My Lover and the Blackthorn Tree
Em Harriett
I have lived many lives and told many tales, but none as sweet as my dear Sloe.
She lived in a small cottage atop the hill with a blackthorn tree behind it, able to see the moors fringed by the forest and the village huddled beside it. The tree was more of a glorified shrub, its branches wiry and studded with thorns, its berries round and bitter—but Sloe didn’t care.
She loved that tree as much as she loved me.
Every morning she went and spoke to it (or perhaps she spoke to me), telling tales from her dreams and her plans for the day. She pruned the branches and plucked the berries with the tenderness of a parent, gathering the fruit in her apron and ferrying it to her kitchen. Her cauldron boiled the berries down to syrup and filled the house with the rich smell of magic.
The village called her ‘witch’, as if that was an insult.
Sloe let the word ferment. She was a witch, in the broadest sense—her tonics and tinctures brought life and love to the people she tended. Her magic came from intention, from her herblore and the books her mother left her when she’d died so long ago.
But still, the bite of the villagers’ tongues stung Sloe when she pretended not to care. No matter how many times she cured the sick or brought joy to the downtrodden, the village could not shake their superstition.
“I wish they talked of me with the same reverence that they speak of you,” she told me one evening, sitting on her front steps and watching the yellow lights from the village below.
I curled around her with a warm sigh and lifted her long hair in my fingers. People worship and revile me, I told her.
“Yes, but you are the wind—you are nature itself. I’m just a human.”
“You are nature, too,” I said.
“It’s not the same.”
I knew not what to say, so I toyed with the windchimes above her door, letting sweet music fill the silence.
Daylight shortened like fire burning down a match. I admit that staying in one place makes me restless—it’s in my nature, I suppose—so I roamed the lands around the village, over the moors and through the thick corpses of elder and ash. I carried news to the village from surrounding towns—harvests, losses, whispers on the wind asked me for by those who revered me. I cannot claim to love them the way I love sweet Sloe, but any force that’s been around for millennia grows to like the taste of favors.
Sloe left me offerings, too, on the windowsill beside her kitchen—pastries, jars of herbs, even small loaves of bread left over from her baking. I took the scents and wafted them around the cottage, warding it with nutmeg and cinnamon, clary sage and mugwort, keeping the villagers’ foul thoughts from breaching Sloe’s homestead.
I kept her house steadfast no matter the storm. I turned the gales of my family aside so that neither shingle nor slat of wood would shake. I was the protector of Sloe’s happiness. And she would sing such sweet melodies while she worked, would tell me such loving things that made me feel as young as the spring breeze.
I knew it was foolish, loving a human this way. But I suppose I am allowed to be a fool. It’s only nature, after all.
And, in that regard, maybe I am to blame for her misfortune.
Sloe waited for the first frost before she harvested the ripest berries off the blackthorn tree. The berries were sharp and tart, astringent on the tongue like venom, yet their taste heightened the senses and made one feel alive. Sloe took the berries and mixed them into potions that would last through spring and back again. Even if the villagers gossiped and called her witch, they loved the health and vigor that her tinctures granted them.
Sloe pricked each berry with a thorn from the blackthorn tree and covered them in sugar, steeping them together with gin until the liquor turned red as rubies. She gave the liquor to any who asked, and testimony spread far and wide of its health-granting powers.
The berries she mashed into preserves and syrups, jams and desserts and all manner of food—but the tiny stone pits she left for me. I took the pits and carried them into the woods beside the hill to plant in the loamy soil there. Over the years, I’d started a hedge of blackthorns, though the villagers kept away from them—wary of the same prickly trees that their witch Sloe used to cure them.
It was a ward, of sorts, meant to keep my Sloe safe.
But balefulness cannot be stopped by thorns alone.
A preacher came to town one morning when the weather was thick with fog. To this day I do not know if he was truly a holy man or one devoted to his personal gains—but he entered the village like a snake, winding his way through social circles and flicking his tongue into conversation. Word of Sloe’s witchcraft had drawn him out of the moors to hunt.
