Hear Me Read Free

she never poured more than four. It wasn’t easy to carry the patron home afterwards. Ivy’s own prescription was a cup and a half. Sallie had once told her she’d do better with two, especially living so close to the barrier, but Ivy had resisted so far. If she was up to two cups at twenty years old, how many would she be drinking by the time she was her customers’ age?
    She poured the steaming water over the tea leaves, swirling the pot around to make sure every leaf was saturated.  
    “Excuse me?”  
    Ivy jerked her head up to find the tourist woman standing before her. She held a few linen satchels of loose tea. “I’d like to purchase these, please.” She smirked. “I mean, if they aren’t enchanted.”
    “They’re medicinal,” Ivy replied, checking the price tags. “It’s up to storytellers to decide how much medicine is magic.”  
    “There’s a difference!” the tourist said, indignant. “Magic is, like…evil.”
    Right. Magic was evil now. Ivy should remember that, especially in front of a stranger. Who knew what stories she’d spread in town about the wicked tea shop owner and her half-fae clientele? Deacon Ryder would wallpaper the neighborhood in posters.  
    Talk about a headache.
    “This tea is Nightmare Eraser,” Ivy said, holding up one of the tourist’s picks. “It’s got chamomile in it for relaxation, lemon balm to soothe your spirits, and anise to repel bad thoughts. You can believe what you want about its potency, but there’s nothing in here you can’t buy from a grocer’s spice rack.”
    The tourist seemed relieved. She bought the Nightmare Eraser and—to Ivy’s amusement—the Love Potion Tea, with its mix of jasmine, ginseng, and rose hips. When she left, Ivy shook her head and entered the purchase in her ledger. She’d told the scared, silly woman the truth. Nothing in the ingredients she sold were magic. If Ivy had a way with plants, that was from her father. And if she had a way with making teas and tinctures… well, she did have her mother’s forest blood.  
    When the headaches had started and too many townspeople had run mad from the sound of the bells, Ivy remembered little from that time except the pain. Headaches so bad you’d vomit and pass out. Sensitivity to everything: the sound of the TV switching on and off made her keel over, the softest setting on the lamp in her room made her cry out in pain. And forget a ringing phone. The ringing bells were more than enough.
    One night, in the dark greenhouse, where everything was living and soft and brown, her father explained his discovery. Metal bells had always protected humans from unwanted magic. The bells of the barrier were calibrated against forest magic—evil as well as the good. And she was part forest folk, so the magic was in her blood as well.  
    Ever since the town’s creation, forest folk had worn the redbell flower as protection when they left the woods. All her life Ivy had seen it on them, tucked into Archer’s buttonholes whenever he stepped out of the forest, woven into her mother’s hair on the few occasions she deigned to visit her daughter. Ivy’s father, the botanist, knew it was more than superstition. It was medicine against modernity. He hypothesized that if it couldn’t cure the barrier sickness Ivy and her kind suffered from, it would at least mitigate the effects.  
    “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” he’d said, his head bent low over their salvation. “Had I known… I was only trying to protect you.”
    Yet it was Ivy whose deft hand had perfected the recipe, in materials and technique, and ensured that they could make their tea without destroying their supply of the rare flower.
    As long as she took the tea and stayed away from the barrier, she’d be fine. As long as she listened to the town council and trusted that they knew what was best for her and the town, she’d be safe. As long as she tended her garden and brewed her cups and kept her head down, she could pretend