Califia's Daughters Read Free Page A

reins, then remove her weapons from the horse: rifle for distance, bow for silence. As Dian leaned both in the corner and reached for the cinch buckle, Judith allowed her gaze to rise into the vast reaches of the building, to the web-draped rafters that had been cut from trees on the surrounding hills and raised, thick and bright and hopelessly anachronistic in an age of aluminum siding and prefabricated girders, by her grandmother’s grandfather. She had never met the old man in person, but she met and used his handiwork every day of her life, from the bed she’d awakened in that morning to the time-black bench underneath her now. She followed a shaft of light from one of the ventilation holes he had cut in a corner of the hayloft.
    â€œHey, Di—you remember the owl?”
    Dian let the saddle thump down onto the top of the stall partition, then turned to look at her sister.
    â€œThe nest, you mean?”
    Yes, there had been a nest. It was an oddly disjointed memory, as if it had been from early childhood, although she must have been, what, fifteen? sixteen, even? when she had slipped into the barn on Dian’s heels late one night, a night when a huge full moon flooded the Valley with depthless blue light, seconds after the barn owl had dropped from the high opening of the hayloft and disappeared on silent wings down the fields. They scurried, noiseless as the owl—or at any rate, Dian did, with clumsy Judith, nearly twice her sister’s age and half again her size, stumbling behind. Two girls, Dian’s inseparable four-legged shadow for once left behind, running across the barn floor and up the ladder, to bury themselves into the hay and wait.
    Even then, Judith had been bad at waiting: moonlight crept an infinitesimal path across the boards while she stifled sneezes and itches and boredom, and then without warning the owl was there, a brief outline against the bright night in the loft window before it swooped noiselessly through the barn. Tiny hatchling cries rose up over their heads, then came a faint rustle from where eight-year-old Dian lay. Suddenly a mouse was twitching across a bare patch of boards—it must have been late spring, the hay nearly gone—scrabbling and squeaking and behaving in a suicidal fashion. The owl dropped from its nest in the darkness above, only to meet bare boards, a pile of hay, and—a hand. Holding her breath, Judith saw the bird flap its wings to land on the loft floor, then eye the closed fist that protruded from the hay. Its face was a flat blue-white surface set with two unamused black holes; it seemed very large. Slowly Dian’s hand rotated, and opened, until the dead mouse was proffered between two fingers. The barn waited. After a long minute the owl took a step forward, its claws brushing the old wood with a faint scritch that Judith felt up her spine. It paused, then took another step, and a third. Inches from Dian’s hand it stopped, settled its wings in a sort of decisive shiver, and reached forward delicately to seize the offering. When it had the mouse, it retreated a step to study the empty hand. For a moment the owl was both a rather stupid bird and a visitant from the divine. Judith must have made a noise, for the owl spread its wings and was gone.
    And the child Dian had laughed, had scrabbled out from the hay and shook herself off, then turned toward her teenage sister and crowed in glee at the workings of the universe. Dian used to do that a lot, Judith recalled, back when she was still called Lizzie. Not anymore.
    Judith let her eyes drop from the rafters and found Dian gazing down at her, a faint trace of that long-ago amusement on her face.
    â€œPleasant dreams?”
    Judith flushed, but she did indeed feel refreshed, whether because of the barn, the daydream, Dian’s presence, or the possibility that the invasion would be harmless, she could not have said. She stretched and picked up the water bucket that sat on