Oba, feeling fashionable in his cap and brown wool jacket, walked down the sides of the narrow streets, humming a tune he had heard played on a pipe at an inn he'd passed. He had to wait for a rider to go by before he turned down Lathea's road. The horse's ears swiveled toward him as it passed. Oba had had a horse, once, and liked to ride, but his mother had decided that they couldn't afford to keep a horse. Oxen were more useful and did more work, but they weren't as companionable.

As he walked down the dark road, his boots crunching on the crust of snow, a couple came past from the opposite direction, from the direction of Lathea's place. He wondered if they had gone to the sorceress for a cure. The woman cast a wary look his way. On a dark road, such a reaction was not undue, and, too, Oba knew that his size frightened some women. She sidestepped clear of him. The man with her met Oba's gaze-many men didn't.

The way they stared reminded Oba of the rat. He grinned at that memory, at learning new things. Both the man and the woman thought he was grinning at them. Oba tipped his cap to the lady. She returned a weak smile. It was the kind of empty smile Oba had often seen from women. It made him feel a buffoon. The couple melted into the dark streets.

Oba stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and turned back toward Lathea's place. He hated going there in the dark. The sorceress was fearsome enough without the walk down her dark path. He let out a troubled sigh into the brisk winter air.

He wasn't afraid to confront the strength of men, but he knew he was helpless against the mysteries of magic. He knew how much misery her potions inflicted upon him. They burned him going in and coming out. They not only hurt, they made him lose control of himself, making him seem like he was just an animal. It was humiliating.

He had heard tell of others, though, who had angered the sorceress and suffered worse fates-fevers, blindness, a slow lingering death. One man had gone mad and run off naked into a swamp. People said he must have crossed the sorceress, somehow. They found him snakebit and dead, all puffed up and purple, floating among the slimy weed. Oba couldn't imagine what the man had done to earn such a fate from the sorceress. He should have known better and been more cautious with the old shrew.

Sometimes, Oba had nightmares about what she might do to him with her magic. He imagined Lathea's powers could lance him with a thousand cuts, or even strip the flesh from his bones. Boil his eyes in his head. Or make his tongue swell until he gagged and choked in a slow, agonizing death.

He hurried along the path. The sooner started, the sooner finished. Oba had learned that.

When he reached the house he knocked. "It's Oba Schalk. My mother sent me for her medicine."

He watched his breath cloud in the air while he waited. The door finally opened a sliver so she could peer out at him. He thought that, being a sorceress, she should be able to see him without having to open the door for a look, first. Sometimes when he was there waiting for Lathea to mix up medicine, someone would come and she would simply open the door. Whenever Oba came, though, she always peered out first to see it was him.

"Oba." Her voice was as sour with recognition as her expression.

The door opened to admit him. Cautiously, respectfully, Oba stepped inside. He peered about, even though he knew the place well. He was careful not to act too forward with her. Harboring no fear of him, she swatted his shoulder to spur him to move deeper into the room to give her the leeway to shut the door.

"Your mother's knees, again?" the sorceress asked, pushing the door closed against the frigid air.

Oba nodded as he stared at the floor. "She says they're aching her, and she'd like some of your medicine." He knew he had to tell her the rest of it. "She asked for you to… to send along something for me, as well."

Lathea smiled in that sly way she had. "Something for you, Oba?"

Oba knew that she knew very well what he meant. There were only two cures he ever went to her for-one for his mother and the one for him. She liked to make him say it, though. Lathea was as mean as a toothache.

"A remedy for me, too, Mama said."

Her face floated closer. She peered up at him, the snaky smile still playing across her features. "A remedy for wickedness?" Her voice came in a hiss. "That it, Oba? Is that what Mother Schalk wanted you to fetch?"

He cleared his throat and nodded. He felt puny before her thin smile, so he looked back down at the floor.

Lathea's gaze lingered on him. He wondered what was in that clever mind of hers, what devious thoughts, what grim schemes. She finally moved off to fetch the ingredients she kept in the tall cabinet. The rough pine door squeaked as she pulled it open. She set bottles in the crook of her other arm and carried them to the table in the middle of the room.

"She keeps trying, doesn't she, Oba?" Her voice had gone flat, like she was talking to herself. "Keeps trying even though it never changes what is."

Oba.

