Tribal phoenix design in black ink

There was a girl named Hester Quill who kept the orchard gate for her uncle, and she kept it badly, because she was forever watching the sky over the ridge. One August evening the sky caught fire. It was no sunset. A bird came down out of the smoke with its wings swept back like a pair of hooked knives, its crest curled over its head like the neck of a question mark, and it landed in the bramble hedge so hard the hawthorn shook its blossom off in a snow of white.

Hester went to it with a bucket of well water, because that was what you carried in those days. The phoenix did not thank her. It opened its beak and told her, in the voice of a rusted gate, that it had a heart burning at the centre of its breast and that the fire would not go out until somebody carried a cinder of it home. Only a cinder, mind. Not a feather, not a bone. She had to take it from the heart itself, and the heart would not let go of anything that wasn't offered freely.

So Hester did the thing nobody in the village ever forgave her for. She knelt in the bramble and put her hand flat against that burning chest, and she let it take one spark. Her palm bore the mark of it for the rest of her life, a little knot of black tendrils running down toward her wrist. The bird rose, its tail of long flame trailing behind it over the orchard, and the windfalls all along the rows steamed and sweetened in its wake.

If you go up to the ridge tonight, you'll see the tail still drifting over the Bottom. That is the sign the spark is still in the family. Now, give that wasp a wide berth and fetch me another cup.