Advent Book Quiz Day 15

Day fifteen of our festive quiz

Can you identify the author and title of the following extract? Submit your answer as a comment and you could win a fabulous prize! Closing date for entries is 1st January 2014 and all will be revealed on 3rd January!!

They sang 'The First Nowell' as their last carol; they made their farewells; they were out again in the snow and the crisp air, with Merriman's impassive polite smile disappearing behind the Manor doors. Will stood on the broad stone steps and gazed up at the stars. The clouds had cleared at last, and now the stars blazed like pinpricks of white fire in the black hollow of the night sky, in all the strange patterns that had been a complicated mystery to him all his life, but were endlessly significant now. 'See how bright the Pleiades are tonight,' he said softly, and Mary stared at  him in amazement and said, 'The what?' 

So Will brought his attention down out of the fiery black heavens, and in their own small, yellow, torchlit world the Stanton carollers trooped home.He walked among them speechless, as if in a dream. They thought him tired, but he was floating in wonder. He had three of the Signs of Power now. He had, too, the knowledge to use the Gift of Gramarye: a long lifetime of discovery and wisdom, given to him in a moment of suspended time. He was not the same Will Stanton that he had been a very few days before. Now and forever, he knew, he inhabited a different time-scale from that of everyone he had ever known or loved...But he managed to turn his thoughts away from all these things, even from the two invading, threatening figures of the Dark. For this was Christmas, which had always been a time of magic, to him and to all the world. This was a brightness, a shining festival, and while its enchantment was on the world the charmed circle of his family and home would be protected against any invasion from outside. 

Indoors, the tree glowed and glittered, and the music of Christmas was in the air, and spicy smells came from the kitchen, and in the broad hearth of the living-room the great twisted Yule root flickered and flamed as it gently burned down.