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that life hadn’t really changed so much. That’s what her father said to her, every day for months after the bells had started their incessant ringing. It would be worth it, he told her. It would be all right.
    She never had discovered why he hadn’t taken his own advice.
    In the months following his death, she’d tortured herself with hypotheses. Perhaps he’d wandered too close on one of his foraging trips, searching for any rare flora that might remain on this side of the barrier. Unlike those with forest blood, regular people could draw within feet of the bells with little more than a sense of unease and a static shock. It was only touching the bells that caused a zap, like a live wire.
    Maybe he found a specimen too perfect to resist. Maybe he thought he could reach through the lattice without touching the lines. Maybe maybe maybe… did it really matter? Now Dad was gone, too.  
    Her father knew the forest inside and out. He knew the bells would ruin his plant-foraging business. And yet he’d still supported the erection of the barrier. Ivy clung to that knowledge, especially during the first long winter after her father was gone. He, who’d spent his life there, who’d married a forest girl and built a career out of trading the forest folk for ever-rarer specimens of forest flora and loam for his greenhouse. If he thought the forest was threatening the survival of the town, that the darkness within it had grown too great to withstand, then it had to be true. As impossible as it seemed, that the forest she’d loved all her life posed a threat to the place she called home… well, her father knew more than her of the dangers in the forest’s depths, and he’d seen something that scared him enough to back the council’s plan.  
    Growing up, Ivy had learned from her father how to be responsible and respectful of forest ways and dangers. He was wary, but not forbidding, even after their mother had left them to return to the wild.
    “Some aren’t meant for a life beyond the trees,” he told Ivy whenever she asked why she only saw her mother once or twice a year. He’d reminded her of it again when Archer started coming round. “Are you sure you ought to be spending so much time with that boy, Ivy?” he’d ask, bent over his work desk, his fingers stained green with cuttings. “Don’t get too attached. He’s forest to the root.”
    But Ivy had laughed it off. She knew all about Archer’s root, after all. And even when the kids at school had snickered behind her back or called her a forest-lover, she hadn’t minded. Her father, too, was a forest-lover, and felt no shame. Besides, what was a little town folk prejudice to compare to what she had with Archer?
    And yet, in the end, her father had been right, for Archer chose the forest when the barrier went up. He chose the forest over her. Maybe that’s why those first dark weeks of bells had been so bad. It wasn’t just her forest blood. It was her broken heart.  
    As the afternoon waned, her customers thinned, exchanging holiday greetings and picking up trifles for their families on their way home. Tonight was the winter solstice, and even those who didn’t keep to the old ways anymore wanted to get home before the long night fell. This far north, in the shadow of mountains that scraped the sky, it fell sharp and quick.
    The few remaining tourists in the shop finished up their cakes and their Earl Greys and departed, too. Ivy washed the dishes, swept the floor, and loaded up a bag of used linens for the laundry. There were a few busy days left before Christmas, but Ivy had already contacted her regulars and informed them that they were to bring thermoses to tide them over for the holidays. Responsibility was one thing—slavery another.
    At last, when it was dark, she collapsed into the sagging corduroy couch in front of the pot-bellied stove, her own mug of bell tea in her hands. Steam wafted up from her cup and tickled her nose as she stared at