are strong enough, we will make them our brothers and sisters. Our relationship to winter is explained to them by our tellers, and we offer them freedom to join us in the world unfettered by physical weakness. In time, when their strength of will and faith in winter’s power is tested, they are given the blue of our family. As no doubt you could be given if you saw fit.”

    The man's wrinkles seemed to grow deeper. He sighed and said, "I doubt they see it the way you do."

    How could they all be so ignorant of such basic things? Surely Dustin’s tribe understood something of nature’s bounty.

    “Is it not this way in Texas?” Bronwen asked. “Do you not have your customs which set you apart from others? How do you worship winter?”

    “God bless the home star state, we don’t really get much in the way of snow, kid.”

    “I am no child!” The words spilled out of Bronwen and he reached out for Dustin who leaned calmly to the side and then nudged him, setting him spinning and bobbing nauseatingly. “I am…” he twisted his head struggling to maintain eye contact with the man, “…a brother, and you will treat me with respect.”

    Dustin did not answer the demand or ask any additional questions. He let the candle burn, melting away a millimeter at a time. Bronwen’s foot began to tingle. 

    “Our tribe is many men strong, with more every year by our conquests,” he said. “This is one town. There are others!”

    “People do love to fill silences,” Dustin said. “How many is many?”

    Bronwen flushed now with a new anger at himself. He had already barked out too much like a misbehaving wolfhound. He clamped his jaw shut and said no more. The rush of blood to his face forced him to breathe through his mouth as his nose clogged with mucus.

    “Your skin,” Dustin asked. “The Fall wasn’t long enough ago for you to be born this way. How do you get it?”

    He ran the flat side of his blade across the exposed flesh of Bronwen’s chest, applying enough pressure to see the action of capillaries under the blue tone. 

    “We earn the color of winter,” Bronwen said proudly. He grasped the banister to stop his swaying and defiantly met Dustin’s eyes. “Through hunt, and living the ways of winter honorably with our family we may ask to stand before her and know our future’s path."

    “You’re a salesmen kid, I admit that.” They held one another’s gaze firmly. A window slid open somewhere else in the house, like a gentle wisp of paper moving across paper. It would be only moments to freedom. Several breaths passed, and then Dustin smiled broadly at him. “Good poker face, too. I appreciate that.”

    He rose without making the stairs creak, unlatched his knives, and the unknown items on his hips. He left the candle one step up from where he had been sitting, and gently bumped the blue-skinned teen, setting him swinging again casting shadows about the room as the flame danced in the breeze.

    “Don’t go anywhere,” Dustin said to him.

    “You are nothing to the Winter! You are but a mote of heat to be drained by her greatness.” Bronwen’s clipped words sounded more hurried than forceful. He needed to keep the man here, and focused on him so his brothers could gain the advantage. To be found caught like a prey would be terrible loops and braids to bear.

    Dustin’s footsteps cast a hard click on the floor for two steps, then he became silent. Bronwen pivoted, twisting his head and body about for clues how the man had vanished but instead set himself swinging more wildly. Dustin must have possessed a magic of the Texas tribe to become as silent as owls and as invisible as white fox.

    The sharp crack of a snow-laden branch breaking in the woods rolled through the house like thunder’s cousin. Twice the sound broke the night, then a third time, and the weight of a body collapsed to the floorboards, muffled by throw rugs. Bronwen jerked his head about but found only silence and dancing shadows.

    Red crept along the floor from the side room, following the grains of the wood.

    “Brother? Durogen?”

    A brother bled mere feet from him and he could do nothing! Panic set in, and he set himself swaying even more. The candle flickered in the breeze of his fumbling. He reached up, toward his ankle, but couldn’t reach the blade. He bucked to gain momentum and climb his own leg, when the crack of thunder sounded again twice more, just outside the building. 

    Numbness followed pain in his strangled foot. He reached again for the knife on his leg, as the deliberate clicking on the floorboards returned. The leather-clad man reached to Bronwen’s leg and calmly removed the knife, swatting away Bronwen’s awkward attempts to grapple.

    He ran a finger along the blade, which was carved from bone, and the wrapped handle strips of deer leather. The tassel of snowy owl feathers floated playfully in the air currents as he moved it about. Dustin sat down on the stairs again. The candle cast his shadow in silhouette, reminding the younger man of a wolf against a moonlit sky at night. Dustin’s hand reached up, drew a cloth across his face, and then his hands. He placed it at his side, now stained a rusty brown red.

    “Now, I am going to cut you down, and you will tell me more about this tribe of yours.”

Bronwen’s heart sank. Thoughts of rescue died. Hope to save his brothers died. The magic of the Texas clan was too great. Tonight, his only company was Dustin and his rumbling voice. He would give him nothing.