Excerpt: The Winter Keeper

Raisa looked up at the sky for a moment to look at the beautiful trees. At first it seemed as the forest was completely quiet, but when she listened closely she could hear many sounds. This was another thing her master had taught her to do often.

“Always appreciate the sounds,” he liked to say, “The world is always saying something to you in its cryptic way.”

Raisa concentrated and listened. The loudest noise was the crunch of their boots breaking the crust of frost. Then there was the occasional bird call, and the melodic whistling from the whistlecone pine trees, whose cones had holes in them that acted like flutes when the wind blew through. Then there were the even fainter noises – the soft flump when snow slid off a tree branch and fell to the ground, and the giant tree trunks creaking as their limbs waved in the wind.