Terry Goodkind - The Pillars of Creation

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. It isn’t so bad, when the babe is newborn. They’re not such a . . . such a person, yet.”

Oba. Surrender.

“You mean, it would be easier.”

“That’s right,” she said, eagerly latching on to his words. “It would be easier.”

His own voice slowed and took on an edge that he didn’t know had been in him. “You mean it would be easier . . . before they got big enough to fight back.”

The range of his latent talents amazed him. It was a night of new wonders.

“No, no, that’s not at all what I mean.” But he thought it was. Her voice, reflecting a fresh respect for him, quickened, became almost urgent. “I only mean that it’s easier before a woman comes to love her child. You know, before the child comes to be a person. A real person, with a mind. It’s easier, then, and sometimes it’s best for the mother.”

Oba was learning something new, but he hadn’t put it all together, yet. He sensed that all his new learning was profoundly important, that he was on the cusp of true understanding.

“How could it be best?”

Lathea stopped pouring the liquid and set the bottle down. “Well, sometimes it’s a hardship to have a new baby. A hardship on both. It’s best for both, really, sometimes . . .”

She walked briskly to the cabinet. When she returned with a new bottle, she stepped around to the other side of the table so her back was no longer to him. Most of the ingredients for his cures were powders or liquids and he didn’t know what they were. The bottle she brought back contained one of the few things he recognized, the dried base of mountain fever roses. They looked like brown, shriveled little circles with stars in the centers. She often added one to his cure. This time, she poured a pile in her cupped hand, made a fist to crush them, and dumped the fine brown crumbles in the cure she was mixing.

“Best, for both?” Oba asked.

Her fingers seemed to be looking for something to do. “Yes, sometimes.” She seemed like she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, but couldn’t find a way to make it end. “Sometimes it’s more of a hardship than a woman can endure, that’s all—a hardship that only endangers her and the rest of her children.”

“But Mama had no other children.”

Lathea went silent for a moment.

Oba. Surrender.

He listened to the voice, the voice that had become somehow different. Somehow vastly more important.

“No, but all the same you was a hardship on her. It’s difficult for a woman to raise a child by herself. Especially a child—” She caught herself, then started over. “I only meant that it would be hard.”

“But she did it. I guess you were wrong. Isn’t that so, Lathea? You were wrong. Not Mama—you. Mama wanted me.”

“And she never married,” Lathea snapped. Her flash of anger had put the flame of haughty authority back in her eyes. “Maybe if she . . . maybe if she’d married she would have had a chance to have a whole family, instead of only . . .”

“A bastard boy?”

Lathea didn’t answer this time. She seemed to regret having taken a stand. The spark of anger left her eyes. With slightly trembling fingers, she dumped another pile of the dried flower buds in her palm, hurriedly crushed them in her fist, and dumped them in the cure. She turned and busied herself studying the flames in the hearth through a liquid in a blue glass bottle.

Oba took a step toward the table. Her head came up, her eyes turning to his.

“Dear Creator,” she whispered as she looked into his eyes. He realized she was not speaking to him, but to herself. “Sometimes, when I look into those blue eyes, I can see him.”

Oba’s brow drew down above his glare.

The bottle slipped from her hand, thumped on the table, and rolled to the floor, where it shattered.

Oba. Surrender. Surrender your will.

This was new. The voice had never before said that.

“You wanted Mama to kill me, didn’t you, Lathea?”

He took another step toward the table.

Lathea stiffened. “Stay where you are, Oba.”

There was fear in her eyes. Little rat eyes. This was definitely new. He was learning new things almost faster than he could note them all.

He saw her hands, the weapons of a sorceress, lifting. Oba paused. He stood cautiously, at attention.

Surrender, Oba, and you will be invincible.

This was not merely new, it was startling.

“I think you want to kill me with your ‘cures,’ don’t you, Lathea? You want me dead.”

“No. No, Oba. That isn’t true. I swear it isn’t.”

He took another step, testing what the voice promised.

Her hands rose, a glow of light coming to life around her clawed fingers. The sorceress was conjuring magic.

“Oba”—her voice was more forceful, more sure—“stay where you are, now.”

Surrender, Oba, and you will be invincible.

Oba felt his thighs bump the table as he advanced. The jars rattled and clanked together. One of them wobbled. Lathea watched it teeter and almost right itself, only to topple and spill its thick red liquid.

Lathea’s face abruptly twisted with hatred, with rage, with effort. She cast her clawed hands forward, toward him, cast the full force of her power at him.

With a thunderous clap, light ignited, the flash making everything in the room go white for an instant.

He saw a flare of a yellow-white light knife through the air toward him—deadly lightning sent to kill.

Oba felt nothing.

Behind him, the light blasted a man-sized hole through the wooden wall, scattering flaming splinters out into the night. All the fire fizzled out in the snow.

Oba touched his chest where the full force of her power had been directed. No blood. No torn flesh. He was unharmed.