Hear Me

by Viv Daniels

  When the headaches had started and too many townspeople had run mad from the sound of the bells, Ivy remembered little from that time except the pain. Headaches so bad you’d vomit and pass out. Sensitivity to everything: the sound of the TV switching on and off made her keel over, the softest setting on the lamp in her room made her cry out in pain. And forget a ringing phone. The ringing bells were more than enough.

  One night, in the dark greenhouse, where everything was living and soft and brown, her father explained his discovery. Metal bells had always protected humans from unwanted magic. The bells of the barrier were calibrated against forest magic—evil as well as the good. And she was part forest folk, so the magic was in her blood as well.

  Ever since the town’s creation, forest folk had worn the redbell flower as protection when they left the woods. All her life Ivy had seen it on them, tucked into Archer’s buttonholes whenever he stepped out of the forest, woven into her mother’s hair on the few occasions she deigned to visit her daughter. Ivy’s father, the botanist, knew it was more than superstition. It was medicine against modernity. He hypothesized that if it couldn’t cure the barrier sickness Ivy and her kind suffered from, it would at least mitigate the effects.

  “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he’d said, his head bent low over their salvation. “Had I known… I was only trying to protect you.”

  Yet it was Ivy whose deft hand had perfected the recipe, in materials and technique, and ensured that they could make their tea without destroying their supply of the rare flower.

  As long as she took the tea and stayed away from the barrier, she’d be fine. As long as she listened to the town council and trusted that they knew what was best for her and the town, she’d be safe. As long as she tended her garden and brewed her cups and kept her head down, she could pretend that life hadn’t really changed so much. That’s what her father said to her, every day for months after the bells had started their incessant ringing. It would be worth it, he told her. It would be all right.

  She never had discovered why he hadn’t taken his own advice.

  In the months following his death, she’d tortured herself with hypotheses. Perhaps he’d wandered too close on one of his foraging trips, searching for any rare flora that might remain on this side of the barrier. Unlike those with forest blood, regular people could draw within feet of the bells with little more than a sense of unease and a static shock. It was only touching the bells that caused a zap, like a live wire.

  Maybe he found a specimen too perfect to resist. Maybe he thought he could reach through the lattice without touching the lines. Maybe maybe maybe… did it really matter? Now Dad was gone, too.

  Her father knew the forest inside and out. He knew the bells would ruin his plant-foraging business. And yet he’d still supported the erection of the barrier. Ivy clung to that knowledge, especially during the first long winter after her father was gone. He, who’d spent his life there, who’d married a forest girl and built a career out of trading the forest folk for ever-rarer specimens of forest flora and loam for his greenhouse. If he thought the forest was threatening the survival of the town, that the darkness within it had grown too great to withstand, then it had to be true. As impossible as it seemed, that the forest she’d loved all her life posed a threat to the place she called home… well, her father knew more than her of the dangers in the forest’s depths, and he’d seen something that scared him enough to back the council’s plan.

  Growing up, Ivy had learned from her father how to be responsible and respectful of forest ways and dangers. He was wary, but not forbidding, even after their mother had left them to return to the wild.

  “Some aren’t meant for a life beyond the trees,” he told Ivy whenever she asked why she only saw her mother once or twice a year. He’d reminded her of it again when Archer started coming round. “Are you sure you ought to be spending so much time with that boy, Ivy?” he’d ask, bent over his work desk, his fingers stained green with cuttings. “Don’t get too attached. He’s forest to the root.”

  But Ivy had laughed it off. She knew all about Archer’s root, after all. And even when the kids at school had snickered behind her back or called her a forest-lover, she hadn’t minded. Her father, too, was a forest-lover, and felt no shame. Besides, what was a little town folk prejudice to compare to what she had with Archer?

  And yet, in the end, her father had been right, for Archer chose the forest when the barrier went up. He chose the forest over her. Maybe that’s why those first dark weeks of bells had been so bad. It wasn’t just her forest blood. It was her broken heart.