“Isn’t it odd how that woman’s house on the hill never shakes in a storm?” He’d say, pointing out Sloe’s cottage. “Why, there was such a gust last night it tore the hay from the henhouse, yet her home retains those delicate dog rose blooms as if nothing had happened.”
“That’s true,” murmured the villagers, casting suspicion on Sloe’s garden.
“Isn’t it strange how she knows these miracle cures?” The preacher said, condemning Sloe’s healing teas and tinctures. “Why, it’s as if the devil himself whispered in her ear! No mortal on earth can craft such spells without aid from the dark.”
“That’s true,” muttered the villagers, casting doubt on Sloe’s hard work.
The preacher went on, needling at every behavior he considered a sign of trickery, until he had the villagers suspecting their own kith and kin of secret witchcraft influenced by Sloe’s own medicines. I heard all this, of course, and ferried it to my dear Sloe, but she seemed unworried at first.
“Let them think their thoughts,” she said, sitting by her fire and tending a cauldron of blackthorn-berry jam. “They’re only human. And what human isn’t prone to wild thoughts now and again?”
I told her to be cautious, but in truth I felt guilty. It’s odd, I suppose, for the wind to feel this way, but I cannot lie about myself. I wanted to keep Sloe’s old cottage from collapsing. I wanted to keep her way of life alive.
So, I shielded it. And the preacher noticed. And, in turn, so did the villagers, whose own homesteads wilted and shuddered as my family relations picked up the slack in the gales while I was preoccupied with Sloe. Everyone, from the westerlies to the sea breezes, nagged me to forget my local affection and return to my duties, but I ignored them as the horse ignores the fly.
The season froze. Rime coated the grasses of the moors and killed the fruits left unpicked. Sloe kept warm with her fireplace and hedge magic, and despite the villagers’ gripes they still came to her cottage for balms and teas to help them with their colds.
But that was not the only place the villagers went. Bundled in their heavy coats and using scarves to hide their mouths, they followed the preacher after his sermons and clung to his vehement superstition. They held meetings beneath the church and whispered rumors that stained their teeth with lies.
One evening in late November, I lingered outside their windows to hear what toxins infected their words.
“Oh, Preacher!” they cried (for that is what they named him). “What are we to do? The witch Sloe has her thorns in all of us by now, what with her potions and her house-charms that all of us surely have taken. Her foul magic has infected our poor village!”
The preacher clasped his hands and smiled with all his teeth.
“You must catch her while she sleeps,” said he, “for even witches need mortal rest. Tie her hands and bind her to the tallest tree in town. Set her ablaze with thick bundles of moor-grass. Recite the holy prayers to drown out the sounds of her screams, and then your village and your souls will be at peace.”
The villagers nodded and murmured assent as the preacher rallied them to carry the deed that night.
I was furious, to say the least. I left in a tempest, knocking loose a weathervane off the church steeple and scattering pots and barrels across the streets. I rioted all the way up the hill to Sloe’s home and told her in harsh gusts what I’d heard.
“Oh, Zephyr!” She cried (for that was what she named me). “What am I to do? They won’t believe me if I protest, not with such poison in their hearts and such clouds across their judgment!”
I told her I could strike the preacher and his procession down with a single blow. But Sloe shook her head.
“No,” she scolded. “The people are not to blame. They have been swayed by bitterness, but in their hearts, I know they are my neighbors. I could not bear to kill them to save my own skin.”
Then, I asked her, what would you have me do? I could ferry her across the moors, across the sea, to some distant shore where she would be safe.
But again, Sloe shook her head.
“This is my home,” she said. “I cannot bear to leave what my mother and foremothers have raised. They are buried in the village, and I will not abandon them.”
Sloe quieted, then, seeing flickers of torchlight emerge from the village below her hill. The preacher was first among them with a sermon slithering from his lips.
Sloe watched the villagers approach with grim realization.
“I know what I must do now,” she said. “But I need this hilltop clear to do it.”
I told her not to worry, and with a gust I plucked the blackthorn tree atop the hill straight from the ground and carried it to the forest, planting it among its brethren in the hedge.
The hilltop was free. Sloe clasped her hands in front of her and bowed her head. Her lips moved as if in prayer or incantation.
