Hear Me

by Viv Daniels

“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.

  An ivy bower.

  Long ago, George Potter had built it with help from a forest girl he’d met while studying the unusual species found inside the unexplored canyon forest. They’d fallen in love—so in love, apparently, that the girl had left the forest to start a family with the young botanist right there in town. Or, at least that’s the story he liked to tell.

  But by the time their daughter, Ivy, was old enough to remember, her forest-born mother was gone. The greenhouse remained, and so did the botanist, his love for forest plants undiminished by the betrayal he’d suffered at the hands of a forest-dweller.

  Ivy knew that most greenhouses didn’t look like theirs. She’d seen them on trips she’d taken with her father to the big cities, to academic research labs and garden centers where the plants sat in boxes in neat little rows. She’d found them mystifying, sterile. She’d asked her father how the researchers could study life, with plants that were so thoroughly captive. But their forest’s plants, her father had explained, were like the forest folk: impossible to tame, hard to even keep contained. The Potter greenhouse was a maze, a jungle of twisted walkways and overgrown root systems. Some of the plants dwelt in clay pots, true, but most drew their strength from the bare soil beneath the glass.

  It was to this greenhouse that Ivy led Archer now, after first giving him a spare shirt that had once belonged to her father. She’d had quite enough of averting her eyes from his well-muscled chest and abs for one evening.

  And if her ploy worked, she’d never be troubled by visions of his body again. Her teenaged dreams of running away to live with her boyfriend in an enchanted forest were one thing. Getting dragged into a dying forest and trapped there by a married dark magic practitioner she used to love was quite another.

  She just had to keep telling herself that.

  The still, snowy night they stepped out into was unbroken by the sound of jangling bells, by the buzz of their power—the power Archer claimed was black magic. Ivy had donned a red fleece sweater over her shirt in deference to the frigid evening. Archer had refused so much as a scarf over the old, plaid shirt she’d given him. Indeed, he’d barely buttoned it, as if even the idea of their modern, machine-stitched clothes with their plastic buttons and factory tags were anathema to him.

  It was odd, shuffling across the snow to the backyard greenhouse. Quiet. Ivy had quite forgotten the squeak your boots made against fresh-fallen snow, the tinkle of ice crystals against pine needles. Moonlight sparkled blue and silver on the ground and across the panes of glass that curved above them as they reached the greenhouse door.

  She unlocked it and gestured for him to get inside, before the warmth escaped.

  “Oh, no, Ivy Potter,” he said, and waved his hand. “Ladies first.”
<
br />   She rolled her eyes and entered and he followed close behind. She shut the door. He stilled, like a buck when it hears the snap of a twig or catches the scent of a predator on the wind.

  “What’s that?” he asked. He was cocking his head, listening. But Ivy knew it would do him little good.

  “It’s nothing,” she replied. “That’s our secret.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Originally, her parents’ plan had been to shield the forest plants from the town, from the sounds of motorcars and air conditioners, the buzz of electrical wires, and the smell of diesel and Freon and paint. It had been Ivy’s mother’s idea to make the greenhouse soundproof, or nearly so. She didn’t like the sounds of civilization, so she was sure forest plants wouldn’t either.

  And once the barrier went up, and the plants nearby died, but the greenhouse flourished, Ivy and her father knew exactly why.

  The forest here lived. Thrived. All day, all night, every summer and winter. The plants were lush, huge, as only plants who hadn’t felt a winter’s chill in twenty years could be. Their long, artificial summer benefitted from the soil and the sun that fed this magical slice of Earth, yet were protected from the harsher elements, as well as from the artifices man had brought to this place.

  Archer’s eyes were wide as he looked around him. This wasn’t his first time in their greenhouse, of course. He’d spent many hours wandering its paths with Ivy when he was younger. But memories faded, and the world around them had changed. As a child of the forest, Archer was probably unimpressed with their meager specimens back then, probably hardly noticed the way one couldn’t hear street traffic or the quarry shift whistle. Now though, when silence was a golden gift and the forest was withering away behind the barrier…

  He closed his eyes and breathed. “It’s clean here,” he whispered. “Quiet. It’s…right.”

  Ivy knew exactly what he meant. She used to come here, once the forest was cut off but before she’d perfected her tea. She used to lie in the earth and bury herself in leaves and breathe the greenery and remember Archer and the way things used to be. Even now, she loved it here. Loved what it reminded her of—the endless forest of her youth, the enduring proof of the connection her parents must have once shared. Her mom may have gone back to her forest roots, but she’d left plenty here for the Potters.

  “See?” she replied. “Plants can grow in a cage.”

  Archer turned to her, eyes blazing. “Then this was your father’s plan? Kill the forest and keep his own plants safe?”

  “No!” she cried. His words were needles, his glares were knives. “He had no plan.” Wasn’t the barrier sickness and the loss of their business proof enough of that? “He was only trying to keep the town safe.”

  In the final days before the barrier went up, when the town buzzed with stories of bramble-men walking out of the trees and infants being replaced with babes of mud, Ivy had expected her father to stand up for the forest, to take a stand against the barrier plans. But he did not.

  “The forest teems with evil,” he’d said, at a meeting in the center of town, while Ivy sat in her seat in the front row, skin crawling at the accusing eyes around her, head tucked down against her chest as she’d heard the attacks against the forest folk she’d loved. “I’ve explored its depths and I know what I’ve seen. Though my livelihood comes from the forest, though my own daughter is half forest blood” —here he pointed at Ivy, and she heard the rumblings through the audience— “I can no longer ignore its dangers. We must put up the barrier. It’s the only thing that will protect our families. Protect us all.”

