Authors: Viv Daniels
“No!” The word tore out of her. “I will never let him go.”
Behind her, the forest folk were gathering, readying to set off into the unknown. Ivy looked down at the space where they’d all crawled through.
“Ivy,” Jeb warned. “You cannot go into the forest.”
She turned to River. “Tell me where to find him. I know you know.”
River was silent, studying Ivy, her modern clothes and her townie features. “I do not. But when he brought the flowers, wrapped in your greenhouse moss, he also had with him a knot of the bell lattice. I believe he has made his choice.”
Ivy chest felt tight, remembering the giant hole in the lattice right across from her shop. The one they’d been repairing when Shawn had thrown her in the van. “His choice?”
“Yes,” said River. “Like his brother, Archer will die when the bells begin to ring.”
***
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Ivy-girl?” Jeb asked her when she slipped beneath the barrier.
No. Of course not. Ivy didn’t have the slightest clue what she was doing. She could not search the entire forest in a few hours, and she wasn’t entirely sure if she could even get to Archer once she’d found him.
But she had to try.
“I’m going to get Archer,” was all she said. “I’m going to get him.”
“But what about the bells?” Jeb asked. “You’ll be trapped in the forest.”
She nodded. “I know. But I spent three years trapped on this side. It’s time to try something new.”
It was crazy how convincing she sounded.
“Good luck.” He waved.
Ivy tried not to cry as she took off into the woods.
First she made a beeline down the barrier toward her shop, searching for a hint of silver lattice work in the ground. If Archer planned to commit suicide by bell, he’d have to attach the bells he stole to the rest of the lattice somehow. Right?
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all she had.
She hurried through the deadened trees at the edge of the forest, sloughing through fallen leaves and hopping over roots and rocks. There was no sound in the forest tonight—even if any fauna had come closer to the bells during these last two days of silence, they were clearly wiser than Ivy, and had fled at the first tingle of the barrier bells. Though she hadn’t been in the forest in years, she had never heard such total silence, on either side of the barrier.
Every time the bells rang out, a fresh wave of pain sent her into a cowering crouch, covering her ears and crying out in pain. Her jaw ached from gritting her teeth, her stomach roiled with nausea, and a slow, pounding agony took up residence inside her skull. The sound was coming more often now, every ten minutes, then every five, then every three. She wasn’t sure how much longer she had—how much longer
Archer
had.
The first question she’d won from him in the game, his story of coming for her the morning after the bells started to ring, loomed large in her mind.
They filled the air, setting everything on fire. The trees, the soil. But I kept walking. My blood boiled beneath my skin. My face blistered, my bones crumbled. And still I walked.
Ivy didn’t walk. She ran, and in her head, larger than the pain, louder than the bells, stood Archer, her own, lovely Archer, who she’d thought she’d lost, and who she never wanted to lose again.
There! A line of silver, a single wire running from the main barrier lattice into the heart of the forest. She stopped to peer through the bells, trying to get her bearings. They were just down the street from Petal and Leaf.
All of a sudden, Ivy knew exactly where Archer had gone.
She sprinted into the forest, heedless of dead trees and beasties. The woods were rotted and black, like ghosts from a forest fire, and she leaped over downed limbs and piles of char. Three horrible rings of the bells later, she saw it, a great, ancient tree rising up from the forest floor, blackened to a crisp, but still standing. And there, in the side of the bark, was affixed a row of rungs reaching high into the canopy.
Don’t be afraid, Ivy-mine
, Archer had whispered into her ear on that warm, summer night.
Climb up. I’ll see you at the top.
The silver thread also wound its way up the trunk. Ivy squeezed her eyes shut.
Damn you, Archer.
The splintered rungs were hell on her injured hand, and slippery with ice and snow. Her feet broke off chunks of rotted wood with every step, and each ring of the bells—faster now, every two minutes, every one— sent shockwaves of pain and nausea through her body. It had been nearly three days since she’d drunk redbell tea. Even if she made it to him, the barrier might kill her.
But he’d come looking for her the day the bells started to ring. They’d nearly killed him, but he kept on. And so would she. For if he’d chosen this tree, of all the trees in the forest, it meant he was hers, still.
He was hers, and she wasn’t letting him go.
Ivy’s fingers were raw and bleeding by the time she reached the platform Archer had built in the branches. The flowers were long gone, of course, nothing but crackling vines on blackened boughs, an empty ruin swaying in a deadened tree. It was nearly midnight in deep winter, and there was no one up here.
The bells sounded again and she collapsed on the platform, huddled into a ball, covering her head with her hands, her mouth open in a silent scream. Midnight was nearly upon her now, and with it, death and enchantment. And Archer wasn’t here at all.
A flash of silver drew her eye as the bells tapered off, but no—it was just a knot of bells and wire, wrapped tight around a mess of branches.
A sob escaped her throat. Was it one last, cruel trick, to think that she might find him in their bower?
“So,” croaked the branches, in a voice like low thunder. “You are an angel, after all.”
“Archer!” She crawled over to him. He looked like part of the tree, charred and crumbly, with black smoke pouring off of him like he’d just been taken from a fire. There were angry red lines where the silver wire cut into his shoulders and neck and wrists, and his features were barely discernible in the deep night. “I’ve come to get you.”
“Archer is gone,” he said. “You cannot fuck him out of me anymore.”
“Shut up!” She hadn’t come to argue with the darkness, but to fight it.
The bells rang again. He let out a cry of pain and she wavered, woozy, while blackness crowded the edges of her vision.
When the bells silenced, she reached out and began unwinding the wires from his skin.
