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There’s a bowl of blackberries on Merricat’s nightstand, freshly plucked from brambles in the woods. She carried them back, holding her apron up as a pouch, stepping high over mud puddles and mounds of dirt made by moles to avoid tripping. She didn’t want to spill her bounty before she made it home; if the blackberries somehow touched the ground, they couldn’t be used, and she just knew that going back for more wouldn’t make it right again. She had already chosen the blackberries with care, taking only those which could be used for protection.
They sit in the old sugar bowl now, each one carefully washed. She’s arranged them so they don’t jostle each other; each blackberry touches another gently, its skin contacting another’s skin with the utmost lightness, so that none are in danger of being squished.
Merricat skims her fingers over them, making sure they’re all there, and waits.
At three a.m. -- the witching hour -- her door creaks open and Constance comes inside, her footsteps silent and light. She walks with a dancer’s grace to the edge of Merricat’s bed and sits there; her weight barely makes a dent on Merricat’s quilts.
“Blackberries?” says Constance softly. Her fingers hover over the sugar bowl without actually touching. They’re slim and long and pale, not yet marred by all the housework Constance does. The sight of them makes Merricat’s heart pound in her chest.
“They’re magic,” Merricat says. Face in the shadows, Constance turns her head to look at her.
“How so?” she asks.
In response, Merricat kicks back the covers a little and sits up in bed. She stretches her arm around Constance to snag the bowl and pulls it closer to her.
“Like this,” she says. One by one, she removes the blackberrries from the sugar bowl and places them in her cupped palm. When all of them are stacked together in the center of her hand, she makes a fist and feels the skin of the blackberries breaking. Black juice oozes out from between her fingers, dripping in the bowl.
Constance says nothing. She watches with a rapt attention, eyes shaded from the moonlight.
“Give me your wrist,” Merricat says. She’s whispering now, and can’t explain why, but it feels right. Meekly, Constance offers her left hand, tugging up the lacy sleeve of her nightgown. Merricat furrows her brow in concentration and dips two fingers into the mess of blackberry pulp in her hand; she uses those two fingers to draw a thick line on the inside of Constance’s wrist. Constance gasps when the cold substance touches her skin, but she doesn’t pull away.
“What does it do?” Constance asks. Silently, Merricat reaches for her other wrist and draws a thick line there as well, going vertically up Constance’s inner arm, from the tip of her wrist down toward her elbow. The line extends maybe two or three inches. It looks like a bleeding, self-inflicted wound in the dim light.
“It’s protection,” Merricat says. She has nothing to wipe her hands on, so she props them up on her bent knees, palms up. Constance looks down at her wrists; she thrusts them into a beam of moonlight from the window and turns them this way and that, examining the wounds.
“Protection,” Constance repeats reverently. When she finally looks back at Merricat, it’s with a teasing little smile. “I’ve never needed magical protection,” she says. “I have you.”
Merricat smiles back, too breathless to respond. Constance raises her wrists to her mouth one by one, and her rose-petal lips pucker as she blows on them. When the blackberry juice is dry, she takes the sugar bowl from where it’s lying, abandoned, on the bed, and sets it carefully on the nightstand.
She adjusts the skirt of her nightgown, so that it falls back down to her ankles, the wrinkles and folds clearing themselves out, and then she leans over Merricat to kiss her forehead, as she always did back when Merricat was a little girl and Constance was her protective older sister.
“Goodnight, Merricat,” Constance whispers. Her lips catch Merricat’s and at first they seem refreshingly cold, but they quickly catch Merricat’s warmth, and then it’s almost like she’s kissing herself. Her eyes stay open while Constance’s close, and it’s like looking at herself in the mirror. Like looking at a more perfect version of herself.
Constance moves away. She takes the sugar bowl and glides out of the room, the hem of her nightgown swishing around her bare feet. Merricat can still feel the burn of Constance’s lips against her skin.
“Goodnight, Constance,” she says.