Hear Me

by Viv Daniels

  “And you can forget about using your… cellaphone?” He held up her phone.

  Her hands flew to her pocket. When had he slipped it out? When they kissed? When he grabbed her? And how had he known what she’d been thinking? No, this was not the Archer she remembered.

  Though he still couldn’t pronounce the words of the modern world.

  “These things are bigger than I remember.”

  Once, Ivy had laughed at such statements, but she didn’t feel like laughing now. “Smarter, too.”

  He looked down at the bit of glass and plastic in his hand. “Not smart enough, it seems.” He put it back in his pocket, though he grimaced as he did. She imagined it must burn, as there wasn’t a scrap of redbell on him tonight. No protection from the bells, no protection from the town.

  “What happened to you?” She didn’t like the tremble in her voice, but there it was. If she couldn’t run, she might as well slake her curiosity.

  “In three years in the forest? What hasn’t happened?” He shrugged, still facing away from her. “Let us play like in the old stories, Ivy Potter. You can ask me three questions, and I’ll tell you whatever you wish. Starting now.”

  Questions blossomed in her brain, so many they threatened to choke out every other thought. Was he the Archer she remembered, or had he been turned by dark magic into… something else? If he’d harnessed something evil to bring down the barrier, why? What had he been doing all this time? What had become of the forest? Who was the woman in his mind’s eye, the one with the dark hair and the overwhelming sadness and the small, sick children?

  Now Archer turned around, his eyes as dark as onyx, and Ivy tensed again. Some deep, primal part of her cried out to run. This was a fox, and she was a rabbit. Not quick enough and, like her phone, not smart enough either.

  “I hardly need to warn you, though,” he added, “that we forest folk are tricky.”

  No, Archer. He didn’t need to warn her. She’d already learned her lesson about that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I don’t want to play games with you,” Ivy said.

  “Lies.” His eyebrows quirked, a mix of humor and menace, and he blinked his eyes green. “You’re dying to know everything. I tasted that in your kiss as well.”

  “Is that why you k—” she cut herself off, because she remembered the rules from the old stories. Three questions. She would not waste them.

  Archer was facing her fully, now, and the look he was giving her was superior and cocky, Rumplestiltskin and Pan. Pan, especially, given his bare, muscled chest. He hadn’t had those abs at sixteen either.

  Ivy clenched her jaw. But she could do this. She just had to be careful and clever and brave. She could be Puss in Boots; she could be Jack the Giant-Killer. She knew all the rules. Her father had taught her when she was just a girl, and her father knew everything about the forest.

  The coals glowed merrily in the stove. It had started to snow again outside, fat flakes drifting past the window. And the silence—the glorious nothing in the air. Her ears and head and heart were full of it. For the first time in years, she could think without the ringing.

  She could do this.

  “You’re wilder than you were before,” she said at last.

  “That is not a question.”

  “It’s an observation.” Ivy circled the couch, watching him. He tracked her with lichen-green eyes, his muscles tensed like an animal ready to spring. “And it’s true. You never used to put so much stock in the old stories, the old ways of forest folk.”

  The Archer she’d known had been gentle, kind, and understanding of the thing that made Ivy a girl from town. When other forest men were roughly taking their lovers before midsummer fires, Archer had made her a canopy of flowers, a bed of petals, and a night of kisses. It was his first time, too, but he still took care, and created a night that worked for her as well as him. And in the magical year that followed, he may have been as wild as the forest night, but was still as sweet as summer sun.

  But this Archer? This one was a mystery. She didn’t know what to ask that would get her the answers she wanted. She didn’t even know if she wanted them. For years she’d told herself that Archer was well, in the forest, even if she’d never see him again. But what if this was the truth? Archer, turning to another woman. Archer, cursed, devoured by the darkness.

  If Ivy were the one he’d been with all those years, she never would have let this happen to him. Whoever this forest woman was, Ivy hated her.

  “Are you asking me if it’s a product of living only in the forest for all these years or if it’s dark magic what stole my soul?” His eyebrows lifted in amusement, but Ivy didn’t feel amused.

  “I haven’t asked a thing.” She’d wondered, yes, but she wouldn’t waste a precious question on a simple either-or.

  If Archer were playing by fairy story rules, she’d have to be very clever. If he’d fallen to darkness and left a monster to wear his skin, she’d have to be cleverer still.

