Hodgesaargh shut the book and looked at the flame. It was true, then. There’d even been a picture of one just like it in the book, painstakingly drawn by another royal falconer two hundred years before. He wrote that he’d found the thing up on the high meadows, one spring. It’d burned for three years, and then he’d lost it somewhere.

If you looked at it closely, you could even see the detail. It was not exactly a flame. It was more like a bright feather…

Well, Lancre was on one of the main migration routes, for birds of all sorts. It was only a matter of time.

So…the new hatchling was around. They needed time to grow, it said in the book. Odd that it should lay an egg here, because it said in the book that it was always hatched in the burning deserts of Klatch.

He went and looked at the birds in the mews. They were still very alert.

Yes, it all made sense. It had flown in here, among the comfort of other birds, and laid its egg, just like it said it did in the book, and then it had burned itself up to hatch the new bird.

If Hodgesaargh had a fault, it lay in his rather utilitarian view of the bird world. There were birds that you hunted, and there were birds you hunted with. Oh, there were other sorts, tweeting away in the bushes, but they didn’t really count. It occurred to him that if ever there was a bird you could hunt with, it’d be the phoenix.

Oh yes. It’d be weak, and young, and it wouldn’t have gone far.

Hmm…birds tended to think the same way, after all.

It would have helped if there was one picture in the book. In fact, there were several, all carefully drawn by ancient falconers who claimed it was a firebird they’d seen.

Apart from the fact that they all had wings and a beak, no two were remotely alike. One looked very much like a heron. Another looked like a goose. One, and he scratched his head about this, appeared to be a sparrow. Bit of a puzzle, he decided, and left it at that and selected a drawing that looked at least slightly foreign.

He glanced at the bird gloves hanging on their hooks. He was good at rearing young birds. He could get them eating out of his hand. Later on, of course, they just ate his hand.

Yes. Catch it young and train it to the wrist. It’d have to be a champion hunting bird.

Hodgesaargh couldn’t imagine a phoenix as quarry. For one thing, how could you cook it?

…and in darkest corner of the mews, something hopped onto a perch…