Overlooking the fields, older than the oldest residents of the town, is a juniper tree. It is too respected to be felled, standing like a lonely sentry as the fields are seeded, tended to, and emptied of their bounty. Though the peasants live on the land, they have no rights to it. All in Stühlingen is the Count’s domain: beast or fowl or, even, tree.

Berries cover the tree’s scaly branches. Usually, the juniper has few visitors, especially in the colder months. This year is different. More often than not, the tree has company.

The first time the man appears, he stands a distance away, eyeing the juniper’s berries. The second, he does more than stare. There is almost a gentleness about him, about the way he takes a handful in his calloused palm, pocketing them hesitantly. And then he leaves.

It is on a blustery day in the middle of the harvest that the crier appears, a scroll in his hands. “Hear ye, hear ye!”

His voice echoes in the valley. The Countess of Lupfen has decided to start a new embroidery project, so all serfs are ordered to collect snail shells for her to spool her thread with. Men, women, and children are to cease harvesting indefinitely until the woods have been emptied of snails.

Landsknechte populate the fields the next morning, loaded crossbows in hand and barring entry. For a time, the threat of violence subdues the peasants, and they do no more than murmur out of earshot of the mercenaries. A slow death may be more painful than an immediate one, but life is life. Not that the nobles saw the peasants’ existence as life, really. After all, in order to be, it is not enough merely to be born. The divine right of personhood is only granted to high-born souls.

The woods are disturbed by the rustling of the early autumn leaves as the peasants sweep the forest floor for the Countess’ shells.

The juniper tree sees the man every night. He retreats with handfuls of berries, wary of being sighted by the mercenaries guarding the fields.

It is a week later that the juniper meets the man’s wife–the day things change. She is a wiry thing with elbows like daggers. Her sunken eyes and tremulous hands tell the tree that she has already been given a steady stream of juniper berries by her husband, as there is no other food to eat. Venturing into the fields, populated with unharvested crops, meant death. Though the man and his wife did not know it, the berries meant death as well.

“I’m hungry,” the woman says through a mouthful of berries. Juice dribbles from her lips down the curve of her chin. Ich habe Hunger–I have hunger. The hollowness in one’s stomach is a possession, though not one that is so easily returned.

It is nighttime. The world is dark, illuminated by the barest sliver of a crescent moon. There is no danger of being discovered by the Landsknechte tonight. Beneath the tree, the man wraps his wife in his arms. He whispers promises far emptier than their stomachs. He is the best hunter in the village, but that fact is meaningless when he is not legally permitted to hunt in the Count’s woods. Even if he chose to take that risk, nothing would come of it. All prey has been scared off by the shell seeking peasants.

Still, when his lips seek hers, she does not pull away. Her hands shake.

Give her to me, the juniper tree whispers to the man. I can keep her safer than you can.

They leave. Thoughts of the woman circulate the juniper tree’s branches. Her thinning hair is dark and coarse. Her sunken cheeks have a nobility about them, offset by the febrile shine of her eyes. She possesses a contradictory blend of pride and weakness, a combination certain to end poorly. When the woman stumbles at the bottom of the hill, the tree decides it must have her.

The next day is bright and mild, crisp autumn breeze dancing through the trees. Like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom. The end of the day arrives, as does the man. He does not bring the woman this time. His breaths are labored and he leans into the tree, resting his forehead against the bark. The tree whispers again, and this time, he listens.

 Your wife is ill, it says. Take her here for the next seven nights. Feed her my berries and nothing else. Then she will be healed.

A tear slips down the man’s face and lands in the dirt, fading almost instantly in the dry nighttime air. “And if I do this, she will live?”

The tree does not respond. The man must decide the truth of its promise for himself. He reasons that the juniper is kind, looking out over the fields, standing in perpetual observance over the field workers’ labor. Nature, he thinks, is kinder than nobility. He would sooner entrust his wife to the tree than to the Countess.