  As the afternoon waned, her customers thinned, exchanging holiday greetings and picking up trifles for their families on their way home. Tonight was the winter solstice, and even those who didn’t keep to the old ways anymore wanted to get home before the long night fell. This far north, in the shadow of mountains that scraped the sky, it fell sharp and quick.

  The few remaining tourists in the shop finished up their cakes and their Earl Greys and departed, too. Ivy washed the dishes, swept the floor, and loaded up a bag of used linens for the laundry. There were a few busy days left before Christmas, but Ivy had already contacted her regulars and informed them that they were to bring thermoses to tide them over for the holidays. Responsibility was one thing—slavery another.

  At last, when it was dark, she collapsed into the sagging corduroy couch in front of the pot-bellied stove, her own mug of bell tea in her hands. Steam wafted up from her cup and tickled her nose as she stared at the glowing coals and yawned. Another year drawing to a close, and still she sat in her father’s flower shop, tending to the plants in the greenhouse and brewing tea for her neighbors. She was twenty years old, but aside from no longer going to high school, her life wasn’t noticeably different than it was at seventeen.

  Wait, strike that. At seventeen, she was at least getting laid.

  The first year, it made sense to put off college. Her father had died, and someone needed to man the shop and make the tea for her neighbors. But why was she still here after all this time?

  Each autumn she’d resolved to create an exit strategy for the new year, and each Christmas she found herself right here, alone in her shop across from the forest and the barrier, thinking to herself that she stayed in this town not for the things that were here, but for the ones that were long gone.

  How many seasons had she spent drifting as near to the barrier as she dared, peering through the jangling, twitching lattice of bells, hoping to learn what was happening in the forest beyond? She never saw anything, magic or otherwise, yet she couldn’t break the habit. She had no friends left her age. They’d all moved away, they all thought she was crazy to stick by the bells, like some pathetic victim from the old stories who wasted away when her forest folk lover abandoned her at summer’s end.

  All the staring, all the waiting in the world wouldn’t change a thing. Archer was gone forever, and so was her father. If she was wise, she’d take the hint and leave town as well. If she stayed in the town much longer, she’d wither, sure as the trees planted at the barrier had.

  Ivy drank down the last dregs of her cup and nodded to no one in particular. It was settled: come the new year, she’d start making a plan to leave—find a way for her customers to get their tea without her. Maybe Jeb could take over duties in the greenhouse. He wasn’t doing much woodworking these days. It would be good for him to have an activity.

  And it would be good for her to get away, maybe go to some far off town where bells were forbidden and the forests were friendly. Somewhere where she could study the type of botany that had nothing to do with magic, where no one had ever heard of forest redbell or the tea one might make from it. Ivy used to get good grades in school. She could surely enroll in a college somewhere.

  Or maybe just take some time off. A vacation.

  Ivy let her head fall back against the cushion of the couch, sighing as the tea dulled the ache winding through her brain. Another place. Trop
ical, maybe, where all she could hear was the soft whisper of waves against sand and the singing of strange-colored birds, where she could sip frozen drinks decorated with paper umbrellas instead of medicinal tea, where there were new people, maybe even a new man, who didn’t remind her of the one she’d lost…

  Archer was a vague, blunt emptiness in her chest most days, the twinge of old heartbreak. Rationally, Ivy knew hardly anyone stayed with their first love, and those chances were even more minuscule if your first love was a mercurial, half-wild forest boy. She only had to look at the example of her own family, at her forest mother, who’d rather range the depths of the wilderness than get stuck with anything so mundane as child rearing. Forest lovers weren’t for keeps, no matter what pretty promises they made you as they took off your clothes.

  But, oh, those memories. Ivy stretched on the sofa, smoothing her hands down the length of her sweater and feeling her flesh tingle with sudden warmth. Yes, most days, Archer was nothing more than an old ache, but there were nights when her head filled with images and her body with sensations she couldn’t quell, even with all the redbell in her father’s greenhouse.

