Hear Me by Viv Daniels

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