Hear Me (6 page)

He glared at her, his jaw tight, every muscle in his arms and shoulders tensed. Every trace of humor, every shade of humanity, every detail that had convinced her that—whatever else had befallen her friend—he was still the Archer she’d loved as a teen, had left his face, leaving nothing but fury behind.
 

“Don’t kid yourself,” he said. “You’re a townie, root to stem. And you know
nothing
. You sit here day after day and you put your flowers in their little plastic prisons, as if they are yours to own, to live or die as you see fit. And your town did the same to us with their hellish cage of bells.”

“We had to protect ourselves!” she cried. “It’s not our fault you wouldn’t leave! It’s not our fault you didn’t care enough to save yourself from dark magic.”

His brow furrowed. “Don’t speak to me of dark magic, Ivy Potter.” He pointed behind her, toward the door and the street and the forest beyond. “That barrier is the blackest enchantment the forest has ever known. Believe me when I tell you that the blackest of magics are those that men wrought themselves. Whatever evils are in the depths, they have been there longer than history’s telling, longer than towns or villages or men and women. They belong to the Earth the same as you and me. Those bells of yours are evil of a different sort. There is nothing in the forest that can compare, and nothing that poses so dire a threat.”

“Not true!” Ivy exclaimed. They’d been bombarded with stories in those final weeks before the bells had gone up. Terrible beings, excruciating curses, babies and families and lives lost to enchantment. Even her father had told stories of the horrors he’d seen, there in the town square, on the podium where all could see and hear. And Ivy had stood in the square and listened, her skin crawling as she remembered the nights she’d spent in Archer’s bower, high at the top of a forest tree, her heart racing as she wondered what darkness had borne witness to them. Who—or what—had watched them have sex?

Archer was lying. He had to be. Either that or he’d gone so dark he couldn’t even see it. Would a practitioner of black magic think what they were doing was evil? “There was a horrible evil coming from the forest,” she insisted now. “Maybe you never saw it coming. Maybe it’s what’s hurting you now.”

He thrust his hand toward the windows of her shop. “The only thing hurting us is those damnable bells. You, who taste of the redbell flower, can you say they aren’t what’s killing you, too?”

She looked away. She’d answered three of his questions already. She didn’t need to tell him more.

“Your protection—whatever cowardly townie thing it is you think you’re saving yourself from—is not worth the price we all pay.”

Ivy swallowed her words, for they would have been a question. She knew how much her neighbors and their scatterings of forest blood were injured by the bells. How did they torture those in the forest, full-blooded folk like Archer who couldn’t move away? She recalled the things he’d shared with his kiss. Sick children, empty huts…
“It must be stopped, or we’ll lose them all.”
 

All these years, she’d listened to the council’s dire warnings and worried the forest folk had been wiped out by dark magic. Perhaps they had. Only it wasn’t brambles and stone that had defeated them. It was the bells.

What can fight dark magic but more of the same?

And now they had stopped, and he was here. It hurt to breathe. If Archer had turned to dark magic, it was the town what drove him to it.
 

She looked at her first love again, at the scars crossing his skin, at the defiance in his eyes, at the resentment which poured off him like fever sweat. And she couldn’t blame him.
 

“You still have one more question.”

That she did. And now she didn’t care about the woman and the children. She only wanted the truth. “What are you doing here?”

He chuckled. “I told you, you don’t want to ask me that question.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Ivy Potter,” he said, and his voice was full of sorrow, “you won’t like the answer.”

CHAPTER SIX

“There are many things I don’t like about this night,” Ivy said, as bravely as she could. “But that’s my question, and according to your own rules, you’re bound to tell me.”

Ivy could think of three possibilities, and each one scared her more than the last. Perhaps he was escaping, since the evil in the forest had grown so dangerous that
no one
could withstand it, no matter what dark arts they practiced. Or maybe his task was to bring down the barrier and let enchantment flood the town.
 

Option three was the most terrifying of all. Maybe he had come for her at last. There were times, especially that first year when her father was still alive and the barrier was making her sick, that she used to dream of it. To imagine Archer breaking the barrier and coming for her. She’d picture him scaling the sheer sides of the gorge or digging tunnels below the earth or bringing down the barrier, bell by wretched bell, to gather her in his arms and tell her that nothing— not dark magic or the town’s disapproval, would ever keep them apart.

Those dreams died slowly years ago, worn to tatters by loss and illness and the neverending din of the bells.

Ivy didn’t speak again, and she didn’t back down. These were the rules of the game.
 

Archer relented, his shoulders slumping. “We need your father’s help. The redbells in the forest are dying out. You must know what that means for us.”

She did. Without the flower, they’d never survive the bells’ effects. “But my father’s gone.”

He nodded. “And you run his shop now.”

Archer’s plan came crashing into view. He’d come for her father, to save the redbells. But her father was dead, and the tea was Ivy’s invention.

That meant he
had
come for her.

Once, it would have been all she wanted. To live with Archer in the forest, to be young and free and wild in a place filled with love and enchantment. But Ivy knew better now. She knew the truth of the dangers that the forest held, she knew her place in the modern world, and she knew, most of all, that Archer was not hers. There was that girl in his mind. There were those children. There were the years between them, and most of all, there was the darkness he’d allowed into his heart.

But tonight, the bells had stopped, and in the muffled, snowy stillness, she could hear him breathe, in and out as he watched her, not even blinking. She could hear the tiny voice she’d been ignoring for years as she repeated her father’s mantra of safety and security and a small, lonely life. The one that cried out for Archer and adventure and hope and love. It rose within her like a plant in spring sun, a frail shoot with the soul of a forest tree.

