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As an academy orphan, there are precious few things for Dorcas to get sentimental about, no sweet heirloom trinkets or swaddling blanket to clutch when the nights grow savage. To her sisters it's just another comforting reminder that the only attachments worthy of care or bloodshed are the ones between them three. To Dorcas, it's all the more reason to pilfer and hoard.
Anything she can shove into wooden box in the dormitory closet gets snapped up; the ruby ring snatched from Constance Blackwood during a choir practice spat, a lock of sweet Nicky's hair should ever he need cursing, golden combs found under the pillowcase of a weak witch who couldn't handle her harrowing. Prudence is dismissive of it all, turning her nose up at the peacock quill she snatched when nosing through Luke's things that Dorcas is already planning on teasing Nick with until he whines.
"You would be better hoarding spell supplies, sister-dear," she says, ignoring Dorcas fluttering it against her nose with stoney grace.
"I'd rather have riches," Dorcas draws the feather across her own collarbone, like an iridescent slit throat. "Perhaps my mother had dragon-blood."
Agatha picks through the box with a scowl, sliding rings onto her fingers. "I'd hardly call any of this rich."
"Then keep your paws out." Dorcas slams the box shut on her dainty hand, but Agatha doesn't give her the satisfaction of a yelp.
Dorcas doesn't notice Agatha's fingers snaking back out, nor what's tucked between them.
When they were girls, Dorcas was not the only one who loved stories.
They spent hours after dark in the warm cocoon of the library, picking through the toothiest folklore they could find.
They all had favourites, of course. Prudence favoured stories of ruthless women exercising their power, storming into the dorm holding a pig by its curling tail the evening after they had sat wide-eyed around Circe's episode of the Odyssey. "Moritz was acting like swine," she'd said, her smile sharp even then. "So I thought he should be one for an hour."
Agatha's eyes lit up whenever a witch played havoc with measly mortal lives, hanging chicken legs onto the slits of her bedframe in tribute to Baba Yaga.
Dorcas, though, burned brightest for devotion. "I think it would be terribly romantic to eat a lover's heart," she told them both as they dug through the kitchen. holding an overripe pomegranate above her braided head. They'd read one like that just an hour before, of a girl whose lover died and sent her his heart, only for her husband to feed it to her in vengeance. Dorcas had been enraptured, the inside of her cheek bloody from the ache for resonance.
Agatha sliced the pomegranate clean through with the sharpest knife she could find, all of them scavenging it's seeded entrails until all but three remained.
"I'll keep them," Dorcas said, sweeping the seeds into her palm, translucent like untumbled rubies.
"You shouldn't waste food, sister," Prudence tsked, ever the sensible.
"It's not a waste," Dorcas emphasised, clutching them tightly in her palm. "It's a symbol, like Persephone. We're bound together because we've eaten the same fruit, all the power of hell burns within us."
Agatha poked Dorcas's fist where red juice dripped between her knuckles. "Like freshly-spilt blood," she said, thrusting her tongue out to taste. "I'll drink yours straight from your severed heart someday, sister, if you think that's so romantic."
Dorcas grinned. "Tell me you promise."
"Cross my heart and hope to die."
The night after Lupercalia, Dorcas has the lock of Nick's hair dangling above the flame of a black candle. Her skin is still pinkened from Melvin's paws, but that's hardly enough to soothe the hurt of losing to Spellman. She's probably never even charged a spell by touching herself until the power fizzed and burst beneath her fingertips. She can hardly imagine what Nicky thinks a girl like that could do with him.
Before she can lower the dark curl into the flame, a cold hand curls around Dorcas's ankle, nails sunken deep enough to leave welts. She tries to scream but finds her voice swallowed up as she is dragged off the bed and pulled into the dark beneath it.
On the cold wooden floor, Agatha lies on her belly, stroking her fingers down Dorcas's cheek.
"I couldn't abide your moping, Dorky. Not least over a boy as middling as Scratch."
Dorcas tries to speak, but her voice remains stolen.
"Hush," Agatha says, one hand disappearing into the shadows and returning with a red envelope, dangling it above Dorcas's widening eyes. "You recognize it, good."
Agatha shakes three seeds and holds them out. They're dried and smell of sweetened rot, but Dorcas's mouth waters all the same.
"Prudence is preoccupied with Ambrose," Agatha continues with a look of mild derision, "so it will have to be us alone. Lupercalia, so patriarchal. As if I don't know your hunger better than any whelp of a boy could." She taps Dorcas on the chin. "Open up, good girl."
Dorcas's tongue lolls out, her mouth upturned in the corners.
"It's not quite a heart," Agatha tells her, placing the first seed on Dorcas's tongue. "But there will be time enough for that. It's just a reminder that you belong to me before all others, Dorky. You do, don't you?"
Dorcas swallows with a deep and terrible smile.
Agatha pops a seed in her own mouth, swallowing before her lips touch Dorcas's. It is no soft, chaste kiss like an oath in a fairytale. Agatha kisses until Dorcas's lungs burn, until the seal of their lips is faintly pink with blood. Dorcas's voice floods back with a hungry, delirious moan that Agatha muffles.
"We'll start a new ritual," Agatha tells her, one hand dropping the final seed back into the envelope as the other snakes its way across Dorcas's body. "Practice, for when we three reign hell."
Dorcas does not answer, just brings their mouths together once again.