Winter Magic

by Abi Elphinstone

  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

  by Abi Elphinstone

  Winter is a season that sparkles with magic and transforms our ordinary world into a glittering kingdom: rooftops covered in snow, lakes glazed with ice and windows frosted white. It is a time of year that invites exploration and whispers of adventure. And at the heart of it all there is a sense of longing – for snowflakes, stockings and sledging, of course – but also, for stories.

  My childhood winters were filled with snowball fights and wintry walks, but it is perhaps the evenings cuddled up by the fire with a book that I remember most. Because it was there that I discovered a wardrobe leading to a land locked in an eternal winter, a pack of wolves prowling through the snow around Willoughby Chase and a young girl riding an armoured polar bear across the Arctic ice plains. There are few things as enchanting as reading a snowy story during the depths of winter, and it is my absolute pleasure to introduce this collection of Winter Magic stories, written by some of the most talented and acclaimed writers in the country.

  Let frost fairs enthral you, husky dogs whisk you away on fur-lined sleds and wishing books answer your heart’s desires. Here, fairytales are reimagined, lost legends are remembered and folk tales are re-told as you’ve never heard them before. There are snow dragons, elf tunnels, winter ballets and frozen rivers, but there are also pied pipers, unlikely time travellers, witches and renegade French teachers. This is winter magic at its best. So, take a seat, wrap up warm and don’t forget to send your Christmas list to the Svenland elves – because eleven shiveringly magical stories await you . . .

  Emma Carroll

  1

  Leaving Gran was the hardest part. Harder, Maya thought, than seeing her in weeks-old clothes or finding a hairdryer instead of milk inside her fridge. They’d done the right thing, Dad said, as they left the care home today. He said it again on the way to the station. And again when buying takeout coffee as they waited for their train. It sounded less convincing each time.

  And now they faced the long journey home. Maya never enjoyed it, even on better days. It meant two different trains and a taxi ride across London, all of which made her travel-sick. It also meant four hours with Jasmine, her older sister, who hogged the armrest and talked endlessly about people Maya didn’t know. Today, she didn’t even pretend to listen.

  There isn’t a word for how I’m feeling, Maya thought as she stared through the taxi window. Sad didn’t cover it. Or angry – though she felt both. She’d always had a special connection with her gran. It was a fierce, unspoken thing that didn’t always make sense to her because they weren’t the slightest bit similar: Gran loved travel and exploring; Maya got queasy just from going to the supermarket in the car.

  Yet sitting in London traffic she felt a different kind of awful. The care home with its wipe-clean chairs and shepherd’s pie smell was a million miles from her gran’s own house. That was full of strange carvings and bright-coloured rugs that hung on the walls – souvenirs from the many adventures Gran had been on in her life.

  And now it had come to this.

  It would’ve been easier if Mum was here to talk to. She didn’t jump in, telling you what to do, she listened to what you said. But she was in India visiting her sister who’d just had a baby. Everyone and everything important seemed a long way away.

  Beyond the taxi window, darkness had turned the city into a sea of lights. It was raining. As the traffic crawled across London Bridge, Maya pictured the River Thames, black and glistening, beneath them. Cars stopped. Started. Stopped again. The windscreen wipers were the only fast-moving thing.

  Dad leaned forward to speak to the driver. ‘We’ve got another train to catch in half an hour. Reckon we’ll make it?’

  Maya didn’t hear the answer. She glanced at Jasmine, who’d given up talking and was listening to music on her phone. Jasmine who did perfect flicky-eye make-up and wore amazing vintage clothes.

  ‘I’m not jealous,’ Maya would say, though today she’d definitely felt it. Just before they left the care home, Gran had given them both presents.

  ‘These things are very precious to me,’ Gran said, as she’d pressed packages into their hands.

  Jasmine opened hers first. It was a gorgeous little star-shaped brooch that came in its own red leather box. She made gushing noises and straightaway pinned it to her coat.

  Maya began unwrapping her own present. Something brown and ugly emerged from the paper. Her heart sank. She’d no idea what it was, but it certainly wasn’t a pretty brooch. She glanced at Gran, confused.

  ‘It was Edmund’s,’ Gran whispered. ‘No one believed him, either.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Maya, eyebrows raised. ‘Right.’

  She sensed Gran wanted to say more, but Dad was tutting irritably. ‘Oh, Mum, not this Edmund again?’

  The name had come up a lot recently – ever since Dad suggested that the carers who came every day weren’t enough, and it was time for Gran to consider moving into a home.

  ‘You’re mollycoddling me,’ Gran had said. ‘It was just the same for poor Edmund, and it didn’t do him any favours, did it?’

  No one knew who this ‘Edmund’ was. When they’d asked Gran, she said she’d met him on her travels, but beyond that she was pretty vague. They’d searched for clues in her old photographs and the other stuff she kept – the ribbons and bus tickets, coat buttons, birthday cards and wrappers from old chocolate bars. With so much heaped in her bedroom, it had been hard to even open the door.

  None of it led to Edmund, so in the end they’d supposed he was another of Gran’s fixations. And she did have a few – like keeping her bath full of water in case the pipes froze.