She squeezed her eyes shut, willing it to go away. Her father’s words echoed in her mind.
You cannot trust forest folk. They don’t think as normal people do. They don’t want what normal people want. Look at your mother. She loved us and still she left us. Look at every half-blood in this town. The forest lives in their hearts, and their magic will ensnare you, as harmless as it seems.

Hadn’t she seen enough to prove that when the forest folk claimed they’d rather die than leave their villages when the barrier went up? Now here they were — dying, breaking the barrier after all. Here was Archer, filled with dark magic and finally remembering she existed.
 

You cannot trust forest folk. No matter what he’d once been to her, he could not show up in the middle of the night, suffused with dark magic and dripping with blood, and expect her to trust him. Ivy stepped back.
 

“Don’t run, Ivy.” It was almost a sigh. So soft, so final.

“I can’t. You’ve already proven that.”

He blinked. He’d not been expecting this response. Not after their little game.

She had to find out the details of his plan. She may not be able to run, but she wasn’t going to walk into the forest a willing captive. “Three questions won’t do it for me, Archer. Not with what you’re proposing.”
 

“I’m not… proposing.” Was that a blush stealing across his cheekbones? Whatever it was, it was gone in a flash, replaced by something unreadable and intense. “I’m telling. We need your help in the forest.”

“Then you can afford to explain yourself fully. What exactly you want.” Her botanical knowledge? Or her, body and soul?

Not that she’d consider that one. It would just be interesting to know, a balm to soothe the devilish parts of her mind.

He hesitated, and there was a world inside his silence. “If I tell you everything, you will use it against me.”

Archer always had been able to read her like the tracks in the snow. Once, she’d thought it had been due to that “shared soul” he told her they had. But it was a trick. All just a forest trick. It would be madness to walk into the forest with him now, a repudiation of everything her father had helped her to see when the barrier went up. The forest was dangerous, and Archer was a forest man. Helping him was one thing, but trusting him another.

“Your plan is foolish,” she tried. “You don’t need my help with the redbells in your cursed woods. You brought the barrier down. Why don’t you take your people and escape?”

He looked at her as if she spoke gibberish. “Escape? You have lived across from these bells for years, though I know it must make you as sick as it makes me. Why do you not
escape
?”

She folded her arms. “That’s different.” But when she went to explain why, her arguments seemed hollow as straw. This was her home—but the forest was home to the folk who dwelt there, too.
 

Still, her home was real. Safe. Brick and plumbing and roof tar and wires. Not some backward forest hovel. “No one here is dying,” she said at last.

“We are only dying because you’re killing us,” he replied. “We will not abandon our home just because your kind seeks to destroy it.”

“We’re not destroying anything,” she replied. “Just trying to protect ourselves.”

“Oh?” he asked wryly. “How safe are you tonight?”

Ivy’s breath caught in her throat again, but Archer’s expression smoothed and he ran his hand through his hair in frustration.

“I’m wasting precious time. Your townies could discover what I’ve done any minute. Ivy, I don’t wish to make an enemy of you.”

“You have a funny way of showing it.”

“Please, do not judge me by my behavior this night. To bring down the barrier—” He sighed. “It took a lot out of me. I’m not fully myself.”

“Oh, is that what you call it?” she snapped. “You aren’t being cranky, Archer. You as good as told me you’d sold your soul.”

She expected him to respond, to deny, but he said nothing at all, just stared at her, wistful and sad, and then finally spoke. “This is the truth: we need your help.”
 

How could she trust that? She gave a small shake of her head. “I can’t…”

He made as if to close the distance between them, then checked himself. “I don’t know how you have managed to keep enough redbell growing in your little greenhouse to see to the needs of your forest-blooded townies, but you have. Meanwhile, we’ve stripped the forest of nearly all the bulbs. Without them, every person in my village will be dead within the month, thanks to the abomination of your barrier bells.”

When Ivy moved this time, it was to sit on the couch. Archer was poised to spring on her again, but stopped as she leaned back on the cushions, as calmly as she could in such a situation. He was still shirtless, he was still standing over her, and he was still threatening to drag her into the woods.

She averted her eyes and kept her tone as cool and logical as she could. “How do you use the plant?”

He narrowed his eyes and lowered himself to the arm of the sofa. Still between her and the door, but like this, she could almost imagine him any normal customer—well, if Ivy had been in the habit of catering to twenty-one-year-old ex-lovers who didn’t wear shirts, that was.
 

“A sliver of redbell bulb beneath the tongue,” he said.

She shook her head again. No wonder they were running out. “We make a tea. I can give you the formula—it uses less of the bulb, more of the flowers and the petals. It preserves the bulb for multiple sproutings—”

“No,” he replied. “That won’t help us. Our redbells are still dying. We don’t have enough anymore, even if we did start making tea. They’re only found deep in the forest now—far from the sound of your bells. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how dangerous that makes them to harvest.”

She shuddered.

“We used to send children to gather them. Now only trained rangers are allowed.” He leaned in. “Yet you grow them here? In a town? In full range of the bells? Tell me your secret, Ivy Potter.”

She nodded in understanding. This would save her, and take Archer away again. Forever.
 

“I will show you.”

***

George Potter’s greenhouse was a marvel. A dome of glass panels, banded and veined by bars of copper and bronze, the better to protect the forest life found within from the poison of modern iron. Everywhere green vines grew, stretching tendrils up toward the sunlight so that during the day, the greenhouse looked less like a building of glass and more like a living bower.