Oba was throwing a hay bale down from the loft when he heard his mother's voice.

" Oba! Where are you? Get down here!"

Oba scurried down the ladder. He brushed hay from himself as he straightened before her waiting scowl.

"What is it, Mama?"

"Where's my medicine? And your cure?" Her glare swept across the floor. "I see you still haven't gotten the mess out of the barn. I didn't hear you come home last night. What took you so long? Look at that stanchion rail! Haven't you fixed that, yet? What have you been doing all this time? Do I have to tell you every little thing?"

Oba wasn't sure which question he was supposed to answer first. She always did that to him, confused him before he could answer her. When he faltered, she would then insult and ridicule him. After all he had learned the night before, and all that had happened, he thought that he might feel more confident when he faced his mother.

In the light of day, standing back in the bam, with his mother gathered before him like a thunderhead, he felt much the same as he always did before her storming onslaught, ashamed, small, worthless. He had felt big when he came home. Important. Now he felt as if he were shrinking. Her words shriveled him.

"Well, I was-"

"You was dawdling! That's what you was doing-dawdling! Here I am waiting for my medicine, my knees aching me, and my son Oba the oaf is kicking a rock down the road, forgetting what I sent him for."

"I didn't forget-"

"Then where's my medicine? Where is it?"

"Mama, I didn't get it-"

"I knew it! I knew you was spending the money I gave you. I worked my fingers to the bone at spinning to earn that, and you go wasting it on women! Whoring! That's what you was doing, whoring!"

"No, Mama, I didn't waste it on women."

"Then where's my medicine! Why didn't you get it like I told you to!"

"I couldn't because-"

"You mean you wouldn't, you worthless oaf! You only had to go to Lathea's-"

"Lathea is dead."

There, he'd said it. It was out and in the light of day.

His mother's mouth hung open, but no words rained out. He had never seen her go silent like that before, seen her so shocked that her jaw just hung. He liked it.

Oba fished a coin from his pocket, one he had set aside to return so she wouldn't think he'd spent her money. Amid the drama of such a rare silence, he handed her the coin.

"Dead… Lathea?" She stared at the coin in her palm. "What do you mean, dead? She went ill?"

Oba shook his head, feeling his confidence build as he thought about what he had done to Lathea, how he'd handled the troublesome sorceress.

"No, Mama. Her house burned down. She was killed in the fire."

"Her house burned. ." His mother's brow drew together. "How do you know she died? Lathea isn't likely to be caught unawares by a fire. The woman is a sorceress."

Oba shrugged. "Well, all I know is that when I went to town, I heard a ruckus. People were running toward her house. We all found the place ablaze. A big crowd gathered around, but the fire was so hot that there was no chance of saving the place."

That last part was, to a degree, true. He had started to leave town, headed home, because he figured that if no one had spotted the fire, maybe they wouldn't until morning. He didn't want to be the one to start yelling "fire." In light of history, that might look suspicious, especially to his mother. She was a suspicious woman-one of her many peevish traits. Oba had planned on simply telling his mother the story of what he knew was bound to happen anyway, the blazing ruins, the charred body found.

But as he had been walking home after his visit to the inn, not long after that Jennsen woman and the man with her, Sebastian, passed by leaving town on their journey to find Althea, he heard people yelling that there was a fire down at Lathea's place. Oba ran down the long dark road with the rest of the people, toward the orange glow off in the trees. He was just a bystander, same as everyone else. There was no reason to suspect him of anything.

"Maybe Lathea escaped the flames." His mother sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than him.

Oba shook his head. "I stayed, hoping the same as you, Mama. I knew you'd want me to help her if she was hurt. I stayed to do what I could. That's why I was so late."

That, too, was partly true; he had stayed, along with the crowd, watching the fire, listening to the talk. He had savored the crowd's anticipation. The gossip. The speculation.

"She's a sorceress. Fire isn't likely to catch such a woman."

His mother was starting to sound suspicious. Oba had figured on this. He leaned a little toward her.

"When the fire burned out enough, some of us men threw snow down so we could get in over the smoking rubble. Inside, we found Lathea's bones."

Oba pulled a blackened finger bone from his pocket. He held it out, offering it to his mother. She stared down at the grim evidence, but folded her arms without taking it. Pleased with the effect it had, Oba finally returned the treasure to his pocket.