  Despite Dad’s irritation this afternoon, Gran had soon started on again about Edmund.

  ‘You might not know Edmund,’ she’d said to Dad. ‘But that doesn’t mean he didn’t exist.’

  ‘Mum, I really think—’

  Gran interrupted. ‘That’s just it, James, you don’t think. The world is full of things you’ve never seen or heard of, but they are there, you know – and sometimes you have to go looking for them.’

  To Maya this was probably the most sensible thing her gran had said all day. But Dad, thoroughly fed up, stormed off to speak to the nurses.

  ‘I thought you might be interested in Edmund, my dear,’ Gran said, patting Maya’s arm. ‘You’re like your mother – you listen to people. And believe it or not, you’re also rather like me.’

  ‘Am I?’ said Maya, surprised.

  Gran nodded. ‘You’ve got an explorer’s mind inside that head of yours. Now please go and use it.’

  Maya stared at the brown lump in her hand. She felt she should understand what Gran was trying to tell her. It seemed important – more important than the pretty brooch that Jasmine had already stopped gushing over.

  ‘Thanks for the present,’ she muttered, stuffing it in her pocket.

  Now, in the quiet of the taxi, Maya took it out. The package, messily wrapped in pale blue paper, was about the size of a phone, though heavier. Sh
e’d no idea what it was, and she definitely didn’t see how it linked to this person called Edmund. She wasn’t quite sure what an explorer’s mind was, either. But if it meant that your thoughts often came out as questions, then she supposed Gran had a point.

  Maya slumped back in her seat. The traffic still hadn’t moved very far; they were stuck about halfway across the bridge. It was raining heavily now, the wipers swishing faster over the taxi’s windscreen. What fell against the glass looked grainy. Icy. In the headlights of other cars, Maya saw flecks of white. The rain was turning rapidly to snow.

  A bit too rapidly.

  She sat up, alert.

  ‘What’s going on with the weather?’ she asked, but no one else seemed to have noticed.

  The wipers went faster and faster. Watching them made her dizzy, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Something very strange was happening. Beyond the windscreen, London had changed.

  The road was now completely white. All the rooftops along the riverbank were coated in snow, and the traffic . . . well . . . there was no traffic any more, at least not of the car-kind. And Maya was no longer sitting inside a taxi.

  She was standing in a busy street, shivering.

  2

  ‘Out of the way, numbskull!’

  Bewildered, Maya spun round. She stumbled into the gutter just in time, as a cart pulled by horses thundered past. From the opposite direction came a man on horseback and plenty more people on foot. It was too dark to see much, but from the pushing and jostling she sensed she was somewhere very busy. The taxi was nowhere to be seen.

  I’m dreaming, Maya decided. I’ve fallen asleep and in a minute I’ll wake up. At least she hoped she would, for though she’d kept her coat on, it really was freezing – the sort of cold that seeped under her scarf and through her jeans. Maya shivered miserably. She started walking; it was the only way to get warm. The taxi must be here somewhere; she just hoped she was heading in the right direction to find it.

  Quickly, the road became even busier, till it was a heaving mass of people. She couldn’t stop or turn or even see much above the heads and shoulders that swarmed around her. Every now and then, a cart would trundle through the middle of the crowd, parting it like a ship on the water. Then the crowds would close in again. It almost felt like drowning. Or being stuck waist-deep in mud that you couldn’t get out of.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ Maya told herself, though her heart was thumping hard. ‘Just go with it. It’s only a dream. It’ll be over soon.’

  The road led under a huge stone arch and out onto a bridge. Not the same London Bridge as before – this one had even more people crossing it, and tall buildings on either side of the road. Most seemed to be heading north across the river. She began to notice the men, women and children pressing in around her. They had an air of excitement about them, like people on their way to a football match. She wondered where they were going.

  There weren’t any street lights. The only light came from fires in metal baskets that burned on the street. As Maya’s eyes adjusted, she realized how oddly dressed everyone was. The women wore skirts to the ground and the men had triangular-shaped hats and trousers that stopped at the knee.

  She was beginning to wonder if this really was a dream. Somehow, she felt a bit too wide awake. Perhaps I’m on a film set, she thought, or there’s a fancy-dress party going on. But her mind slid back to what Gran had said earlier, about things existing even if you’d never seen them.

  You have to go looking.

  Whatever strange stuff was happening, Maya was very definitely here. In the moment. She could feel every cobblestone beneath her feet, every little icy snowflake that fell against her face.

  Yet how could that be possible?

  Maya grew steadily more confused. But better that than feeling panicky or cold – and actually, she no longer felt either. She’d stopped thinking about where the taxi was, too. By now, she was halfway across the bridge. On both sides buildings towered above her – old, wonky-looking places that stood so close together they almost touched. Some, with crumbling stonework and half-collapsed roofs, stood empty. Others hummed with life. She passed pubs. A chapel, a steakhouse, pie shops and shoe shops, and a house advertising quiet rooms for ladies to rest and drink tea. It was mad to think so much happened on a bridge.