“I tend this earth with care and kindness,” she whispered. “And, in turn, I ask that it shelter me in love and truth.”
She planted her heels into the dirt where the old blackthorn tree used to be. The soil swarmed over her shoes until they became roots. Her skin turned to smooth, dark brown bark, and from her long hair branches spread and flourished until a beautiful blackthorn tree was all that remained of my lover’s human flesh.
The procession came upon her home and found it filled with silence. When they saw the tree atop the hill behind it, they turned around in confusion.
The preacher scowled, cheated of his violence, and he waved his hand dismissively.
“No matter,” he said. “The witch Sloe is gone, one way or another. Perhaps she sought salvation across the moors. Or she’s fled into the forest to commune with those wretched plants.”
“A pity,” said a man with a torch in hand. “I would have liked to speak with her. Sloe may be a witch, but I cannot make jam the way she can.”
“And I cannot make house-charms the way she can,” said another.
“And I cannot make tinctures the way she can,” said a third.
“What are we to do now?”
All around the preacher and the blackthorn tree, the villagers realized their folly in following a foolish man without merit. One by one they turned around and headed to their homes to stew in sorrow and shame. The word ‘witch’ softened in their minds now that their only hedge witch was gone—and the kindness they’d relied on drifted away with her.
The preacher, left alone on the hilltop with his failed plans, clenched his fists in rage.
“I know you’re out there, witch!” He spat to the moors and the thick forest below the hill. “I will not have you and your kin staining the purity of—”
I shoved him down the hill with a gust so fierce he rolled all the way to the forest’s edge. The preacher picked himself off the blackthorn hedge I’d planted there and marched to town to retrieve his belongings with his cheeks aflame.
I laughed. My levity danced through the long grass around Sloe’s old cottage.
And she, in turn, laughed with me.
Her branches sang, the thorns brushing together in a tangle of percussion. She was just as alive as ever, rooted in the soil of her homestead as she’d always been—the only true difference was her form.
I sighed, wrapped my arms around her, and embraced my dear Sloe. Her branches clattered in joy and revelation. And in her heartwood, she bloomed with love for her home, sprouting berries among her thorns so that all who needed her health and care could find it among the branches.
To this day I do not know what magic Sloe channeled through her veins—but I do know that it saved her life.
And, in a sense, she gave the village back its life, too.
Once the preacher left town—for, without a witch to hunt and his reputation stained beyond scrubbing, his business could not function—the villagers sat with the gin from Sloe’s berries and belatedly mourned the loss of their community witch.
“Who will make us tinctures now?” They asked.
“Who will make us house-charms?”
“Who will cheer us when the winter drags long?”
“Perhaps she left something in her home,” said a youth. “A book or ledger with her recipes inside.”
The villagers ventured to the old cottage on the hill and sought the same help they’d gotten from Sloe before their minds were clouded. The blackthorn tree my lover became bristled with thorns and tapered leaves even in the chill of winter, and she would prick those who’d been so vocal to shun her—but she let those with kindness in their hearts approach and take from her what they would. Her thorns were a reminder not to take her offerings for granted. And the villagers obeyed.
With her berries they made poultices; with her branches they made shillelaghs. With the old herb books they pillaged from her home, they taught their people hedge witchery and herb medicine. When another preacher slithered into town whispering lies, the villagers shooed him from their lives with blackthorn branches and build a hedge with pits from Sloe’s berries.
And all the while, Sloe grows strong and healthy, sitting atop her hill with her roots and branches stemming to earth and sky. For even if the wind can fall in love with a human spirit, so too are humans capable of extraordinary magic.
It’s only nature, after all.
About the Author
Em Harriett (she/they) is a queer author, illustrator, and photographer from New England. She is inspired by nature and enjoys writing speculative fiction when she isn’t knitting. Their work has appeared in All Worlds Wayfarer, Kaleidoscope: A Queer Anthology, and A Coup of Owls. You can find Em on Instagram @emharriettwrites or at emharriett.com.
© My Lover and the Blackthorn Tree by Em Harriett. 2022. All rights reserved.
