A Winter's Promise (The Mirror Visitor, #1)

by Christelle Dabos

You know very well my little abode is allergic to surprise visits. One of these days you’re going to get whacked on the head, and you’ll have asked for it!”

This is what Ophelia was like: in situations where any young girl would have cried, moaned, shouted, implored, she usually just observed in silence. Her cousins liked to say that she was a bit simple.

Ophelia wasn’t remotely drawn to boys of her own age, but she could spend hours in the company of a barometer

Hanging there, in the middle of the night sky, its towers steeped in the Milky Way, a marvelous citadel floated above the forest, with nothing attaching it to the rest of the world. It was a totally crazy spectacle, an enormous beehive disowned by the earth, a tortuous interlacing of keeps, bridges, crenellations, stairs, flying buttresses, and chimneys. Jealously guarded by a frozen ring of moats, their long streams solidified in the void, the snowy city soared above and plunged below this line. Spangled with lit windows and street lamps, it reflected its thousand-and-one lights onto the mirror of a lake. As for its highest tower, it speared the very crescent of the moon.