  The first time they’d slept together, it had been high summer in the forest, and Archer had built her a bower of branches and flowers, high in the limbs of an ancient forest tree halfway between his village and the border of Ivy’s town. Midsummer’s night bonfires burned bright in the forest, and the sound of forest drums and reed flutes made every leaf and twig tremble beneath their magic. Despite a lifetime of wandering forest villages, sixteen-year-old Ivy had been scared. Children weren’t allowed at the rites, and now that she was of age, Ivy quickly understood why. The gossip she heard in town finally made sense, as the savagery and wildness of forest folk was revealed to her in all its naked—literally—glory.

  Earlier, she’d begged her father to let her stay, and now she was wondering if perhaps she should have gone home. And then Archer had come for her. Archer, her old friend, who’d lately made her heart beat faster every time he came close, and blush whenever he’d whispered in her ear.

  “Ivy.” The whisper in her ear was louder than all the drums in the forest. She could hear it in her bones. Archer had drawn her away from the flames and whispered of secret surprises to show her. So they’d left the bonfires behind. She’d trembled with fear and anticipation as she climbed up into the tree he’d brought her to, and gasped with shock and pleasure when she’d come upon the bower.

  “Do you like it, Ivy-mine?” he’d asked, almost bashfully, his cheeks pink in the white light of the summer moon.

  She’d loved it. She’d loved him, and nothing in the world felt more right than to bare herself to him, body and soul, in the middle of the forest night.

  You weren’t supposed to keep your first love, no matter how your body burned for his touch. You weren’t supposed to yearn for a boy who’d never pick you over his wild forest home. And you were never, ever supposed to wish that things had been different, that the barrier separating you had never gone up. That way lay madness, and magic, and the destruction of your whole town.

  Ivy knew better. She swore she did. But as her eyes grew heavy and the flicker of the fire blurred before her eyes, she couldn’t help but wonder. Would it be worth it to be swallowed whole by dark magic, if it meant one more night with the man she loved?

  ***

  Ivy wasn’t woken by the stinging zap of static that momentarily engulfed the town, that made the lights flicker and the street signs tremble and buzz. She didn’t notice when her clay pots rattled on their shelves or her glass vials jingled in their holders.

  Rather, it was the nothingness that followed which brought her to. Her eyes flashed open and she sat up, as if from a nightmare she couldn’t remember, so disoriented by… something… that for a moment she wasn’t even sure where she was. This was home—her shop, her couch, the fire burned down to soft, pink embers. But there was still… something. Something missing.

  She stood, by instinct putting out her hand to help her balance, but there was no rush of dizziness, no twinge of constant pain as there’d been for three years. She froze as the truth hit her in a silent wave.

  The bells had stopped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Scarcely daring to breathe, Ivy tiptoed to the front door of her shop. She peered out into the darkness. It had snowed again while she dozed, and the formerly speckled street lay beneath drifts of frothy white. The bulb of every streetlight had blown, casting the entire street in blue-black shades of midnight. And across the way, the lattice of the bell barrier stood, still, silent—silent—and almost invisible. There was no jangle, no buzz of power, and the metal of each tiny alarm was dull and dead.

  The barrier was down. The forest lay open, for the first time in years. Ivy swallowed, fear and relief waging war in her soul.

  She should pick up her phone. She should call the town council. The barrier was failing.

  She should put on her warmest coat and sprint for the forest before it was too late.

  In the end, she did neither, for something moved, there in the darkness. At first, she thought it was just another drift of snow, but then it shifted and groaned and the snow shuddered off a lump of bloodied flesh the shape of a man. Heedless of the winter night, she slipped her feet into her boots, opened the door, and crossed the street.

  This is dark magic, said something in the back of her head. Run. Scream.

  But Ivy’s father had died at the barrier, and maybe this person was about to die now, so she walked ever closer.

