Diego let his path lead him where it would. He knew where it eventually must take him, and though it had been his object in setting out, he was in no great hurry to arrive.

In the clear cool light of just-post dawn, the ranch seemed an altogether different place than what he’d returned to yesterday afternoon. This early, before the sun had a chance to burn off the scant dew, the air had a scent of crisp green to it. He’d forgotten, or perhaps never realized, how clean everything smelled here compared to the packed alleyways of Madrid. A new world indeed, and not just in name.

At the hacienda there were people about even this early, but he’d turned his footsteps away from where he was likely to find them and now he walked in comfortable isolation. His father, he remembered, never slept much past dawn himself, but Diego doubted he himself would be missed. No one would be expecting him to be about this early and if his absence were discovered—well, he imagined his father would probably know where he had went.

The path curved around a rocky hillside and fell away just as he remembered, revealing a gentle slope that fell away into a broad sweep of rolling plains. On a clear morning like this one you could see the ocean glimmering in the distance.

He sat down on a large flat rock without having to look for it. He and Gilberto had come out here too many times before for him to have forgotten it, even after seven years. There had been a time, at maybe eight or nine, when this had been part of their every morning routine. Mother had, to say the least, not been an early riser, and two boys of more energy than sense had been too much to contain inside the walls of the hacienda. And so Buena had packed up a small breakfast for each of them, tied carefully in a scrap of cloth and sent them outside where their noise could bother nothing but the stray wild animal scared out of its hole.

Diego traced his fingers idly along the rock edge, remembering. They’d raced here, every morning. Gilberto had often won, though it was not always so. It had never really mattered. It had been the sense of freedom, of being set loose from Buena’s knowing gaze to tumble full speed over rocks and gullies though they had been told a thousand times to be careful.

In the fresh scrubbed morning, the memory felt warm and a little melancholy, but not painful. He traced Gilberto’s name where it was carved in the rock with one finger, smiling a little. The nine-year-old Gilberto had made an impressive conquistador.

I, Gilberto de la Vega, claim this rock in the name of His Majesty, Carlos the Fourth!

Diego had tried to explain that they could hardly claim a rock that had belonged to the king since before they were born, but Gilberto hadn’t been much deterred by that logic. Gilberto never had been one to be restrained by something so pedestrian as fact.

Diego reached into his coat and drew out his own carefully wrapped breakfast, this time provided by Buena’s young sister Maria now that Buena herself was married and gone. Change, and yet not. Maria’s tortillas had much the same flavor of her sister’s and despite her obvious nervousness and attempts to please, he’d detected that same disapproval that he wouldn’t sit down for a proper breakfast that he remembered so well from Buena.

The sun was climbing higher now. If he wanted to reach his destination before the energy of the growing day stole over the quiet peace of the morning he needed to be off.

Ahead of him the path sloped down and across to his father’s western pastures. But there was a cut about a hundred yards down the path that curved back towards the house and it was this one that he took.

On its way back to the hacienda, the path detoured to one particular spot. A spot designated by his grandmother, or so he was told. Far enough from the house not to loom over everything, close enough for visitation. A practical woman, his grandmother, from all accounts. It had been his mother, though, who had tended it, seeing it planted with native bushes and flowers so that it stayed green for most of the year.

Why come to a new world, she had always said, if you were just going to transplant the old one with you? And so her garden, like this carefully designated square, had been filled with native species, with only a few concessions to her nostalgia for the big gardens of her youth in Spain.

Diego had seen the gardens in Spain. They’d been old, well cultivated. One of the rose bushes was rumored to date from centuries before. His uncle’s gardeners had been geniuses, carefully engineering the water supplies to provide year round irrigation even in the driest months. Upon descending to the gardens from his uncle’s palatial country residence, one was met with a sense of overwhelming loveliness, but despite the almost orgiastic growth of the greenery, it had felt somehow sterile, manufactured. He preferred his mother’s smaller, humbler efforts, which followed the rhythms of nature and bloomed only in season.

Under the shade of a large tree, the air retained the soft humidity of the earlier day and the crushed grass beneath his feet filled everything with the scent of earth and growing things. In the time since had left someone had added a stone bench here.

This had been his last stop before leaving for Spain. It seemed only appropriate that it should be his first upon his return.

The stone which covered his mother’s grave still looked new, though one could begin to read the passage of time in the softened edge of one corner and the dust that had settled into the carved letters of her name. Kneeling in the soft earth at the base of her grave, He took his handkerchief from his pocket and cleaned the dust away. She’d been a tidy woman, always preferring things done with pride and attention over expense.

Task done, he settled himself fully on the ground, leaning a bit on the bench for support. In the dappled light that filtered through the branches overhead, the stone gleamed. She had loved just this sort of morning. At least once a week she’d tramp out across the ranch to the stream which fed the lower pasture. She’d perch there on a bench Alejandro had made just for that purpose and read for hours. When he and Gilberto had been young, they’d accompanied her as often as not, and she’d set them loose to find boyish treasures under rocks and in nests that they’d bring back for her approval. As they grew older Gilberto especially had been increasingly lost to the interests of learning to ride and track and handle a musket under the watchful eye of their father. But she had kept it up without them, packing up a novel or her pencils and sketchbook and reappearing only hours later, the hem of her skirt trailing dirt and with brambles tangled in her hair.

