Azar tried to draw back her hands but Jack held on tight. A little bit of fear crept into the recesses of her mind. She hadn’t been paying attention to the direction they were walking, trusting Jack, and his assertion that he could do no harm. There were plenty of things that were torturous without being physically harmful. She took a deep breath and willed her mind to calm. Jack had done nothing untoward, other than being excitedly cryptic.
“That's great Jack, but either you tell me what you are talking about, or let go of my hands,” she said with forced passivity.
Jack blinked a couple of times and looked sheepish. “I’m sorry Azar, I just got caught up in the moment. It’s just been so very long…” He cleared his throat. “No, I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s go back to the beginning. When Ibsali first came to me, I actually had no intention of giving the Great Weapons back to the Djinn. I thought they were a power too great, too tempting for your kind to have in their keeping, because there will always be one who seeks more power than they have and will use them for ill. I’d captured your friends, and incapacitated them, ready to tell you all to get on your way. You would never know I had Ibsali in my possession.” He grinned wide, showing a row of perfect square teeth that shone like polished white seashells.
“Then you burst from the forest, all naivety and sassy comebacks, and the Earth murmured beneath me. I turned your fireball into a carnation, and the Earth screamed at me that you were the balance. I had no idea what it meant, but I trusted the Mother, so I took you back to my cabin and gave the Djinn back Ibsali. I stayed close to you, hoping I could find what it was that made you special.” He smiled as his thumb ran over her pulse point in an action that managed to be both soothing and erotic. “Indeed, you held a unique position in the supernatural community of New York; you are Djinn, Human and a member of a Were Pack, an honor I don't think has been bestowed on a Djinn in nearly a thousand years. But it didn’t add up. I couldn't converse with the Earth in your concrete jungle; all I knew for certain was that you were important, so I did what I could to help your situation.
“Everything played out as you know, and we ended up here, in the lungs of the Earth. Since we have arrived, she has repeated to me that you are the balance. She’s basically yelled it at me, and let me tell you, that is not a pleasant experience. Finally, she talked to me in that gentle way of mothers when a child isn’t listening.” Jack paused, and Azar held her breath. “And she told me that you are the balance because you are Tuatha Dé Danann.”
The idea was so preposterous that Azar scoffed impolitely. “Dude, you need to stop licking the tree frogs around here. I am not even a little bit Fae. Or Tuatha Dé Danann. I’m pretty certain that I am half Djinn, half human. Saraf is 100% Ifrit. There isn't anything but fire demon in that one.” She explained it slowly, but he was looking at her patiently, as if he was waiting for her to make the inevitable link. Well, he would be waiting awhile, because this made no logical sense whatsoever. He waited, and waited. Azar shrugged and tried not to squirm.
Finally he sighed. “It is my belief that your mother possessed a drop of Tuatha Dé Danann blood. Just like the Djinn, the Tuatha have been guilty of preying on human women as well. If you think about it, it explains everything. Why your father could not resist your mother, even though he had promised not to sire any more half-blood children. Why you can step inside a Faery circle unharmed. Why I seem to be irrevocably drawn to you in a way that I haven’t been drawn to anyone in a millennium. I thought it was simple lust for a beautiful woman, but it isn’t. Your blood calls to mine.” His eyes got fervent and his face implored her to understand. “Feeling your vibrations inside the sacred circle, so close to the Earth, I can feel the Tuatha in your blood. You are special. I can almost taste which of my brethren is your sire, but it eludes me. It has been a long time since I’ve been in the presence of the Tuatha. Sadly, most have joined the Mother.” He sounded so alone.
Azar petted his arm awkwardly. She wasn’t convinced. If her mother possessed this drop of divine Faery blood, why did she die after giving birth? Wouldn’t the blood make her hardier? Plus, she was sitting in this circle too, and she didn't feel a goddamn thing except awkward. Apart from the wash of harmony at crossing into the Faery circle, kneeling inside the ring of irises and sitting on the dirt in their campground felt exactly the same to her. Her disbelief must have been written all over her face because Jack took both of her hands and clasped them in his oversized ones.