"She was in the middle of the room, with one hand lifted above her head, like she had tried to make it to the door but was overcome by the smoke. The men said that a fire's smoke was what put folks down, and then the fire got at them. That must have been what happened to Lathea. The smoke got her. Then, laying there on the floor, reaching toward the door, the fire burned her to death."

His mother glared at him, her mean little mouth all pinched up, but silent. For once, she had no words. He found her glare, though, was just as bad. In the daggers of that glare, he could tell that she was thinking he was no good. Her bastard boy.

Darken Rahl's bastard son. Almost royalty.

Her arms slipped from their sullen knot as she turned away. "I have to get back to my spinning for Mr. Tuchmann. You get this mess scooped off the floor, you hear?"

"I will, Mama."

"And you had better get that stanchion fixed before I come back and see that you've been loafing away the day."

For several days Oba worked at the frozen muck on the floor, but made little headway. The weather had stayed bitterly cold, so the frozen mound, if anything, had only hardened. His efforts at wearing it down seemed interminable, like trying to chip away granite ledge. Or his mother's stony disposition.

He had his other chores, of course, and he couldn't let them go. He had fixed the stanchion and a broken hinge on the barn door. The animals had to be attended to, along with a hundred other small things.

In his head, as he worked, he planned the construction of their fireplace. He would use the back wall between the house and barn, since it was already existing. Mentally, he stacked stones against it, creating the shape of the firebox. He already had his eye on a long stone to use for the lintel. He would mortar everything all together properly. When Oba set his mind to doing something, he put his all into it. He didn't do any job he started just halfway.

In his mind's eye, he pictured how surprised and happy his mother would be when she saw what he'd built them. She would recognize his worth, then. She would finally acknowledge his value. But he had other work to do before he could begin to build a fireplace.

One job, in particular, loomed before him. The surface of the mound of frozen muck in the barn showed the scars of the battle. It was now pocked with holes, places where he had been able to find a weakness, a place with air or dry straw underneath that had allowed him to break out a chunk. Each time a piece went «pop» and came lose, he was sure that he had at last found a way into the formidable tomb of ice, but each time had been a false hope. Chipping away with the scoop shovel was slow going, but Oba was not a quitter.

The worry had come to him that perhaps a man of his importance should not be wasting his time on such menial labor. Frozen manure hardly seemed the province of a man who was in all likelihood something akin to a prince. At the least, he now knew he was an important man. A man with Rahl blood in his veins. A direct descendant-the son-of the man who had ruled D'Hara, Darken Rahl. There probably wasn't a single person who had not heard of Darken Rahl. Oba's father.

Sooner or later, he would confront his mother with the truth she had been keeping from him-the truth of the man he really was. He just couldn't figure how to do it without her discovering that Lathea had spilled the news before she spilled her blood.

Winded from a particularly spirited attack on the frozen mound, Oba rested his forearms on the shovel's handle while he caught his breath. Despite the cold, sweat trickled down from his matted blond hair.

"Oba the oaf," said his mother as she strode into the barn. "Standing around, doing nothing, thinking nothing, worth nothing. That's you, isn't it? Oba the oaf T'

She glided to a stop, her mean little mouth all puckered up as she peered down her nose at him.

"Mama. I was just catching my breath." He pointed around at the chips of ice littering the floor, evidence of his strenuous efforts. "I've been working at it, Mama. I have."

She didn't look. She was glaring at him. He waited, knowing she had something more on her mind than the mound of frozen muck. He always knew when she was on a mission to trouble him, to make him feel like the muck he stood in. From the dark crevices and hidey-holes around the barn, the rats watched with their little black rat eyes.

With her critical gaze locked on him, his mother held out a coin. She held it between her thumb and first finger, not simply to convey the coin itself, but its importance.

Oba was a little bewildered. Lathea was dead. There was no other sorceress anywhere close, none that he knew of, anyway, who could provide his mother's medicine-or his cure. He obediently turned his palm up, anyway.

"Look at it," she commanded, dropping the coin into his hand.

Oba held it out to the light of the doorway, scrutinizing it with care. He knew she expected him to find something-what, he didn't know. He turned it over as he cautiously stole a glance at her. He carefully inspected the other side, but still saw nothing out of the ordinary.

"Yes, Mama?"

"Notice anything unusual about it, Oba?"

"No, Mama."

"It doesn't have a scratch along the edge."