  It was then that Ivy knew the barrier would be raised. If even her father was an advocate, then the town was joined in agreement. There was no other way.

  “It was luck alone that the greenhouse saved these plants,” she said to Archer now. “We didn’t know the forest would be hurt by the bells. We didn’t know we would. We were just trying to protect ourselves from the wave of dark magic coming our way.”

  “There was no wave of dark magic,” he said, his tone filled with disbelief and contempt. “If the forest is darker than it used to be—if we are— it’s from desperation. It’s rot.”

  “That can’t be.” She shook her head wildly. “Maybe the very presence of the bells stopped it, even for your side. Maybe it drove the darkness back into the depths, and it never came at all. But it was coming. We’d already seen the first wave.” Her father had, at least. “Changelings and demon men… and worse things yet. Things my father wouldn’t even tell me, back then. We had to protect ourselves or we’d have been destroyed. That forest teems with evil.”

  “How would you know?” he snapped back at her. “Hiding here—in your iron-choked town. In your silent, safe greenhouse.” He jabbed his finger against his own chest. “I’m the one who knows every twig of that forest. I’m the one who has lived there, who has watched people run mad or wither away when they have no choice, who has watched children die— not because of any dark forest magic, but because of your curse.”

  And now she, too, had seen those dying children. Maybe Archer’s children. That had never been their intent—the council who’d erected the barrier. They’d been trying to protect the town’s children, to protect everyone. That’s what her father said.

  “And what of your curses, Archer?” she asked him. “You’ve admitted to me that you’ve been doing dark magic. What horrible acts have you committed to make sure my entire town is now in danger from your precious forest?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Every word from your mouth is a lie, Ivy Potter. But I no longer know which ones you yourself believe.” Archer turned from her now and walked a few steps down the path, his back straight and proud as he passed beneath the boughs. His left hand drifted outward to trace the whorls of gnarled bark on one trunk. He stopped, reached farther. His shoulders lifted.

  In the stillness, Ivy could swear she heard him breathe.

  Memories crowded in on all sides, twining through her mind like insistent vines. The feel of his chest moving beneath her head as they rested, wrapped around each other in the treetops. The taste of his tongue in the morning, when books and TV shows told her it should have been gross, but always tasted to her just like Archer. She could have kissed him any time in the day or night. There was a time when she thought she’d hear his breath in her ear every morning for eternity.

  Her mouth still tingled from where he’d kissed her, her body from where he’d wrapped his arms around her and held tight. Her entire palm felt on fire. She couldn’t believe she’d grabbed his balls. What difference did it make, really? She hadn’t taken the opportunity to escape.

  The second she’d touched him she’d almost forgotten why she needed to run at all. Right now, she couldn’t remember her mantras, her need for safety, her decision to send him away.

  He stood, as still as a deer, beneath the branching tree by the side of the path, half turned away from her, as though he’d forgotten she was there. She soaked in every detail—the way his hair curled over his collar, how he held his arms out slightly from his side, as if the shirt bothered him, the way the light dappled through the leaves and onto his winter-pale skin.

  He was so beautiful. And so very, very far away.

  In the green and golden stillness of this place, she could almost see it, shimmering at his edges like violet-black mirage. Whatever wretched enchantment had made his eyes turn black, it still lay upon him, a cloak of dark magic enshrouding his soul. She wondered what it might look like to someone who actually could do magic, to Archer, or that forest woman from his memories. A suit of snakes, perhaps, or bramble vines.

  Did it disgust him? Would it disgust her, if she could see it clearly?

  Who was she kidding? Ivy had been admiring his naked chest even as she washed blood from his skin. She’d been distracted by the sight of his forest-hewn body even as she questioned whether he was still Archer inside. The gossip she’d endured in high school may have faded, but it was as true now as
it was then. There was no mistaking Ivy’s twisted, forest-lover tastes. Even bristling with dark magic, Archer made her ache.

  Had the barrier never been placed, she would have ended up a woman like the ones in the posters, wasting away in the forest or stuck in town with forest-blooded babies after her lover abandoned her for the wild.

  Babies. That possibility had seemed eons away to her as a teenager, but the glimpse she’d seen into Archer’s memories had been anything but.

  “The children,” she blurted before she lost her nerve. “The woman. In your mind. Are they… yours?”

  If possible, his back went even straighter. “Yes.”

  She was glad he wasn’t facing her now, as she couldn’t hide the anguish that overcame her at the words. Of course they were. Of course. He was a forest man. They didn’t wait long—there was no college to think of first. He had met another girl, made babies—babies that should have been hers.

  Ivy sucked in a breath and blinked away the moisture stinging her eyes. Why cry now? Archer had been lost to her three years ago. That future could never come to pass. But thinking it was one thing—seeing his children, his woman, hearing confirmation that he’d moved on... That was something else.

  But hers or not, she would not let Archer’s children die. She couldn’t follow him into the forest, but she could still help his family.

  She fought to draw breath enough to speak. “This way to the redbells,” she choked out, and slid past him on the path. Don’t touch, don’t look. He’s not yours. “I’ll give you a large supply of tea and my parents’ plans for the greenhouse. The tea will sustain you while you build your own…”

  “Build?” he sneered. “Because there is such a supply of glass and bronze in the forest?”

  “Oh.” Ivy flinched. She hadn’t even thought of that. And they wouldn’t have the craftsmen or carpenters either. But that couldn’t be her problem. “That’s all I can offer you. That’s what makes the plants grow. There’s no other secret. There’s nothing my going back with you can accomplish. I can give you tea; I can give you redbells. The rest is up to you.” She dared to look over her shoulder at him, but his expression was unreadable. “Please, Archer. I’m telling you the truth. There is no other secret. There’s nothing else I can do for you.”