On the first day, the woods are once again disturbed by peasants searching for the Countess’ spools. The now-familiar sound of rustling leaves brings no comfort to anyone but the overseer, standing on the edge of the field with a keen eye on the peasants. He keeps an eye, too, on the Landsknechte that sit on the crops in their multicolored ensembles. The mercenaries are exempt from the Sumptuary Laws, permitted by Emperor Maximillian himself to wear whatever clothes they liked on account of their lives being so “short and brutish.” So, in ostrich feather plumed helmets and puff sleeved doublets, they carry out their task: to prevent the peasants from reaping their livelihood.

When night falls, the man returns, a willowy shadow trailing behind him. She is silent and wraith-like, though clearly weakened. Her ankle bones jut out like doorknobs, bringing to mind the question of just what she houses. The man reaches out to the tree with a dirt-caked hand. When he brings it back, his fingers are fisted around pale blue.

She tilts her head, fierce eyes narrowed, and he releases the berries into her gaping mouth. Her teeth shine in the light of the moon as she chews, wet squelching sounds as the meat of the berries is ground between her molars. The tree looks on in satisfaction. The couple does not linger. The moment the woman has eaten, they steal away soundlessly into the darkness.

The second night goes the same, as does the third. On the fourth day, the forest is still. The sounds of searching have ceased, but the peasants have not yet returned to the fields. The crops ripen to rotting, and the fruits of the peasants’ labor will not stay edible for long. Something sour hangs in the air. An omen, perhaps. A sign. Then, in the late evening twilight when all but two of the Landsknechte have left, shovels and pitchforks are carried in a stealthy getaway. By the time the thieves have returned to their shacks with the tools of their presumed salvation, a nighttime chill has set in.

On the fifth day, the peasants gather in the shadow the juniper tree casts as coruscate sunbeams peek over the horizon. In their white-knuckled fists are the Geräte that had been spirited away the night before. The crowd, twelve hundred strong, comprises both men and women. The Landsknechte, for the first time in nearly a week, are absent. As is the man who has been visiting the juniper tree nightly with his wife. As the sun rises, so do the starving peasants. The horde screams in a single, unified voice of desperation and rage. Soon, they vanish from the valley, traveling west.

That night, the juniper tree is not sure whether to expect the man. It waits. When he finally arrives, as he has the previous four visits, his wife trails behind him. As she mounts the crest of the hill, she loses her footing. He is too late to catch her. Thin arms scrape against the protruding roots of the tree, and sweet cherry wine drips from where her skin has been torn. It splatters on the cracked wood. The long-dead root segments do not drink in the accidental offering. They have been exposed for too long, beaten into inactivity by the elements. The man whispers apologies, helping the woman up with hands that seem just as lifeless as the blood-splattered roots. His wife sighs. “You should have left me,” she says to the man.

His thick brows furrow. “I am no fighter,” he replies. “I would be of no use to the Haufen if I am thinking of my family while I’m meant to be slitting the throats of noblemen. You…” he tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “You would not survive if I left.”

She does not seem pleased by the insinuation of her weakness, but she knows that denying the verity of his claim would be a lie, so she says nothing. Instead, she takes the handful of juniper berries that her husband offers her. Her fingers tremble as she places them in her mouth, one by one. She looks almost pained as she chews the mush–her eyes squint each time she bites down. An angry rash on the column of her neck bobs as the food is swallowed. When she has eaten half of the berries in her palm, she crumples onto the ground as if she cannot eat and stand simultaneously. Her body lies atop a root, and though the juniper tree reaches out, trying to feel her warmth, the limb is unresponsive.

On the sixth day, a nail is hammered into the tree. The feeling of the wood splitting beneath the wrought iron point is nearly as painful as watching the dying woman leave each night. It’s macabre, the corpse of one of the tree’s kind plastered against its bark. Later, when the pain has dulled to an uncomfortable awareness of the invasive object, the tree sees the man’s silhouette at the bottom of the hill. The shadow is distorted, and there is a moment before the realization that it is because he is carrying his wife on his back. It takes longer than usual to make it up the hillside. Beneath his thin-soled shoes, rivulets of dirt tumble down the side of the hill. Venturing up the same path night after night has worn down the yellowing grass.

When he reaches the top, he falters. There, slightly below eye level, is a declaration. But the man is not lettered.