“I can prove it to you. If you did not possess some Tuatha Dé Danann in your heritage, you could not commune with the Earth, the Mother.” He lowered both of their hands to the ground, and pressed them flat against the moist ground until her palms lay flat on the surface, his resting on top of her own. “Brace yourself.”
Azar sucked in a breath, and when she let it out, everything was the same but different. They were still in the Faery circle, but the air was thick, almost tangible and golden as if it was the very last light of a summer's day. And so very warm. It was a strange sensation because the Djinn didn’t feel the hot and cold except in an academic sense. But the warmth in the air inside the circle embraced her like a liquid. The noise of the jungle stopped, and she could hear the sound of her heart beating faster and faster. Jack’s skin shone in the golden light, giving color to his icy paleness. He shone so bright, it hurt her eyes and she had to look away.
When she turned her face, her eyes fell on a woman. It had to be the Mother. She was a woman without features, an every-woman, and her shape shone golden from the inside. It was like staring at the sun, and she felt the tears streaming down her cheeks.
The woman had no discernible features, just light, but Azar knew she was smiling, because a feeling of giddy pride settled in Azar's chest, the instinctual part of her brain understanding that this Woman’s happiness meant everything. The figure reached out to pull her in an embrace, and Azar’s body went willingly.
As soon as she touched the Mother, she spoke to her. She didn’t really speak, but rather showed her images and feelings. An image of a mother hugging a child, of a flower in time lapse budding to life, a set of scales but the stand was a metal statue of Azar. She showed Azar an image of Jack and the Mother touching hands, a look of pure adulation on Jack’s face. A feeling of love and warmth. A memory of a man chasing a woman through a forest, and the man was strong and shining like Jack, but he wore furs over his shoulder. The woman had pale skin and long black hair, and she was running but her face smiled brightly back at her lover, her hair whipping around her face in the breeze. A feeling of regret and loss.
The next image was of a forest of dead wolves, then quickly flashed to burning buildings, the charred remains of people stuck behind glass doors. The fear and horror after that image was so strong that Azar almost choked on it.
A sense of purpose and urgency overcame her. In the next image, she sat on the Dais in the hearing room at the compound, and in one hand she held a puppy, in the other a crown, two very different daggers strapped to her forearms.
The woman leaned her shining face forward and pressed a kiss to her forehead, and Azar felt like she was drowning in bliss.
She fell forward, and Jack caught her against his body. He held her as her breath regained its normal rhythm, and her heart thudded at a slower pace in her chest. Azar didn’t know what to say. Her whole belief system had just been rocked.
“That was…” her mind struggled to come up with a word.
“That was the Mother, the Earth. That was Danu.”
Chapter 19
Azar sat cross legged on the ground, trying to tame her thoughts. Conversing with the Earth was possibly the most interesting thing that ever happened to her. Considering she sprouted wings and flew around on fire, that was really saying something.
"So, what did she say to you? If that isn't a too personal question, of course." Jack was still holding her hand. Azar hesitated, but Jack would be the only person who could understand what she saw, because some of that stuff was trippy. Sh
e knew some of it was obvious, like some kind of premonition, but some of it made no sense.
"Uh, I'm not sure. It’s kind of like one of those picture riddles. I know she was happy to meet me, then a flower blooming, which I think meant she had watched me grow. She showed me a memory of you two holding hands, and she told me she loved you. The rest is pretty open to interpretation, I think. She was trying to tell me what I should do, or show me the future or something, but it’s all very cryptic."
She wanted out of this circle. He was glowing slightly, making his face mesmerizing and she found it hard to drag her eyes away from him.
She needed to talk to Bast. He would ground her, help her make sense of all this shit. She counted backwards from ten and calmed her heart rate. Maybe she would explain it to the rest of the group. She trusted most of them implicitly. Well except for Vivian, who she hardly knew. Cy she'd only just met, but family loyalty meant a lot to him. She'd take a leap of faith and trust everyone. Five heads were better than one in piecing everything together. She stood and stepped delicately back over the Faery circle.
