“As a matter of fact,” said Marigold, “I understand perfectly.” For the first time, she caught herself feeling genuinely fond of Pettifog.
“And now you’ve ruined everything!” he said. (So much for fondness, Marigold thought.) “How am I supposed to be of service to a wizard if the wizard is a blob of glop? The demonic realms will slurp me back! That’s what’s supposed to happen when my employment is terminated.” He was talking faster now, as though he might get slurped at any moment. “I can’t go back, Princess. I won’t be able to bear it. I’ve seen too many daffodils!”
“Don’t talk like that!” Marigold put her hands on Pettifog’s trembling shoulders. “You’ve got to calm down, or we’ll never get Torville fixed. First of all, your employment hasn’t been terminated. You’re simply employed by glop. Isn’t that right, Torville?”
The glop gave an emphatic nod.
Pettifog took a breath. “But if the greater demons find out, they might —”
“They won’t find out,” said Marigold. “I certainly won’t tell them. And soon it won’t matter anyway because we’re going to turn Torville back to himself.”
“Oh, really?” Pettifog didn’t sound convinced. “How?”
“Well, I don’t know how,” Marigold admitted, “but there’s got to be someone who does. I suppose I could ask my parents’ royal magician to reverse the spell. Do you think we could send her a message somehow?”
Pettifog groaned. “If the royal magician of Imbervale finds out that Torville’s been turned to glop, dear Princess, it will be the best news she’s received all year. She won’t lift a finger to help us. She’ll be too busy celebrating.”
Pettifog was right; it had been a foolish idea. “We’ll ask another evil wizard, then.”
“You mean Torville’s competition?” Pettifog shook his head. “They’ll be celebrating, too. If any of them could have changed him to glop, they would have done it already.”
“But they couldn’t,” Marigold said slowly, “because of the Villains’ Bond. Oh, no.” She must have squeezed Pettifog’s shoulders too tightly, because he was trying to squirm away. “Have I broken the Villains’ Bond?” she asked him. “If the other villains learn what I’ve done to Torville, will they send unkillable wasps after me? Will they make my toes fall off?”
“They certainly should,” Pettifog grumbled. “You’re ruining my suit.”
Marigold let go. She stared down at the blob of glop, finally understanding just how much trouble she’d barreled into this time. If she couldn’t get Torville turned back to himself before someone else found out what she’d done, Pettifog would be slurped away by demons and Marigold would have one hundred and five plagues raining down around her ears. Any witch or wizard would leap at the chance to curse a princess of Imbervale — even a wicked one. And there wasn’t a soul in all the Cacophonous Kingdoms whom she could ask for help. Even if she could have climbed into her father’s lap and asked him for a kiss on the forehead, it wouldn’t have done a bit of good.
Down on the floorboards, Torville was growing agitated, twisting his whole gelatinous self back and forth. “Do you know someone who can turn you back to yourself?” Marigold asked him in desperation.
“Who cares what Torville knows?” Now that Pettifog was free from Marigold’s grasp, he was hard at work smoothing out the wrinkles she’d made in his jacket. “He can’t tell us anything!”
But Torville was nodding again. He oozed hopefully toward Marigold, leaving a thin trail of slime behind him.
Marigold watched him move. She thought hard. “You can’t speak,” she said to Torville, “but you can get around well enough, can’t you? That’s a start. Wait here.” She might not know how to lift an enchantment from a be-glopped wizard, but she had an idea about how to communicate with one. She ran over to the blackboard and started erasing the magical formulas Torville had scrawled all over it. “Pettifog, do we have a screwdriver?”
“Of course we do. You can’t break a curse with it, though.” He produced one from a workroom drawer and held it out to Marigold. “What are you getting up to?”
“I’m making a contraption,” Marigold told him. “A simple one. It won’t be perfect, but it should work well enough for now.” Balancing on her tiptoes, she unscrewed the blackboard from its standing frame while Pettifog did his best to hold it steady. Together, they laid it flat on the floor. Then Marigold chalked the letters from A to Z in a circular pattern on the board while Pettifog coaxed Torville into his hands and carried him gingerly across the room.
“Put him here,” said Marigold, pointing to the center of the blackboard. Pettifog set him down in the middle of the circle of letters. “Can you read the alphabet around you, Torville?”
Torville was bubbling around the edges now, but he didn’t move, and Marigold wondered if they shouldn’t have scraped him off the floor after all. Then, to her relief, he nodded.
“And do you think you can move from one letter to the next?”
Torville oozed experimentally toward the letter A. He nodded again.
“Good. Now, what was it that you wanted to say? Who’s the person who can help you?”
It took an eternity for Torville to answer. Watching him move around the board reminded Marigold of waiting for the last bit of honey to drip from a spoon. After a good two minutes of oozing, he’d reached the letter O, where he paused to rest. “Is O the first letter?” Marigold asked. Torville nodded weakly. A bubble rose to his surface and popped like a sigh.
It took him only twenty seconds to travel from O to N, and not much longer to reach L, but after that he set off across the circle again, and Marigold couldn’t bear to sit and watch him. Besides, she was ravenous. By the time she’d wandered down to the kitchen, helped herself to a bowl of the cold porridge on the stove top, and brought it back up to the workroom, Torville had reached the letter Y.
“O-N-L-Y,” Marigold spelled aloud. “The first word is ‘only.’”
Pettifog was still crouched by the blackboard. “I don’t think Torville looks quite right.”
“Of course he doesn’t,” said Marigold. “He’s a blob.”
Pettifog rolled his eyes. “Don’t you see he’s gotten pale? He’s not as golden as he was at first, and I think he’s slowing down. That journey to the letter Y has worn him out.” He looked accusingly at Marigold. “You should give him some of your porridge.”
“What?” Marigold looked first at her porridge, then at Torville. “He doesn’t have a mouth anymore.”
“If you won’t feed him, I’ll do it myself.” Before Marigold could stop him, Pettifog had plucked the spoon from her bowl and placed a small, cold lump of porridge on the blackboard. “Here you go, Torville. Eat up.”
“Honestly!” said Marigold, seizing back her spoon. But Torville was already oozing over the lump of porridge and burbling with something that might have been delight. As Marigold watched, the porridge disappeared — though she still wasn’t sure where, exactly, it went — and Torville’s color improved. When the last bit of food was gone, the blob of glop let out a very small burp and headed across the blackboard once more.
“See?” Pettifog looked smug. “He loves porridge.”
By the time Torville reached his next destination — the letter M — Marigold had gotten tired of waiting. “Only M,” she said. Down on the blackboard, Torville began to pivot. It might be quicker, Marigold realized, to guess what he was spelling. “Only magic?” she tried. “Only moonlight? Only . . . mushrooms? Mousetraps? Mandrakes? Muffins?”
“No,” said Pettifog, “none of those. He’s spelling ‘Only Marigold.’”
“He isn’t!” said Marigold.
But Torville had already stopped inching across the board and was nodding with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. “I’m the only one who can change you back?” Marigold asked him. “That can’t be right!”
“I should have guessed it,” said Pettifog. “When Torville cursed the downstairs toilet, he had six wizards and a magical plumber come to look at it, but none of them could break the curse. Since Torville was the one who got the magic knotted up so badly in the first place, only Torville had any chance of untangling it.”
