Hear Me (2 page)

But that was all over now. As the town grew, so did its conflict with the forest, and as they all learned, magic thwarted turns into magic dark. As Ivy became a teenager, the dark magic of the forest began to fight against the encroachment of the town, and as the forest grew dangerous, then deadly, even her forest-loving father had been forced to make a choice.

The wilds of the forest were no longer acceptable to the townsfolk, and the people of the forest even less so. The barrier of the bells had gone up, and Archer and the rest of the forest folk had declined to join the town, choosing the evils they knew of the forest instead of the ones they feared in civilization.
 

Ivy stared out the window of her shop, at the glowing silver barrier and the treetops beyond. The trees closest to the barrier were dead now, their trunks blackened by invisible fire, their skeleton arms bare even at the height of summer. But farther in, the forest remained wild and deep. Maybe there was a place where the people were safe, where Archer and his kin had carved out a place free from danger.

Or maybe the dark magic her father had feared had consumed them all, and turned the only boy she’d ever loved into a monster beyond reckoning.

CHAPTER TWO

The kettle whistled on the stove, its piercing squeal almost soothing next to the constant, bone-deep jangle of the bells. Ivy brushed her thoughts of forest folk away. It was as her father had counseled her in those first horrible weeks, when the sound of the bells had made her neighbors run mad and sent her to bed with earplugs and sedatives that barely took the edge off. He’d told her what she needed to think, the mantra she needed to repeat whenever it all seemed too much to bear.
 

It does no good to fret about what lies beyond the barrier. I’m safe here in this town. We’re all safe, because of the bells.
 

“I don’t understand,” the tourist woman was saying now. “If you get headaches from the bells, why don’t you leave?”

Ivy rolled her eyes but stayed silent. It all seemed so easy to outsiders.
 

“Do
you
want to buy my house?” Sallie asked the woman. “It’s right by the barrier so it’s not like it’s expensive. Also, do you know of a good job I could get somewhere else? I’m all ears.”

“Pointed ears,” Jeb added wickedly, though Sallie, like Ivy, did not have that forest trait.
 

The tourist scowled into her cup. Ivy already knew what was coming next. “Well, you could go to the forest.”

No one could go to the forest, just like the forest folk could no longer leave. The barrier stretched from cliff to cliff in the mouth of the blind canyon, and no one had ever successfully climbed up the sheer sides. The forest was an isolated island of darkness and magic, especially now, cut off from the rest of the world.
 

And if the folk who dwelled within had succumbed to the darkness since the barrier had been erected, well… they had chosen the forest. Her father had tried to help them. Before the town raised the barrier, he’d gone to the forest folk and begged them to come to the town, where it was safe. They’d stayed on their side.

And Ivy had stayed on hers.

Her life was here, in the town, with the people who needed her. When the neighbor kids moved away for the army or school or just the big cities down the highway and never came back, Ivy stayed. When half the block lay abandoned while people escaped the barrier sickness—until the only ones left were those as entrenched as any forest folk, unable to imagine a life anywhere else but these streets—Ivy remained. Day after day, she tended to the rare forest plants living on in the greenhouse, she brewed her teas, and she served her customers and she listened to the nonstop ringing of the bells.

She flipped the dial on the stove and pulled off the hissing kettle. The recipe for bell tea wasn’t difficult, but it was exact. A precise mixture of seventy percent dried petals, twenty percent leaves, and ten percent bulb shavings from the forest redbell flower, plus a few sprigs of mint and holy basil for flavor. The water had to be thirty seconds past boiling, the steeping time, four and a half minutes. Honey was okay, especially local, but sugar dulled the effects. No cream. Never cream.
 

The dose… well, that depended on the customer. For some, a single cup would do, and she never poured more than four. It wasn’t easy to carry the patron home afterwards. Ivy’s own prescription was a cup and a half. Sallie had once told her she’d do better with two, especially living so close to the barrier, but Ivy had resisted so far. If she was up to two cups at twenty years old, how many would she be drinking by the time she was her customers’ age?

She poured the steaming water over the tea leaves, swirling the pot around to make sure every leaf was saturated.
 

“Excuse me?”
 

Ivy jerked her head up to find the tourist woman standing before her. She held a few linen satchels of loose tea. “I’d like to purchase these, please.” She smirked. “I mean, if they aren’t enchanted.”

“They’re medicinal,” Ivy replied, checking the price tags. “It’s up to storytellers to decide how much medicine is magic.”
 

“There’s a difference!” the tourist said, indignant. “Magic is, like…evil.”

Right. Magic was evil now. Ivy should remember that, especially in front of a stranger. Who knew what stories she’d spread in town about the wicked tea shop owner and her half-fae clientele? Deacon Ryder would wallpaper the neighborhood in posters.
 

Talk about a headache.

“This tea is Nightmare Eraser,” Ivy said, holding up one of the tourist’s picks. “It’s got chamomile in it for relaxation, lemon balm to soothe your spirits, and anise to repel bad thoughts. You can believe what you want about its potency, but there’s nothing in here you can’t buy from a grocer’s spice rack.”

The tourist seemed relieved. She bought the Nightmare Eraser and—to Ivy’s amusement—the Love Potion Tea, with its mix of jasmine, ginseng, and rose hips. When she left, Ivy shook her head and entered the purchase in her ledger. She’d told the scared, silly woman the truth. Nothing in the ingredients she sold were magic. If Ivy had a way with plants, that was from her father. And if she had a way with making teas and tinctures… well, she did have her mother’s forest blood.
 

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.