CONTENTS
Chapter 1: A Princess of Imbervale
Chapter 2: A Bucket of Birds
Chapter 3: The Wizard and the Imp
Chapter 4: Evil in Twenty-Three Minutes a Day
Chapter 5: The Overlook Curse
Chapter 6: Calamity
Chapter 7: A Blob of Glop
Chapter 8: The Miseries
Chapter 9: An Intrusion of Peaches
Chapter 10: Unexpected Guests
Chapter 11: Torville’s Traveling Powder
Chapter 12: The White Carriage
Chapter 13: An Audience with the Queen
Chapter 14: No Rest for the Wicked
Chapter 15: The Wizard in the Mirror
Chapter 16: The Evil Wizards’ Social Society
Chapter 17: Gentleman, Northwinds’ Magical Artes
Chapter 18: Vivien’s Proof
Chapter 19: The Night Terror
Chapter 20: The End of the Party
Chapter 21: An Occupation of Wizards
Chapter 22: Sneaks and Snoops
Chapter 23: The Lock without a Key
Chapter 24: The Green Gallery
Chapter 25: Big Magic
Chapter 26: Good Enough
Acknowledgments
Marigold came into the world as most ordinary children do, squinting and squalling. This time, the king and queen of Imbervale had taken precautions: every sneak and scoundrel had been swept out of the kingdom; the royal magician had woven a web of protective spells around the palace grounds; and at the moment Marigold was born, six royal guards were appointed to watch over the little princess day and night. Soon enough, however, it became clear to everyone that no evil wizard was going to steal so much as a glance in her direction. Her smile was kind, but it couldn’t mend a scraped knee. Her laughter was bright, but it had no obvious effect on any of the plants in the palace gardens. She occasionally sulked. And on the morning of her third birthday, when she wasn’t allowed to eat cake for breakfast, she drew in her breath, stuck out her lower lip, and threw such a tantrum that all six of her royal guards resigned on the spot. “I don’t think,” said a nursemaid, slipping cotton wool into her ears, “that Princess Rosalind ever howled quite so loudly.”
Marigold grew up hearing all about Rosalind. The nursemaids talked about her often. So did the gardeners, the cooks, the stable hands, the royal steward, the farmers in their fields, and the shopkeepers in the market square, each of whom seemed to remember a different precious detail about the sister Marigold had never met. Some evenings at bedtime, King Godfrey and Queen Amelia would tell Marigold how Rosalind had once nursed an injured fox kit back to health or about the time that her sweet songs had soothed the temper of the famously irritable Imbervale dragon. Marigold preferred the evenings when they would read to her from storybooks, even if the king and queen insisted on skipping past all the most interesting tales — those about Gentleman Northwinds, who conjured up the chilling breeze that first turned the Cacophonous Kingdoms against one another, or the Twice-Times Witch, who took two journeys into the demonic realms where most humans didn’t dare to travel even once, returning each time with an imp to help her cast her wicked charms. Once Marigold was old enough to read on her own, those were the stories she turned to late at night when she was supposed to be sleeping.
It wasn’t easy for Marigold to do only the things she was supposed to do. This was especially true in Imbervale Palace, which was full of twisting back passageways and long-forgotten staircases that Marigold wasn’t strictly allowed to use. She explored them all, of course. She even found a loose panel in the wall of the Green Gallery, where she could eavesdrop on her parents’ important royal business. When she got bored of listening to advisers and undersecretaries filing through with complaints about the latest disturbances caused by the other Cacophonous Kingdoms — a scourge of mosquitoes sent from Whitby, for example, or a headache spell from Tiskaree dusting the market square — Marigold would sneak away, shimmy out a window that no one ever remembered to lock, and clamber onto the sloping roof of the east tower.
The rooftop was Marigold’s favorite secret spot in the palace. If the weather was clear, she could see all the way to the wildwood, a vast tangle of trees at the kingdom’s edge. Like the palace roof and the Green Gallery, the wildwood was a place where she was not allowed, but unlike the roof or the gallery, it was hard to reach without being caught. Soldiers from Imbervale sometimes rode off in that direction, searching for a path to Wizard Torville’s fortress, but none of them knew quite where the wizard lived, and paths through the wildwood weren’t so easily found.
“I bet I could find a path, though,” Marigold whispered to her best friend, Collin, as they stood in the courtyard one day, watching another bedraggled and unsuccessful group of soldiers return to the palace.
“You probably could,” Collin agreed, “and I’d come with you. We could be two brave heroes, riding through the trees and fighting dragons!” Collin, who worked in the palace as a kitchen boy, loved storybooks, too, but his favorite tales were different from Marigold’s.
