Millie felt a tug of shyness as they approached Chrestomanci Castle. The whiteness of the settling snow leant it a fairytale appearance as the carriage made its progress up the long drive, through the greatly sloping parkland over which the Castle presided. But the Castle now housed a small group of young enchanters, Christopher's classmates, most of whom had arrived after she'd already left for school and whom she'd never met. Gabriel's ideas about how much holiday was required for the rest and revitalising of young minds turned out to be, predictably, much less generous than those of the traditional teaching profession: so Millie was back from school a week before lessons at the Castle would cease and these other children would go home.
Christopher obligingly rattled through the children she would expect to meet.
"Jason you know already, of course - funny to think of him ever being a boot boy now. He's as full of tricks as ever, thank goodness, or things would be pretty dull. Then there's Bernard - he's only about eleven and he's a bit serious but he's actually a really good bat, and he's shaping up to have a decent spin on his bowling. Not that there's any cricket to be had at the moment of course and whatever Jason says about it, football just doesn't compare..." Christopher sank into a momentary gloom as he contemplated the deficiencies of football as compared to cricket.
"At least it's not lacrosse", Millie put in, and they both started laughing. Millie had written lengthily and with great passion about her experiences with the various field sports in which she had been required to participate over the previous term.
"True! Well, then there's Elizabeth - she's awfully nice though she gets fed up with the rest of us, I think. She's been looking forward to you coming back so that there's another girl amongst us. There Phyllis of course, but she and Paul only live in London so they go home at weekends. They'll be back on Monday morning bright and early for lessons, worse luck for them. And that's it!"
Millie knew most of this already, because Christopher had turned out to be an unexpectedly faithful letter writer. In the first few weeks of school particularly, feeling homesick and remembering how envious Christopher had been of her being allowed to go away to school, she'd written him detailed accounts of the school building, lessons, the other girls, the teachers, the food - everything. She'd found she enjoyed it and she kept it up. The letters he had, somewhat surprisingly, sent regularly in response, were full of detail about the goings on at the Castle. Some of it Millie could have happily done with less of (particularly the lengthy passages about Christopher's clothes and the minutiae of his latest falling out with Gabriel), but mostly she'd been delighted to hear all the news from what had, at the start of the autumn term, just started to feel like home. She'd kept all of the letters under her pillow, in a bundle tied with a green ribbon.
Thanks to the letters, when the horses stopped neatly outside the vast carved front door of the Castle and Millie and Christopher tumbled out of the carriage and into the grand hall, she almost felt she knew the new ones in the sea of faces already.
"We've been waiting simply ages for you to come", said Elizabeth, warmly, when Millie was released from a warm joint hug from Rosalie and Mordecai. Tall, fair and pale, Elizabeth was both exactly and not at all as Christopher had described her: he had somehow conveyed a suggestion of beakishness about her long nose, but it really just lent her face an elegant roman profile. The niceness he'd attributed to her was already apparent, though, and her advanced age of 14 didn't stop her from crying joyfully "Oh, don't take your coats off! Let's all go and play in the snow".
They did, of course. The acres of Castle grounds were perfect for it, and Millie found snowball fighting infinitely more enjoyable a team sport than any she'd done during games at school. Was it something to do with not having to hold a stupid stick, she wondered, fleetingly as she raised a wind to blast a snow flurry in Jason's laughing face as he lunged at her? Or perhaps the fact that nobody was taking it seriously - there were no rules, sometimes people used magic and sometimes they didn't, nobody knew or cared who was on which team, they were just a central mass of youthful ebullience as they whirled and whooped in the snow.
The snow was falling thicker and faster, suddenly, and again Millie was struck breathless at the wonder, the beauty of it - and the sheer unlikelihood. How absolutely extraordinary that these perfect cold white petals should be floating in the dark sky and that she should be there to see them! She stretched her arms out and lifted her face to the sky, and drank it all in. The sound of cavorting, although the others were only feet away, was muted by that eerie muffling effect that snow has and she felt quite alone with her delight. It was a moment that she never forgot, her first snow (and it was a memory which served her well in the months of less idyllic, but more common, English winter weather to come).
Millie at last lowered her face from the sky and through the falling flakes she saw Christopher standing, snowball in hand, staring at her oddly, intently. There was a moment where she felt his eyes upon her and it was as though they were touching her skin. The others seemed further away than ever, and she started to blush without knowing why.
"This is ridiculous", she thought, and scooped up a handful of the snow lying thickly at her feet. Anything unsettling about the moment was immediately forgotten as Christopher's black hair was hidden by white powder, and he swooped to take his revenge.