On the Pillaging and Murdering of Peasants is blocked on the front in elegant Fraktur. Then, centered in a mesh of text: Anyone who can be proved to be a seditious person is an outlaw before God and the emperor; and whoever is the first to put him to death does right and well. This is the time of the sword, not the day of grace. This manifesto, reaffirming the secular superiority of nobility, has been so well-received by the upper echelons of society that it has even been posted here: on a juniper tree overlooking the Count of Lupfen’s land. The writer who penned the page's contents, once a herald of spiritual self-determination, has sunk to nothing more than a bloodmonger.

Though the man does not understand the words on the paper, he knows it is a warning. Fear floods his eyes. The time spent with the tree is brief, and he ghosts away the moment the last berry vanishes between the woman’s red-coated lips.

On the seventh day, the man is caught between two courses of action. With the bulk of the residents of Stühlingen gone, campaigning in the north, the Landsknechte are no longer posted in the fields. They are needed elsewhere. He thinks of his wife. Her skin puckers between the hollows of her bones, cheeks so sunken that she looks more like a corpse than a woman. It would be so easy to walk into the field and take a basket of the rotting harvest–not enough that anyone would notice it missing. But rotten crops will do little for her, and the juniper tree has made a promise.

This is the seventh day. The last day. So, as has become routine, he takes his wife’s hand and leads her out of their home. A cold wind whistles in his ears, heralding the waning autumn, and he feels her shiver. He pulls her closer, hoping that his body heat will warm her. He does not offer to carry her again–not yet, even when she begins to lag behind. She would believe that he thinks her weak and deny his request. Things have changed since they first married. Then, he would pick her up just to hold her. The world felt brighter in those times.

She stops halfway to the top and asks, humiliated, for assistance. She lowers her head, chokes out a pine scented request, and he takes her in his arms before she finishes the question. With each step, the sense of wrongness bearing down on the man increases. He holds her so tightly that he can feel her heartbeat. It is weak and fluttery, a captured butterfly in its last moments of life. He is afraid. By the time he reaches the top of the hill, he shakes just as much as his wife does.

And so the ritual begins: he sets her down on the ground. Her tattered skirts pool around her. The pale berries are placed in her palm. She looks at them with an expression akin to dread, only eating when her husband prompts her to. She manages to eat three before she lunges forward, dry heaving on all fours. Not enough is in her stomach for anything to be expelled. When she has finally caught her breath, she speaks. “I can’t do this.”

An admission of defeat is out of character for her. The woman doesn’t cry. This time, she does not need to ask to be carried back. The man’s expression is drawn, but there is a shadow of an almost manic glee in his eyes. The seventh night will have soon passed, and his wife will be healed as the tree promised.

The tree watches as they leave. Something roars at the night’s torn edge.

The next morning, a sky devoid of color lets down a halfhearted haze of raindrops, at times more akin to a mist than a storm. Just past dawn, a figure approaches the tree. The man’s sobs can be heard from the top of the hill–he is lucky that the Landsknechte no longer guard the field. Sheer determination is all that prevents him from sliding down the hillside.

He grows silent when he reaches the top of the hill, mere feet away from the juniper. A rumble of thunder rolls over the valley, and it is then that he seems to come back to himself. He takes a few more steps until his muddied boots are pressed against the tree trunk. “You lied,” he whispers. “She’s dead.”

This is supposed to happen, the tree reassures. Bury her bones beneath me, and she will rise again.

In lieu of responding, the man sets off. He is gone for a long time. But the tree does not worry. The gray sky makes it difficult to tell what time it is when he returns, but when he does, rain still falls from the heavens. He clutches a bundle of fabric like a lifeline, and he opens it to reveal bones, stripped clean of flesh. His eyes are coals of juniper.

And then he sets to work, plunging his hands into the earth. The ground has softened from the rain. It does not take long for a hole to form. Every once in a while, he takes the femur in his wide hands and positions it by the makeshift grave, judging if it is deep enough. By the time he seems satisfied, his nails are cracked and blood diluted with rainwater incarnadines the side of his hand. He places the bones into the grave one at a time, lining them up with uniform care, and scoops in the displaced dirt.

Then, for the first time since his return, he speaks. “How long will it take for her to come back?”

The tree does not respond.

He waits. And he waits. And he waits. From the branches, a bird takes flight.