  Ivy took a deep breath. Think, think. “What is the full story of the most significant event to transpire in your life since the barrier was erected?”

  His eyes never left her face, but she saw the fear behind his gaze. It flashed for only a second, but it was there. Which meant Archer might be, too. Ivy hardly dared to hope.

  After a long silence, he spoke. “It was the first morning in your cage. High summer. Glorious sun, trees in full leaf. I left my village to come to our tree…”

  She looked away. She’d been locked in her room, safe in her bed, and he’d been at the barrier. Had he been coming for her? Too late, but coming all the same.

  “As I walked closer, I heard them. Your silver bells.”

  She wished he’d stop calling them hers. She hadn’t wanted the barrier. She’d hated it every day. The bells had killed her father, made her skin crawl, kept her from Archer… they weren’t hers.

  “They filled the air,” Archer said, “setting everything on fire. The trees, the soil. But I kept walking. My blood boiled beneath my skin. My face blistered, my bones crumbled.”

  Stop. Heat traveled along her own skin, sizzling like fire ants and ashfall. Was this magic, like with the hot chocolate? Was he doing this to her? He didn’t even need to chase her, if he could hurt her from afar.

  “With every clang, my flesh shuddered so hard I thought it would collapse, that I’d dissolve entirely and turn into mush where I stood.” She looked back and he was still staring at her, his expression accusing, and swirling back to black. “And still I walked.”

  “Stop!” She couldn’t take it anymore. Not the magic and definitely not the story. Not the memory of Archer, her Archer, coming for her.

  He merely shrugged as his eyes were swallowed up by darkness again. “You asked.”

  She had. And this was his response, to burn her with dark magic. After this, she’d need no more reminders of who her Archer had become. She stared at him, his blackened eyes, as if to force herself to believe it. “Fine.”

  “It’s the end of the story, anyway. I don’t remember reaching the barrier, but I’m told that’s where they found me. I don’t remember anything for weeks. When I woke, I was lying in a bed of redbells, and summer had passed. We were alone in the forest, and it wasn’t just the year that was dying.”

  “And so you decided to turn to dark magic?” She clapped a hand over her mouth. Dammit. She’d been so careful, too.

  “No,” he replied, and a secretive, scary smile curled his lips. “That decision, alas, was made for me.” He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to, by rule. She could have cut out her foolish tongue.

  “One more, townie.”

  “Stop calling me that.”

  “Is it not true?” He cocked his head. “Where have you been these three years if not this town?”

  Ivy’s head snapped up. Well, well, well. That was unexpected. “Those are your first two questions to me.”

  For a moment, he looked shocked, but it gave way
to a grin far kinder than the enigmatic smiles that had come before. “Well done, Ivy.”

  Ivy, now? Not the sneering townie or even her full name, hurled like an epithet? That was unexpected, too. She swallowed, once again unsure. Was he playing with her? A forest man wouldn’t so easily give up those questions. A creature of darkness, even less likely.

  So then why would he let questions slip from his lips? Was there a trick in them that she didn’t know? Or was she, as he said, playing well?

  “Perhaps I’m not so very townie after all.”

  He conceded with a nod. “So give me your answers.”

  She thought carefully, trying to figure out his trick and learn what info he was trying to glean. “It’s not true. I have lived in this town, in this building, across from these bells, but it does not define who I am. It doesn’t define any of us, unlike the forest folk, who would rather risk death than live anywhere else but the dark forest.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  It was Ivy’s turn to smile. “Question three.”

  He scowled now, and Ivy couldn’t help but thrill at it. She breathed true for the first time since she’d first caught a glimpse of his cursed eyes. She was the hero of an old story. She knew what she needed to know and she hadn’t even used her third question. Dangerous he might be, and even dark with magic, but—thank heaven, if heaven there was—he was still Archer.

  His sly, tricky forest folk demeanor was a mask he wore, and everything else—well, he was just trying to scare her. A monster wouldn’t ask questions about her past. A monster wouldn’t care so much what she thought. A monster wouldn’t have gulped down her cocoa like it was going out of style. He was a man, not a monster.

  But that didn’t mean she could trust him.

  “I think it,” she exclaimed, “because you forest folk didn’t leave the woods when you had the chance. You knew there were dangers. We warned you, and you chose to stay — your lifestyle was far more important to you than your safety.” She gestured at him. “Look how well that’s turned out.”

  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. S
he 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.”