Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits by Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley Page A

until it seemed to tower over her.
    Yes , she thought. It’s a god. Of course.
    She bowed her head and the wings swept forward until they lay gently against either side of it, a warm, soft, feathery touch. She felt the bird’s brow against her own, the fringes of its scarlet crest mingling into her hair-line.
    They stayed only briefly like that and straightened. Ellie stepped back, feeling not exactly changed, not altered or tampered with, but renewed, fully herself and confident in that selfhood. The gift of the Phoenix. Something she would have until she died.
    ÊºThat’s ’is blessin’,ʺ said Dave. ʺWorth ’avin’, eh? It’ll be gettin’ cold for ’im now, an’ ’e’ll be wanting to sit on ’is fire, so we’ll be goin’ in an’ we’ll tell you about it all.ʺ

    It was well past midnight when Ellie crawled into bed, exhausted beyond belief with the excitement of the day but still for a long while unable to sleep for the muddle of thoughts and memories jostling through her mind. . . .

    . . . Sonny, the one and only ever-living Phoenix, blazing on his great mound of embers on the hearth below but filling the whole room with his presence. . . .

    . . . Welly and Dave curled up in each other’s arms in their room on the other side of the landing, husband and wife for forty years now, he getting younger all the time, and she getting older, and still in love. . . .

    . . . And then, almost word for word in her mind still, what they had told her:
    Êº. . . We’d been together, as people say now, almost since the day we met. I don’t think it was anything Sonny did to us—we just fell for each other, didn’t we, love?ʺ
    ÊºThat we did. Couldn’t think what were ’appenin’ to me. Thought I were getting’ the ’fluenza, maybe.ʺ
    ÊºBut we couldn’t get married because of Dave needing to change who he was every twenty years or so. That was tricky enough as it was without my having to account for a series of missing husbands. But then, in the winter of nineteen forty-nine—No, I’d better go back a bit. From the very first I wanted to know as much as I could about Sonny—ʺ
    ÊºLike that, Welly is. If it aren’t in a book, it aren’t real.ʺ
    ÊºI started in the library here, reading everything I could find about ancient Egypt, and I advertised for a tutor—we could afford that, because of the very generous arrangements his lordship had made for Dave here—ʺ
    ÊºSonny payin’ ’is debts, that come from. Showed me a pile of jewels in ’is bonfire ’eap to give to ’is lordship, an’ then ’e said I got to ’ang on to ’alf of ’em—ʺ
    ÊºAs well as a ninety-nine-year lease on the cottage and the wood. It was still extremely generous, but it meant I could hire a tutor, and I found a wonderful old man, a retired professor of Egyptology who lived in a large old house in Hampstead piled from floor to ceiling with books. I boarded with him all through the war when I was doing war work in one of the ministries. I couldn’t tell him why I wanted to know about the Phoenix, of course, but he got interested and dug out everything he could find, and he taught me to read hieroglyphics, and best of all he got me a place on a dig one of his ex-pupils was running in Heliopolis, and Dave came too—ʺ
    ÊºWanted to see where Sonny spent ’is winter, a’ course.ʺ
    ÊºThe earl vouched for him so we could get him a passport because he didn’t have a birth certificate. We used to walk in the desert in the evenings, and Sonny would meet us. He seemed to have much more power there—ʺ
    ÊºOnly natural, ’im bein’ closer to the sun.ʺ
    ÊºWe were excavating a temple of Osiris, and he’d come to me in my dreams and show me how it used to look in his day, so they were very glad to have me on the