She stumbled back through the forest, and realized she had no idea where she was going. Jack came up behind her silently and held her hand, taking the lead. The trip back to the campsite was all a bit of a blur, but she could see Bast pacing around the edges, obviously agitated. He jumped on them as soon as they walked into the clearing.
"You've been gone for hours. I was worried!"
"We were worried," Cy corrected, his tone equally as stern and disapproving. Vivian sat by the fire, sharpening her throwing knives, obviously staying right out of the conversation.
"I'm sorry, but I can explain." She motioned them to sit on the fallen log that had been rolled over to act as a bench. "You better prepare yourself, because shit is about to get weird."
Azar explained as sanely as she could what had happened in the last two hours. All its bombshells and mysteries, laid before the group, with some clarification from Jack. By the end, even Vivian had edged closer and was listening with rapt attention, her knives forgotten. Explaining the experience of talking to the Earth was more difficult than she imagined. It also sounded far crazier.
At one point Cy checked her for symptoms of poisoning, or jungle fever, and seemed even more confused when there were none. Azar tried to put as much detail as she could remember into recounting her visions; the sounds, feelings, smells and sights.
"Ah, it has to be Dagda. Yes, the more I look at you, the more I can see it,” Jack murmured.
"I find that hard to believe, seeing how he graced the earth, what, four or five thousand years ago? I think the family resemblance might have filtered out by now," Bast commented sarcastically. Azar could appreciate the skepticism.
"I meant in her energy, Bast. Dagda was one of the oldest, and most powerful of the Tuatha Dé Danann. It makes sense. The story of Dagda's folly was once a cautionary tale for the Tuatha Dé Danann. Let me tell you." He cleared his throat. “Now how do these stories start for the humans. Ah yes, once upon a time..."
Dagda was said to be one of the first of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the biological son of Danu herself. He head an unearthly beauty, and he was worshiped as a Sun God by the human race barely out of their caves. One day, he fell in love with one of the human women, well as much as a deity could love a human. He fell in love with the emotion of love.
They made a child, and Dagda left, because Gods can have very short attention spans, even for love. The mother returned to her little squalid village.
The baby boy was born, and he was beautiful. The most beautiful child that had ever been born in that village. His name was Daeg, and he grew up surrounded by the adulation of his fellow villagers, but his temperament was so even, there wasn't even any envy amongst his peers. Eventually his mother died, and he married the most beautiful girl in the village, who seemed like rough hessian next to his opulent silk, but Daeg loved her dearly. They had two beautiful daughters, and these girls inspired sonnets and poems from traveling mistrals. But eventually, Daeg's wife died, and the villagers noticed that Daeg himself was as youthful and beautiful as the day they'd met. Of course, we know it was the immortal blood running through his veins, but the villagers were primitive, and believed that Daeg was cursed.
One year, the rains did not fall, and they had a devastating drought. They believed that Daeg's presence meant that their crops did not grow, that their gods had cursed them for tolerating Daeg to live. So they took one of his daughters, now beautiful in her womanhood, and staked her alive in a field. They set her on fire and prayed to their gods to bring back the rains. Daeg was nearly inconsolable. He raged and killed nearly the entire village before fleeing with his remaining daughter.
They traveled across Europe into foreign lands, and Daeg knew that he could only ever live in peace in the Faery kingdoms. His daughter was aging slowly, so he wed her to a rich king of one of the northern countries, and her beauty and kindness was so renowned that it became one of the most powerful kingdoms in all of Europe. Daeg returned to Ireland, to the Siths, and joined the Seelie Court. But while they accepted and revered his presence, he was always an outsider, as he was Tuatha Dé Danann, not Fae. So they placed him on a very lonesome pedestal until he died a few millennia later of loneliness and a broken heart.
