“I desire to be left in peace with my child and my goddess.” She leaned down to pick the baby up, let it seek her breast.
His inspiration crystallized: “Damn it, I’ll throw my own priests out, I’ll make your goddess the only one and you Her high priestess!”
Her eyes brightened, and faded. “A promise easily spoken, and difficult to keep.”
“What do you want, then?” He got to his feet, exasperated.
“You have a boon left with the dragon, I know. Make it leave the mountain. Send it away.”
He ran his hands through his glittering hair. “No. I need it. I came here seeking help for myself, not your people.”
“They’re your people now—they are you. Help them and you help yourself! Is that so impossible for you to see?” Her own anger blazed white, incandescent with frustration.
“If you want to be rid of the dragon so much, why haven’t you sent it away yourself, witch?”
“I would have.” She touched the baby’s tiny hand, its soft black hair. “Long ago. But until the little one no longer suckles my strength away, I lack the power to call the Earth to my purpose.”
“Then you can’t help me, either.” His voice was flat and hopeless.
“I still have the salve that eased your back. But it won’t help you now, it won’t melt away your dragon’s skin. ... I couldn’t help your real needs, even if I had all my power.”
“What do you mean?” He thrust his face at her. “You think that’s why I’ve come to you—to be rid of this skin? What makes you think I’d ever want to give up my power, my protection?” He clawed at his arms.
“It’s not a man’s skin that makes him a god—or a monster,” Fallatha said quietly. “It’s what lies beneath the skin, behind the eyes. You’ve lost your soul, as I lost mine; and only you know where to find it. ... But perhaps it would do you good to shed that skin that keeps you safe from hatred; and from love and joy and mercy, all the other feelings that might pass between human beings, between your people and their king.”
“Yes! Yes, I want to be free of it, by the Holy Sun!” His defiance collapsed under the weight of the truth: He saw at last that he had come here this time to rid himself of the same things he had come to rid himself of—and to find—before. “I have a last boon due me from the dragon. It made me as I am; it can unmake me.” He ran his hands down his chest, feeling the slippery, unyielding scales hidden beneath the rich cloth of his shirt.
“You mean to seek it out again, then?”
He nodded, and his hands made fists.
She carried the baby with her to the shelf above the crooked window, took down a small earthenware pot. She opened it and held it close to the child’s face still buried at her breast; the baby sagged into sleep in the crook of her arm. She turned back to his uncomprehending face. “The little one will sleep now until I wake her. We can take the inner way, as we did before.”
“You’re coming? Why?”
“You didn’t ask me that before. Why ask it now?”
He wasn’t sure whether it was a question or an answer. Feeling as though not only his body but his mind was an empty shell, he shrugged and kept silent.
They made the nightmare climb into blackness again, worming their way upward through the mountain’s entrails; but this time she did not leave him where the mountain spewed them out, close under the weeping lid of the sky. He rested the night with the mother of his child, the two of them lying together but apart. At dawn they pushed on, Lassan-din leading now, following the river’s rushing torrent upward into the past.
They came to the dragon’s cave at last, gazed on it for a long while in silence, having no strength left for speech.
“Storm King!” Lassan-din gathered the rags of his voice and his concentration for a shout. “Hear me! I have come for my last request!”
There was an alien stirring inside his mind; the charge in the air and the dim, flickering light deep within the cave seemed to intensify.
(So you have returned to plague me.) The voice inside his head cursed him, with the weariness of the ages. He felt the stretch and play of storm-sinews rousing; remembered suddenly, dizzily, the feel of his ride on the whirlwind.
(Show yourself to me.)
They followed the winding tunnel as he had done before to an audience in the black hall radiant with the dust of rainbows. The dragon crouched on its scaly bed, its glowering ruby eye fixed on them. Lassan-din stopped, trying to keep a semblance of self-possession. Fallatha drew her robes close together at her throat and murmured something unintelligible.
(I see that this time you have the wisdom to bring your true source of power with you . . . though she has no power in her now. Why have you come to me again? Haven’t I given you all that you asked for?)
“All that and more,” he said heavily. “You’ve doubled the weight of the griefs I brought with me before.”
(I?) The dragon bent its head; its horn raked them with claw-fingered shadows in the sudden, swelling brightness. (I did nothing to you. Whatever consequences you’ve suffered are no concern of mine.)
Lassan-din bit back a stinging retort; said, calmly, “But you remember that you owe me one final boon. You know that I’ve come to collect it.”
(Anything within my power.) The huge cat-face bowed ill-humoredly; Lassan-din felt his skin prickle with the static energy of the moment.
“Then take away these scales you fixed on me, that make me invulnerable to everything human!” He pulled off his drab, dark cloak and the rich, royal clothing of red and blue beneath it, so that his body shone like an echo of the dragon’s own.
The dragon’s faceted eyes regarded him without feeling. (I cannot.)
Lassan-din froze as the words out of his blackest nightmares turned him to stone. “What—what do you mean, you cannot? You did this to me—you can undo it!”
(I cannot. I can give you invulnerability, but I cannot take it away from you. I cannot make your scales dissolve and fall away with a breath any more than I can keep the rain from dissolving mine, or causing me exquisite pain. It is in the nature of power that those who wield it must suffer from it, even as their victims suffer. This is power’s price—I tried to warn you. But you didn’t listen . . . none of them have ever listened.) Lassan-din felt the sting of venom, and the ache of an ageless empathy.
He struggled to grasp the truth, knowing that the dragon could not lie. He swayed as belief struck him at last, like a blow. “Am I ... am I to go through the rest of my life like this, then? Like a monster?” He rubbed his hands together, a useless, mindless washing motion.
(I only know that it is not in my power to give you freedom from yourself.) The dragon wagged its head, its face swelling with light, dazzling him. (Go away, then,) the thought struck him fiercely, (and suffer elsewhere!)
Lassan-din turned away, stumbling, like a beaten dog. But Fallatha caught at his glittering, naked shoulder, shook him roughly. “Your boon! It still owes you one—ask it!”
“Ask for what?” he mumbled, barely aware of her. “There’s nothing I want.’’
“There is! Something for your people, for your child— even for you. Ask for it! Ask!”
He stared at her, saw her pale, pinched face straining with suppressed urgency and desire. He saw in her eyes the endless sunless days, the ruined crops, the sodden fields—the mud and hunger and misery the Storm King had brought to the lands below for three times her lifetime. And the realization came to him that even now, when he had lost control of his own life, he still had the power to end this land’s misery.
He turned back into the sight of the dragon’s hypnotically swaying head. “My last boon, then, is something else; something I know to be within your power, stormbringer. I want you to leave this mountain, leave these lands, and never return. I want you to travel seven days on your way before you seek a new settling place, if you ever do. Travel as fast as you can, and as far, without taking retribution from the lands below. That is the final thing I ask of you.”