She draped a wing over my lap, and I stroked her feathery head. “Why did you choose me?” I wondered, for the thousandth time since I named her seven years ago. “How can I make you proud?”

The first lantern I ever made was suspended above my desk, illuminating my room. It was clumsily painted, but the subject was unmistakable – it was commonplace. A dragon and a phoenix faced each other, their bodies curved in mirroring crescents so that together they formed a harmonious circle: the symbol of marriage, instantly recognizable even when mangled by the weak, fledgling artistry of a thirteen-year-old.

Its golden light mocked me now. Every girl was expected to find a good match. How could I ever escape marriage when I’d grown up with its living symbol at my side? The phoenix was a sign of good fortune and bestowed luck upon whomever she chose, but above all, she was the dragon’s mate. She represented the ideal wife – honest, faithful and obedient.

Chilli Oil pecked my knee, reminding me that my own phoenix wasn’t exactly the paragon of virtue. I pushed her aside, annoyed and in pain, wiping the blood with my sleeve. She fluttered about the room in a flurry of wings and knocked over a cup with her long fiery tail before she returned to me, her head nudging the side of my thigh as if in apology.

I bent to kiss her head, and thought of the day we met.

I had been wandering in the wooded hills beside my village, searching for a herb because my mother was ill, and Chilli Oil had swooped down from the trees and flashed past me like a winged lantern. I’d run after her, because I loved lanterns, because I lived in a house of lanterns, because I was a lantern-maker’s daughter.

She’d brought me crashing into another girl, who frowned at me when I said I was looking for a herb. “Why wouldn’t you go to the apothecary for that instead of coming out here on your own when you don’t even know what sweet wormwood looks like?”

I was a useless child, too worried by my mother’s fever-dull eyes and sweat-glazed skin to pause and think before I went into the woods armed only with panic and ignorance. “Do you know what it looks like?”

“Yes, of course. I’m a herbalist’s daughter.”

She had been picking herbs and roots for her father. She had a basket strapped to her back, and it was packed near full and smelled deep and verdant. She showed me the herb I wanted, with its tiny yellow buds and its sunny fragrance, and then we both looked down at the phoenix that was chirruping at our feet.

“Is she yours?” she asked, admiration radiant in her eyes.

The phoenix beat her wings and in a breathless moment was perched upon my shoulder. She was still small enough, back then, to do that – not the size of a full-grown swan as she was now. “I guess so.”