Azar felt an overwhelming sadness at Jack's story. Her heart bled for Daeg, ostracized for an accident of birth. She felt pity for the daughter, whose life was taken, merely for being beautiful. When Azar had been on the run from the Djinn Council, she'd hated and feared the Djinn, because she knew that they had the capacity to be cruel and ruthless. But Jack’s story showed her that everything that breathed had the capacity for cruelty, to kill what they didn't understand, or merely to survive. The humans were no better than the Djinn, and the Fae were no worse. Glorious purpose was in the eye of the victor.
She realized that everyone in the circle was watching her closely, waiting to hear her reaction. She mumbled an excuse and headed to her hammock tent. She needed to absorb the story down to her roots. She had to reassess who she was, to redefine her place in the world. She had to process the messages of Danu, because she knew the Goddess had her own agenda, and Azar refused to act until she understood what it was. She was already a puppet on a string for one powerful entity, she wasn't going to blindly hook up another tether.
She lay on her back in the tent for hours, going over and over the images from the Faery circle, and the story of Dagda and Daeg. She picked them apart piece by piece and put them back together until her mind shuddered to a stop and her eyes closed. But even asleep, the images wouldn’t leave her.
It wasn't until Bast cuddled into her back and wrapped an arm around her torso, that Azar let go of her problems and fell into a dreamless sleep.
When they'd first set off into the jungle, Azar had been amazed at the process of taking down a campsite. It was like a well-choreographed dance, where everyone had known the steps and she bumbled along behind trying not to trip anyone over. A couple of days in, and she felt so confident in the routine that she was happy to do it in silence, going from one task to another until the campsite was stowed away in packs, and the only evidence that they'd been there at all was compressed leaf litter.
As they slid their packs on, Vivian finally broke the comfortable silence.
"Am I the only one who is worried that Azar's visions yesterday could have been a premonition? Like some kind of warning? Shouldn't we send someone back to town, warn the Adel about possible attacks?"
Actually, Azar had come to the same conclusion, but she didn't know how she was going to word it to Killian.
She was pretty sure that she got a premonition from an Irish nature Deity/Mother Earth was going to suffice. It might get her thrown in a padded cell. And if she told them the whole thing, with the puppy and throne and crown and shit? Yeah, she was definitely going to the padded room.
However, Bast was nodding in agreement. "I think we should split up. Azar and I wi
ll go back into town and try and get in touch with the Council. You guys should go ahead with Jack and retrieve the Great Weapon."
For a minute, Azar thought Jack would protest her absence, but since she'd gotten the message first hand from Danu, he didn't seem as preoccupied with having her attached to his hip at all times. Cy gave the idea some thought and agreed, so Bast shucked his pack and sat down to brief Cy. It took at least an hour of them going over every possible scenario and the subsequent course of action to be taken in the event of each. For instance, if Beta team that consisted of Cy, Vivian and Jack, weren't back in Lábrea within fourteen days, Bast would call for the Adel, and ask for a contingent of tracking wolves to pick up their trail from this campsite. If Alpha team, her and Bast, had to leave Lábrea before the fourteen days were up, they should leave word at the postal service etc. Eventually, they'd planned for every possible outcome, and everyone shouldered their packs again.
When Azar asked Jack if she could talk to the Earth without him, he merely shook his head. "It is one of the few boons I have, being the Green Man. To converse with the Earth can take centuries of meditation and practiced rituals to do without my assistance. Though, I'll be happy to teach you the rituals once we have retrieved all the Great Weapons. You are, after all, Tuatha Dé Danann. It may come more naturally to you than the Fae practitioners."
She couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. The feeling of absolute love and acceptance that she got during those few minutes with Danu were heady, and perhaps a little addictive. Plus, it would have been good to go back to Danu and repeat the visions, when she wasn't being blindsided by her ancestry. She gave Jack's hand a little squeeze and tried not to pout.
She kissed Cy on the cheek and gave Vivian a wave, as they set off on their paths, in opposite directions. It was a two day hike back to the river boat, and they had to hope that the locals would be there to give them a ride back to the Lábrea.
The Azar Omnibus: The Complete Azar Trilogy (The Azar Trilogy Book 0) Page 41