“Will,” she said, “this is your aunt Dian. What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing her sister’s face change.
“I thought . . . I dreamed.” She stopped, and her eyes rose involuntarily to the empty attic window in the big house. “Kirsten.”
“Dian, I’m sorry. She died, just before Christmas. In her sleep one night. She told me she’d had a dream about you, a couple of weeks before. She would have been so happy to see you.”
Death came when I grew old enough to understand what it took to make a life. . . .
“Yes. Yes, I dreamed about her too.” She turned her back sharply on the house, thus missing the figure who stepped off the veranda, slowly, as if unsure of his vision. “Judith, this is Mai; she came as a friend, and as an official Meijing representative. Do you think we can find them something to drink? We won’t have to house them, they’ll bivouac down by the bridge, but a stab at hospitality would be a good start. I thought I’d ask Ling to put Robin up for a few days, until he decides where to go.”
Judith cast an eye on the invaders, who actually numbered fewer than thirty, and began to call out to the others, asking Lenore to organize beer and lemonade and maybe some ice, sending one of the girls to retrieve those who had sprinted for the caves at the sound of the bell, catching Susanna’s eye and sending her off to summon up quantities of food from across the Valley. She looked back and found Dian watching her, eyes sparkling. She grinned in return.
“What are their names?” she asked.
“I didn’t name them yet. I thought, since Isaac missed everything else, the least I could do was to let him—” Her eyes went past Judith up the road, to the burly, bearded figure slowly approaching. When Judith turned back, she saw all the emotions flood into her sister’s face, the yearning and the joy and the hope and the fear that he, that they . . . Dian hesitated, and Judith gave her the answer.
“God, he’s missed you, Dian.”
Wordlessly, Robin handed Dian her daughter, and watched as the two figures met on the road, the man’s hand trembling as it touched her face, his tears visible from here. Yes, Robin thought, this man is worthy of her.
Judith led her unexpected guests up the hill to her home, and when Laine turned to follow the last jingling, polished horse and its rider, Dian and Isaac were still bent over, huddled together, blind and deaf to anything outside of themselves, and their children.
EPILOGUE
From a distance, there was nothing on the hillside, nothing but the dry grasses of late summer and the encroaching scrub trees of the Northern California forest.
The turkey vulture had spotted him some time ago and begun to glide in lowering arcs. She remembered this place, if birds can be said to have a memory, where one bright, hot morning earlier in the season she had circled down over a positive mountain of food, only to have two parts of it stir, rise to their feet, and walk away. One of them had moved slowly and the other with the awkward gait of an animal about to give birth, but despite these hopeful signs they did not seem in any immediate hurry to provide her importunate fledglings with breakfast. The horse they left behind, however, was more than adequate.
Now there was another meal waiting at precisely the same spot, stretched out among the long-cleaned bones and the scattering of cloth and metal objects that the two figures had abandoned and the grass had not yet covered. It was certainly skinnier than the horse had been; still, even the bony ones had their tasty bits. She dropped down lower yet, eyeing the figure cautiously. Doesn’t do to hurry, not with these kind that had teeth and a temper: she had a scar on her left wing to remind her of that.
By the time she decided that the corpse was going nowhere, she had half a dozen companions. Ever philosophical, the vulture knew that the object below would feed them all, but she was becoming impatient and dropped down to land, first in the snag of a dead tree, then on a tall Remnant of a chimney, and finally to bounce along the ground toward this tawny, bony, toothy lump of meat. She paused, spread her wings slightly, and hopped up onto the log beside the dry bones—and then she was flapping frantically for height when the tawny corpse came back to life and snapped at her. She retreated with dignity to her perch in the dead apple tree and, folding her wings, settled herself with the others to wait. From the looks of it, it would not be long.
The day wore on, the shadows shortened and then grew long again, and still the animal snarled and snapped whenever one of them approached, once coming away with a mouthful of feathers. There were now eleven patient vultures in the tree, murmuring encouragements to one another and outwaiting the dog.
Finally, when the shadows of the hill had begun to swallow up the objects below, their potential breakfast struggled to its feet—stiffly, with only three of his paws touching the ground, but nonetheless standing. The front of his chest was a mess of scabs and scars where the infection from the bullet was still fading, his left ear dangled and oozed from a fight with a coyote two days before, and the bones of his noble spine and hips poked up into the matted, brittle drape of his fur, but he was on his feet, limping slowly away to the south. Inside his chest the great heart beat on, unflagging, as Tomas followed the long-ago footsteps and faded scent of his own, his beloved. His Dian.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LEIGH RICHARDS is a third-generation native of California, born, raised, and now living in the same area that Califia’s Daughters is set. She is better known as New York Times bestselling mystery writer Laurie R. King. Her most recent acclaimed mystery novel is The Game.
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