  Stuffing her hands into her coat, Maya walked as fast as the crowds allowed. Her pockets, as usual, were full of old tissues and sweet wrappers. Back in the taxi, Gran’s present had been in there, too. Yet it wasn’t now. It must’ve fallen out on the seat, and she felt guilty for being careless. Though there was no way she could go back for it, not through these crowds.

  Then, through a narrow gap between the buildings, Maya glimpsed the river. Except it wasn’t black and shiny any more. It didn’t even look like water. Out of the gloom, the Thames glowed a greyish-white. There were things on it that definitely weren’t boats. Things with legs that shouted and waved.

  People.

  Maya stared in amazement. The river, she realized, was completely frozen over. She’d never seen the Thames like this: actually, she’d never seen a frozen river before – only in films and those ones were probably computer-generated.

  This didn’t look anything like a movie, though. It looked real. It felt real, just as the cobblestones and the snowflakes did. She kept walking, keen to get to the other side of the bridge. Passing under another archway, she found herself on the opposite bank of the river.

  The second her feet touched solid ground again, she knew. No, this wasn’t a dream. She had a sudden sense of purpose, as if she was here for a reason, though she still didn’t know what.

  At the water’s edge were signs advertizing some sort of fair. Maya tried to read what they said. The writing was dreadful. Some of the letters she couldn’t make out, but what she could sent excitement shooting through her:

  ‘Once in a lifetime experience! Meet Mr Jack Frost!’

  ‘Eat, drink and be merry at tonight’s marvellous Frost Fair . . .’

  There were queues as far as the eye could see. So this was where the crowds had been heading; everyone was here to go out on the ice. Perhaps it was why she was, too.

  Finally, she reached the front of the crowds. Men were taking money at the river’s edge: people queued up to pay.

  ‘A shilling a go on the ice, ladies and gents! The Thames is frozen two yards deep,’ said the man collecting people’s payments. ‘More chance of me turning into King George than of that ice cracking.’

  King George?

  That couldn’t be right. The person on the throne was a queen, not a king. But everyone was dressed so strangely, weren’t they? And in return, her jeans and trainers had been getting some funny looks.

  She rubbed her eyes. Blinked. Nothing changed. She was still here, queueing up on the riverbank. So if this wasn’t a dream, what was it?

  Something very odd had happened back there in the taxi. And now she was in olden-times London. The only explanation was a mad one. She – Maya Mulligan, who got car sick and train sick on the very shortest journeys – had somehow time-travelled all the way to the past.

  Maya didn’t know whether to be scared or over-the-moon excited. Either way, she was penniless.

  ‘Look,’ she explained, on reaching the front of the queue. ‘My purse is in my bag and it’s back in the taxi, but I’ve got a bank card and ten pounds left over from my birthday, so I can pay, it’s just that . . .’ Seeing the man’s confused expression, Maya stopped. Gulped.

  Bank cards? Taxi? Who was she kidding? If this really was olden-times London, she might as well be talking Greek.

  ‘A shilling,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  ‘That’s the problem – I haven’t got a shilling.’

  ‘No money, no ice,’ said the man. ‘Hop it.’

  Dismayed, Maya backed away. She didn’t have the foggiest idea what a shilling even looked like. But she needed to visit the frost fair – that much she did understand. She’d walked
a few yards when someone with very cold fingers seized her wrist.

  ‘Help me. Please, I beg of you.’

  Maya’s mouth fell open in surprise. As the crowd shifted sideways, a boy of about her age emerged. He looked very pale. Very scared. On instinct, she stepped backwards. The boy came, too – the fingers holding her wrist were his.

  ‘You’ve got to help me. Someone’s following me. I’m in terrible danger,’ he said. ‘If you could—’

  ‘Let go of me. Like, NOW!’ Maya yelped, trying to shake him off.

  The hand didn’t move. Gritting her teeth, she tried to prise off each finger. But as soon as she’d lifted one, the others clamped down again.

  ‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said crossly, ‘or what you think you’re doing.’

  ‘If I’m with you, it’ll throw him off the scent. He won’t expect me to be with . . .’ The boy eyed Maya’s jeans and trainers suspiciously. ‘A girl.’

  This boy’s mad, Maya decided. His eyes were a bit too big and bright for his face. The purple coat he wore flapped about his legs like one of Gran’s old dressing gowns. He certainly looked mad.

  ‘You’d better let go of me, I’m warning you,’ she snapped.

  With a quick glance over his shoulder, the boy dropped his hand.

  ‘So will you help me?’ he asked. He seemed jumpy. Excitable. He couldn’t keep his gaze on anything.

  Maya scowled, rubbing her wrist. ‘Why would I want to help you?’

  ‘A man in a black cloak is following me,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve escaped, you see, and he wants to recapture me. He’ll stop at nothing to get me back.’

  ‘Really?’ Maya folded her arms. It sounded far too much like the plot of a cheesy film.

  ‘Really, truly,’ he replied, then as if seeing Maya properly for the first time, he grinned. ‘I say, you’re rather feisty for a girl, aren’t you?’