“Stop,” he said, unmoving. “I will kill you if I’m free.”
“Not before the bells do,” Ivy said. “And I think one of us, at least, should survive this.”
“Don’t you see?” he asked, as she finished with his arms and started in on the loops around his neck. “I do not want to live like this, in this endless darkness I’ve made for myself. I do not want to live without you.”
“Then help me get you out of here,” she said, leaning in between his spread legs to tug at the wires. “And we’ll run away from the bells, and we’ll figure out the whole black magic thing some other time.”
The bells jangled again, and Ivy gasped as they singed her fingers.
Archer’s voice was scary and calm. “You make it sound so simple.”
“It
is
simple,” she insisted. There was a knot there, high on his neck, and she realized she should have brought wire cutters. “Listen to me: I love you. I love you more than all the dark magic in the world, and I am not afraid.”
From far away, there was a sound—a clamorous earthquake, a crystalline train crash, the horrid, deathly jingle of a million, million bells. The enchantment was complete.
Ivy reached for Archer again, but it was all too quick. The wires lit up in her hands, the silver shone like starlight, and the bells everywhere began to ring.
Then, all at once, the sound resolved, the discordance smoothed, shifting into a harmony, a molten-golden tone that fell onto Ivy’s ears like the sweetest redbell tea, like the softest summer morning, like the whisper of a loved one. Out from her hands, the golden glow spread, dancing down the lines and lighting up the bells like tiny suns.
And where those bells touched Archer, the darkness melted away. His skin shone through the burns, his hair shifted back to red, and at last, his eyes cleared, moss-green and smiling up at her like they had every time in this tree.
I love you, and I am not afraid.
How foolish the townfolk had been to use Ivy for their spell. Her belief was strong, but it wasn’t the one they wanted. She may have been her father’s daughter, but her love was not made weak by fear. It was powerful, and true, and more than any black magic could bear.
Ivy’s hands dropped to her sides. “Archer…”
He lifted them to his lips, kissing each palm in turn. “Ivy-mine.”
CODA
Five Years Later
Ivy tied the last of the ribbons around a bunch of dried lavender and set a price tag sticker on the bundle. She stretched, rolling her neck muscles, and observed the winter display. The tourists would love it. Jeb had told her this morning that his woodshop in town was already seeing a huge rise in visitors this season.
Every year, the land came back into itself, fresh, green growth peeking out from the scars of old magic. The forest folk had moved back into their home, but Ivy and Archer had opted to stay in town and help the people there come to a greater understanding of the resource they’d very nearly lost.
Archer’s forest tours had grown tremendously in the last few years, taking townsfolk and tourists alike into the forest for a display of magic and an education on what the forest was, as well as what it wasn’t…and most of all, how to stay safe beneath the trees. More than ever, people wanted to visit this strange and infamous slice of land, and they needed a guide who knew its good side and its bad. In that, Archer was more of an expert than any ranger of the forest folk.
And with his base here in town, he provided a level of trustworthiness that other forest-folk guides, who didn’t even have telephones, could not.
Over the door, a tiny golden bell rang as someone opened the door, a sweet, harmonious sound that never failed to make Ivy smile. There weren’t a lot of the bells left these days. Tourists had bought up most of them, and scavengers claimed the rest, selling them far and wide as sleep aids and anti-depressants. She’d even seen a few hawked online as guaranteed ways to make your beloved stay with you forever.
That, of course, she couldn’t argue with.
Even the wire that had once formed the bell lattice was worth money, and Sallie had made a fortune crafting healing jewelry from the metal that remained. Last summer, she’d moved someplace tropical. “I may be half-forest,” she’d explained to Ivy, “but I think I need a change of scenery.”
The quarry hadn’t shut down, but for a while people feared it might, after Beemer’s disappearance on the night the bells had begun to ring. Since no body was ever uncovered, and he’d never left a will, they placed the quarry in trust with the town until the mystery was solved. Deacon Ryder they’d found wandering the cliffs near the quarry a day later, babbling like a madman and embracing everyone he saw. Ivy heard somewhere that he’d set himself up in a city down south as a faith healer who cured through hugs.
At least he wasn’t her problem anymore.
Many people did leave the town in those first few months, so afraid of the lies they’d been told about the forest. But more chose to stay, as if helping the forest folk that night had taught them more about humanity than three years of trying to define it ever could have.
Although the bells might have helped, too. Their sonorous chime rang through the town day and night for a week, drawing wonder and curiosity from all who heard the marvelous music. Then, at last, their song wound down, like an echo in a valley, and the bells went silent, hanging like ripe golden fruits from limb and pole.
Everyone had missed the sound. It wasn’t long before people started claiming the bells for themselves, tiny pieces of peace and love to hold up against the darkness.
Ivy, it turned out, had her own.
Archer came into the kitchen, his arms full of evergreen boughs to decorate the mantel. He stomped the snow off his boots. “Counted twenty new trees this trip,” he announced as he shrugged off his coat and grabbed the woven cuff of redbell from its hook near the door. “And I think someone made friends with every robin in the forest.”
Behind him, a little wool hat bobbed just at the level of the countertops. “Hi, Mama!” the girl chirped, peeking up at her. Wild, red curls corkscrewed out from under her cap, but her eyes were pure black.
“Belle,” Ivy warned. “What have you been up to?”
Archer dropped the boughs near the hearth and looked over. “Belle, my sweet. I told you to clean that up before we got home.”
Belle hung her sweet head, playing idly with her necklace of braided redbell stalk. “Sorry, Papa. I love you.” When she looked up again, her eyes were blue.