“Are you all right?” Marigold asked him, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry about the explosion. Is that what normally happens at the end of a curse?”
Pettifog took her hand with obvious reluctance. “I’ve bruised my tail,” he said, “and no. That is not what normally happens.”
Marigold had suspected that, but hearing it made her feel even worse. “You were right,” she told Pettifog miserably. “I couldn’t pull off that spell. I never should have tried it. I suppose Torville’s going to turn me into a beetle now.” She looked around the room once more. “Pettifog? Where’s Torville?”
The imp blinked. He glanced to his left and then to his right. He trotted all around the cauldron and balanced on the tips of his hooves to peer inside it. Then he looked up at Marigold. “Torville isn’t here, Princess,” he said carefully. “I think you vanished him.”
At first, Marigold thought Pettifog was joking. But he wasn’t the joking type. “That’s impossible,” she told him. “I can’t have vanished Torville! The spell didn’t work. And anyway, that’s not what it was supposed to do.”
“You lost focus, Princess!” said Pettifog. “You lost your intention! I saw it on your face. So did Torville. That’s why he shouted at you.” Pettifog was trotting around the cauldron again, first one way and then the other, as if going in circles might help him find a disappeared wizard. “He shouldn’t have done that,” Pettifog muttered. “He got himself stuck in the spell; that’s what happened. I said you’d make a mess of things, but did he listen? Did he say, ‘Dearest Pettifog, wisest Pettifog, you were right all along about that troublesome princess’? Of course not. ‘She might be useful,’ he said. ‘She can’t do much harm,’ he said.”
“He did?”
“And he was wrong on both counts, wasn’t he? Even I didn’t guess you’d end up erasing him from the observable universe. If Torville had thought you were capable of that, he never would have let you near his cauldron.”
“Calamity,” said Marigold under her breath. She began to circle the workroom, looking in all the places Pettifog was too short to check. “Torville?” she called. “Evil Wizard Torville? Are you here? I didn’t mean to vanish you!” It was true that Torville was heartless, with no regard for the people he cursed or for the basic principles of clothes laundering, but across all the Cacophonous Kingdoms, he’d been the only person with any time to spare for Marigold. There had been a few moments when she’d actually enjoyed his company. And even when she hadn’t, she’d certainly never wanted to get rid of him for good. All she’d wanted to do was curse her sister, and shouldn’t that task have been easy enough for a wicked child to manage?
On the other side of the cauldron, near the place where Torville had been standing, Marigold stopped walking. There was a blob of glop on the workroom floor. It was the size of Marigold’s foot and as yellow as butter in summer. Marigold poked it. The glop was slimy but surprisingly firm; it oozed and burbled, but it didn’t collect on her finger.
“Pettifog?” she called. “There’s a blob of glop that wasn’t here before.”
“Residue from your explosion, I assume,” said Pettifog, trotting back toward her. “When a spell goes wrong, there can be side effects.” He took out his handkerchief and nudged the glop.
The glop nudged him back.
Marigold frowned. “Do side effects usually move?”
Pettifog didn’t answer. He sat back on his hooves. Then he unfolded his handkerchief into a wide, flat square and tried to wipe the glop away.
Slowly, but with great deliberation, the glop recoiled from the handkerchief. It collected itself into a sort of gooey yellow mound. Then, still moving more slowly than a slug on a cabbage leaf, it twisted itself from side to side, almost as if it were shaking its head.
“Oh, my,” said Pettifog quietly. “Oh, dear me.”
Marigold knelt down and stared straight at the blob of glop. “Excuse me,” she said to it. “Are you alive?”
The glop moved the top part of itself up and down. A nod, Marigold thought.
She hated to ask the question, even though she felt suddenly, terribly sure of the answer: “Are you Wizard Torville?”
The blob of glop nodded again.
“It can’t be!” Pettifog wrung his handkerchief. He stood up, then squatted down again. He leaned forward over the glop. “Can it?” he whispered.
The air had gone thin in the workroom, or at least it was getting harder for Marigold to breathe. “I’m so sorry,” she said to the blob that was Torville. “This is all my fault.”
“It certainly is!” said Pettifog. His wings were fluttering fast, and his voice had risen in panic. “You’re a reckless girl, turning people to glop without so much as a warning. It’s rude — that’s what it is! Torville gave you a solid roof over your head and a soft pillow beneath it, not to mention all the porridge, and this is the thanks he gets? Princess Rosalind would never —”
“I know she wouldn’t!” Marigold snapped. “I made a mistake!”
Pettifog harrumphed.
“I’m not any happier about this than you are,” Marigold told him, “so there’s no point in scolding me. Just hurry up and turn Torville back.”
“Excuse me?” Pettifog’s wings stopped fluttering. “What did you ask me to do?”
“Turn Torville back to himself. You can do that, can’t you?”
Now Pettifog looked really angry. “Of course I can’t, you ridiculous child. Didn’t all those tutors of yours teach you anything? Imps don’t work magic.”
“But Torville said you helped him —”
“With the stirring, yes, and the tidying up. But never with the spell work!”
“Couldn’t you try?” Marigold pleaded. “Just once?”
Pettifog snorted. He crossed the workroom, stuck his head deep into a drawer, and emerged holding a long piece of parchment, which he thrust toward Marigold. It was covered with words printed in red and black ink, not that Marigold could read any of them; her tutors had never taught her the language of the demonic realms. But there was Torville’s signature in one bottom corner and Pettifog’s signature in the other, and a wax seal between them that shimmered like the edge of a flame.
“When Torville journeyed to the demonic realms to employ me,” Pettifog said crisply, “we signed the standard paperwork. The wizard vows to provide the imp with room and board, fair wages, and safe working conditions, and the imp vows — well, I’ll just read the relevant language.” Pettifog glanced at the parchment, cleared his throat, and let out a string of yelps, coughs, and anguished howls. “Loosely translated,” he said, “that means I’ve got to give Torville my help when he requests it, and I’m not permitted to perform any magic of my own. The wizards’ society says it’s a safety concern, but some imps think the wizards simply don’t like the idea of competition. In any case, it means that if I make the slightest attempt at spell work, I’ll be slurped back to the demonic realms at once.” He tapped the shimmering wax seal. “There’s an enchantment on the agreement, you see.”
“I do see.” Marigold couldn’t resist taking a closer look at the seal. She had never gotten a chance to study one like it before. Her parents refused to sign any magically binding documents without a very good reason, and she supposed Pettifog must have had a good reason of his own to sign this one. “You don’t want to go back to the demonic realms?” she asked.
“Why do you think I wanted this job in the first place, Princess? Why did I wait for nearly three hundred years for a wizard to choose me, packing my suitcase whenever one showed up, sitting for interviews with at least a dozen of them? Why did I spend my first day in this fortress scrubbing the smell of brimstone out of my hair?” Pettifog lowered his voice, and Marigold wondered if he was concerned that another creature from the flames and shadows might overhear him. “I enjoy a crisp breeze! A blooming daffodil! A fresh blanket of snow! I like to iron my shirts and fold them afterward. Ever since I was an impling, these were the things I dreamed of.”
“And the other imps didn’t approve?” Marigold guessed.
“They don’t even wear shirts. You can understand why I had to leave.”