  The lump moved again, and grunted. She reached it and the form was unmistakable now. A man—a young man, his naked, blood-smeared back a mass of corded muscle, his tousled, too-long hair the color of late autumn leaves. She knew the back, she knew the hair, and she knew the man lying in the snow.

  Ivy could no longer feel the cold.

  “Archer,” she whispered, but Archer did not move again.

  She rushed to his side and knelt in the fresh powder. This close, she could smell copper and ashes, and when she reached for him, blue-black sparks arced between her fingertips and his skin. She shrank back and toed his form with the rubber sole of her boot. He grunted, but did not wake.

  He was not dead, then. Not yet. She reached out her hand again. His body sizzled beneath her hand, like the worst static shock, but that was all. Ivy looked up and down the deserted street, searching for another witness to her discovery, but there was no one. Just she and Archer, and a wall of silence, and the black forest beyond.

  Ivy shuddered. Anything could be lurking there, just beyond the shadows of the trees. She should get inside. But she wasn’t leaving him here, half naked in the snow. Forest men were tough, but they still needed coats in wintertime.

  It wasn’t easy to haul a shirtless, freezing man back into her shop, but somehow Ivy managed it. She stoked the fire in the stove, put a kettle on to boil, and pulled out every blanket she owned. Getting him warm was the first step, and then she’d see about getting him conscious.

  With efficiency born of thousands of days in the shop, she moved quickly, gathering supplies from her collection of creams and tinctures to tend to his wounds. She piled the blankets at the foot of the couch and straightened, looking at her charge in the light of the fire.

  Archer, lying before her, like a vision out of her wildest dreams.

  Or her worst nightmares. The red abrasions fanning across his back and arms didn’t look like burns—not exactly—but she knew what happened when one attempted to breach the barrier. He was lucky he escaped with mere burns.

  Or was it luck? Her father had burned to a crisp, and he didn’t even have the magic the barrier had been erected to thwart. For a full-blooded forest man to withstand it must have been nearly impossible. And she could barely contemplate what it must have taken to stop the bells altogether.

  The silence scared her. She could hear herself breathe; she could hear him breathe. How long had it been since she’d heard something as s
imple as the rhythm of another person’s breath, unhindered by the endless jangle of bells?

  And what sort of danger had Archer been in that braving the barrier seemed like the better choice?

  Once, she might have known from Archer, from the mere touch of skin on skin. Though Ivy’s mother had been forest folk, she’d inherited little of their magic. Still, Archer could always bring it out of her. When he held her hand, he could share a memory. When he’d kissed her, she could see flashes of his thoughts. And when they’d slept together, back in those slow, summer days when their lives seemed as full and endless as the forest itself, their very souls seemed to link up.

  When Ivy had tried to explain it to her town friends, they ridiculed her for falling prey to forest tricks. When she’d ventured to confess to a forest girl, she’d responded as if Ivy had been awed by the intricate mysteries of breathing or digestion. Archer himself had laughed.

  “Ivy,” he’d sighed as he slipped off her dress. “Oh, Ivy-mine. Of course we’re linked. Didn’t you know? You and I share a single soul.”

  But Archer had been wrong. For the barrier had gone up and they’d both gone on, alone, and for two people with a magical shared soul like he claimed, she’d felt awfully isolated these past three years. If they were truly so in sync, wouldn’t she have known he was alive? Wouldn’t she have instantly realized the bloody lump in the snow was the body of the only man she’d ever loved?

  No, it was just a lie for young men to tell their lovers in the dark, just a bit of forest trickery, like the townsfolk said. A forest man could show you plenty of pretty fantasies to get you into bed. Weren’t the forest-blooded residents of the town enough evidence of that? They were all products of short-lived flings with forest folk. Ivy and her father had been abandoned by Ivy’s forest folk mother as soon as she realized that dull townie life and child-raising weren’t to her wild taste.