An oil lamp on the trestle table lit the collection of bottles as she set them there, one at a time, her eyes lingering on each. She was thinking about something. Maybe what vile brew she might mix up for him this time, what sort of sickly condition she would inflict upon him in an attempt to purge him of his ever present, unspecified, evil.

The oak logs in the hearth had checkered in the wavering yelloworange glow of the fire, throwing good heat as well as light into the room. In the middle of their room, Oba and his mother had a pit for a fire. He liked the way the smoke in Lathea's fireplace went right up the chimney and out of the house, rather than hanging in the room before eventually making its way out a small hole in the roof. Oba liked a proper fireplace, and thought that he should make one for him and his mother. Every time he went to Lathea's place, he studied the way her fireplace was built. It was important to learn things.

He also kept an eye on Lathea's back as she poured liquid from bottles into a wide-mouthed jar. She mixed the concoction with a glass rod as each new ingredient was slowly added. When she was satisfied, she poured the medicine in a small bottle and stoppered it with a cork.

She handed him the little bottle. "For your mother."

Oba passed her the coin his mother had given him. She watched his eyes as her knobby fingers slipped the coin into a pocket in her dress. Oba finally let his breath go after she turned back to her table, to her work. She lifted a few bottles, studying them in the light of the fire, before she began mixing his cure. His cursed cure.

Oba didn't like speaking with Lathea, but her silence often made him even more uncomfortable, made him itch. He couldn't really think of anything worthy of saying, but he finally decided that he had to say something.

"Mama will be glad for the medicine. She's hoping it will help her knees."

"And she's hoping for something to cure her son?"

Oba shrugged, regretting his attempt at casual conversation. "Yes, ma'am.»

The sorceress peered back over her shoulder. "I've told Mother Schalk that I don't believe it will do any good."

Oba didn't think so, either, because he didn't really believe there was anything needing curing. When he had been little, he thought that his mother knew best, and wouldn't give him the cure if he didn't need it, but he had since come to doubt that. She no longer seemed to him as smart as he had once believed her to be.

"She must care about me, though. She keeps trying."

"Maybe she's hoping that the cure might rid her of you," Lathea said, almost absently, as she worked.

Oba.

Oba's head come up. He stared at the sorceress's back. He had never considered such a thought. Maybe Lathea was hoping that the cure would rid them both of the bastard boy. His mother sometimes went to see Lathea. Maybe they had discussed it.

Had he ignorantly believed the two women were trying to do good for him, to help him, when the opposite was actually true? Maybe both women had hatched a plan. Maybe they had been conniving all along to poison him.

If something happened to him, his mother would no longer have to help support him. She often complained about how much he ate. Time and again she told him that she worked more to feed him than herself, and that because of him she could never put any money away. Maybe if she had instead put away the money she'd spent on his cures over the years, she'd have a comfortable nest egg by now.

But if something happened to him, his mother would have to do all the work.

Maybe both women just wanted to do it out of simple meanness.

Maybe they hadn't thought it all through, as Oba would. His mother often surprised him with her simplemindedness. Maybe both women had been sitting around one day and had just decided to be mean.

Oba watched the flickering light play over the thin strands of the sorceress's straight hair. "Today Mama said that she should have done what you always told her to do, from the beginning."

Lathea, pouring thick brown liquid into the jar, glanced back over her shoulder again. "Did she, now?"

Oba.

"What did you say from the beginning that Mama should do?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

Oba.

Icy realization prickled his flesh.

"You mean that she should have killed me."

He had never before come out and said anything so bold. He had never once in any way dared to confront the sorceress-he feared her too much. But, this time, the words had just come into his mind, much like the voice did, and he had spoken them before he had time to consider whether or not it was wise to do so.

He had surprised Lathea even more than he had surprised himself. She hesitated at her bottles, watching him as if he had changed before her very eyes. Maybe he had.

He realized then that he liked the way it felt to speak his mind.

He had never before seen Lathea falter. Maybe it was because she felt safe dancing around the subject, safe in the shadows of the words, without having them brought out into the light of day.

"That what you always wanted her to do, Lathea? That it? Kill her bastard boy?"

A smile pushed its way onto her thin face. "It wasn't like you make it sound, Oba." All the low, slow, haughty intonation had evaporated from her voice. "Not at all." She addressed him more like a man than she ever had before, rather than an evil bastard boy she tolerated. She sounded almost sweet. "Women are sometimes better off without a newborn babe.