“I promised you I’d look after them,” he said, looking up through the branches at the lacy patches of sky.

She hadn’t asked it of him, but she had been so plainly terrified of leaving them, and there, at the end, it was the only comfort he had been able to think of that might matter to her. She’d been in so much pain, her faced always pinched and tired. Though she’d shaken her head, he’d promised again and again until finally she’d settled a little, smiling as well as she was able and stroking his hand.

His father had come in shortly after and taken him away. Alejandro had stayed with him, forcing him to eat though he couldn’t taste it and then sitting with him and Gilberto in the dark until they’d finally been able to sleep. After that he’d closed himself in with his wife and hadn’t left her until she died three days later.

Six months after that, Diego had been on a ship headed for Spain.

“I promised you, and you see how well I’ve kept it.”

He forced himself to look down again, to look finally at the stone beside hers. The stone would be very new. It would have taken months to find the proper stone, to have it shaped and polished. Darker than his mother’s, the incisions into the stone deeper and sharper. His name, the dates that bracketed his life.

Gilberto.

There had been a part of himself, consciously denied but still not entirely exorcised, that had not quite believed. Gilberto could not be dead, the entire concept a logical fallacy. It was Gilberto. Diego had just received a letter from him, mere weeks before his father’s, full of Gilberto’s characteristic, charmingly directionless ramblings about his new sword and the coming wedding and the new delightful game he and the others were playing with the new alcalde. Death was not a word that belonged in the same world as the person in that letter.

In his waking hours Diego kept this corner of his thoughts ruthlessly quashed, but it showed up in dreams sometimes. Dreams where Gilberto was alive, married, Victoria on his arm flushed and beautiful. Dreams where it had all turned out to be a mistake, that his father had been wrong, and when he rushed home to the hacienda they all were there in the garden together. In one particular, horrific variant, his mother sat among them, laughing with a grandchild on one knee. He’d rushed into the garden, but he’d been the ghost, his fingers catching nothing, his cries falling unheard. But then his mother looked at him, expression pitiless, and told him he'd chosen to leave and would have to live with that now.

After that dream he hadn’t let himself sleep for two days.

The letter that Victoria had sent him had dealt that traitorous hope its first serious blow. The first sight of his father, lessened and grey, had been another. And here, with letters inscribed in stone, was the last.

“She warned us, remember?” Diego said, speaking to Gilberto’s name on the stone. Impossible to think that his brother was buried beneath it. That this was all that remained of him. “She told us all of the time that to be a twin was a special destiny, that we must look out for each other. I forgot that. I let myself forget that.

“You remembered. You never did stop trying to remind me.” Gilberto had never been subtle. If he only rarely directly asked Diego to come to California, the request was there to be found in every letter that went to Spain. It had been there in every tale of adventure that “Diego should have been a part of”, every story about this thing or that he remembered from when they were little, every mention of some wealthy, beautiful heiress that was in need of a suitor. Diego, who had known his brother so well, could not now deny that he had read that message, however unwritten.

It didn’t matter that he’d give anything to take it back. Give all the days in Europe, all the unwritten moments that still stretched before him as his life, if he could have been there that day to try to inject Gilberto with some sense, to remind him that though he might be playing a game, the soldiers were not. Gilberto had always flown too high, and he’d never paid attention to the sun melting the wax from his wings. Diego had known that, had been forever pulling Gilberto back to the earth beside him. And yet, knowing that, he’d gone to Europe anyway.

Diego took a long, shuddering breath. “You always did have to wait for me, but I have finally remembered. I wanted you to know that. To know that you haven’t left them alone, that I will try to take care of them like you would have.”

He didn’t entirely yet see the way, but there was a glimmering of a plan, tied up with the stories of Gilberto’s bright heroics and Sr. Edward’s saber locked up in secret in his trunk. A part of him wanted to just take that saber, ride into the pueblo, call out the alcalde and have done with, with none of this ever present need for caution. But he could not do that and keep his promises and it would be, in the end, just another sort of running away.

He pulled himself to his feet. His father very well might have sent someone looking by now and he had no wish to be found here. He had needed to come here, to see them, to tell them that he remembered his promises now. But as much as he might like to stay here, to sit with them for just a little while, he had not returned from Spain for this.

He looked down on them for one final moment, but then he turned, walked deliberately out of this small, peaceful spot, and set his feet on the path towards the house.

Author's Note: This is purely because a few people asked me about this story lately. I'm not entirely married to these two chapters and anticipate that they'll possibly at least change a bit before the final version. I have the feeling that it wants another chapter between the last and this and possibly for the last one to change POV. I really can't make any promises about finishing this story, given my present schedule. But I haven't entirely abandoned it either. I imagine I'll have some more time this summer, but whether I devote it to this story or to fixing the last one I have yet to decide.