Elphinstone, Abi (ed.) - Winter Magic / Элфинстоун, Эйби (ред.) - Зимняя магия [2016, epub, ENG]

A Night at the Frost Fair by Emma Carroll The Magic of Midwinter by Amy Alward The Voice in the Snow by Michelle Harrison The Cold-Hearted by Geraldine McCaughrean Casse-Noisette by Katherine Woodfine Someone Like the Snow Queen by Berlie Doherty The Room with the Mountain View by Lauren St John Snow by Michelle Magorian Into the Mountain by Jamila Gavin The Wishing Book by Piers Torday The Snow Dragon by Abi Elphinstone

The Snow Dragon by Abi Elphinstone

There was nothing unusual or especially exciting about Whistlethrop. It was an ordinary English town. A string of shops and restaurants lined the High Street and behind them back roads filtered out into rows of red-brick houses, semi-detached gardens and a park with swings and a slide. The town had a church, too, with a steeple that towered above the slated roofs and a graveyard ringed with yew trees. And to most people who lived there, this was all that Whistlethrop was. But to Phoebe, who peered at things more closely, the town was a very different place. She knew that there was a badger sett in the woods beyond the park; she knew that when almost everyone was asleep and the street lamps glowed bright, an old lady hobbled out of her house and then sat on a bench in her garden to watch the moon; she knew that if you listened hard enough you could hear the weathervane creaking on top of the church spire. She also knew, though she wished she didn’t, that the vicar practised yoga without his robes (or indeed his trousers, shirt, socks or pants) in his bathroom on Wednesday nights. And Phoebe knew all of this because she watched, every evening, from the skylight window of an attic in Griselda Bone’s Home for Strays. She leaned forward onto the balls of her feet, and the tower of books below her wobbled. Then she clung tighter to the skylight and nudged it open, because she knew that although it was dangerous to stand on top of forty-three encyclopedias, it was also extremely important. She pushed her elbows through the gap in the window, rested her chin on her hands and let her blue eyes grow large and round. It was Christmas Eve, and from her perch on the outskirts of town, Phoebe could see that Whistlethrop was covered in a thick layer of snow. It was the first snow of the winter and it had come silently in the night – the way magic often does – but unlike the shadows and the moonbeams and the stars, this magic had stayed until morning. It had covered her ordinary world and transformed it into a glittering white kingdom, and as Phoebe looked upon it, her body tingled. The snow felt like a promise somehow, a pledge that today might be different from all the other days and that possibly, just possibly, there might be even more magic waiting for her. . . .