“Don’t feel too proud of her,” Pettifog said, climbing down from Collin’s shoulders. “She almost left me behind again.” He shook his head disapprovingly and dusted the purple powder from his sleeves. “Reckless girl!”

Torville had gotten stronger while the others had been away, but he was now putting all his effort into acting as tragic as possible. He clung to Pettifog’s fingers when the imp carried him out to the garden for some air, and he only picked at his porridge that evening. Whenever Marigold left the workroom, he would fling himself against the side of the cheese dome and glop miserably back onto his plate.

“I think he was lonely without us,” Marigold said to Collin that evening. They were standing in the bathroom, next to the cursed toilet. The wires in the false mustache had scratched Collin’s upper lip more than he’d let on, and Pettifog had given him a jar labeled HEALING SPELL in Rosalind’s tidy handwriting. Now Collin was dabbing on the healing spell, which was a surprisingly cheerful shade of pink, while Marigold tinkered with the mustache wires.

“Do evil wizards get lonely?” Collin asked. “I thought Torville already spent most of his time alone in the fortress.”

“He’s never really alone, though,” said Marigold. “Pettifog and I are here, too, and before me there was Rosalind. The Miseries are always yelling at him through his gazing ball. Some days he goes off to visit clients or work curses that can’t be cast from a distance. And even when he’s at the fortress, he’s not usually stuck on a dinner plate.” She held the mustache up closer to the enchanted candles on the wall, though they didn’t give off as much light as she needed. “It must be terrible to be a blob of glop.”

Collin nodded. Half his face and a good portion of his neck were now bright pink. “You’ll turn him back, though,” he said confidently.

“I’ll try again tomorrow.” Marigold gave the mustache one final tweak. Unlike a cursed wizard, it hadn’t been hard to fix. “But, Collin, what if I make more peach trees? There won’t be any room left in the fortress for the rest of us!”

“You won’t make peach trees,” Collin told her. “Your spells are working now, remember? You got us back here from Blumontaine in one try!”

“I wish I knew how I did that. I was too panicked to think straight when I threw the traveling powder.” Marigold looped the mustache around her own ears, which made her look absolutely nothing like an evil wizard. “Maybe I was just lucky.”

Collin shrugged, as if he didn’t think so. “Thanks for letting me come with you today,” he said. “It was a good adventure. What did you think of my stomping?”

“You did a wonderful job,” Marigold assured him. “I’m sure Queen Hetty was fooled. She’s probably pulled Blumontaine out of the peace treaty already.”

“Then the Miseries will stop bothering you,” Collin said, looking pleased, “and once you’ve fixed Torville, you can come back home. To Imbervale, I mean.”

“I already told you: I’m not going back there!” Marigold yanked off the mustache. “Didn’t you see Rosalind today? Didn’t you notice how she practically glowed with goodness? I don’t glow with goodness, Collin! And I can’t stand living with her.”

As Marigold’s voice grew louder, the cursed toilet began to steam. “YOU’RE DISTURBING MY SLUMBER,” the voice from nowhere complained. “I TOLD YOU NOT TO DO THAT.”

“You see?” said Marigold as she and Collin retreated into the hall. “You’re never really alone in a wizard’s house.”

The only place in the fortress where neither Collin nor Pettifog ever went was Marigold’s midnight-dark room. Pettifog refused to put so much as a hoof inside, although he did tell Marigold as often as he could that the room had been much more pleasant when Rosalind had lived there. When Collin had first seen it, he’d stuck a hand into the midnight darkness, where it had disappeared at once. “Don’t you bump into things?” he’d asked Marigold, pulling his hand back into the light.

“Constantly,” Marigold had admitted. “Being wicked is very bruising.”

Now, in bed under the blanket she could feel but couldn’t see, Marigold closed her eyes. She’d planned to try an exercise from Evil in Twenty-Three Minutes a Day that had instructed her to count her heartbeats each night before falling asleep, willing them to slow down until, one day, they stopped altogether. But no matter how hard Marigold tried to focus on her withering heart, she kept getting distracted by a pattern of prickling vines with large indigo blossoms that wound its way through her memory and across the backs of her eyelids. She wondered if Blumontaine had already chopped down the indigo stranglers or if Queen Hetty had found another wizard to send quicksand to Foggy Gorge. Were all those people really working and worrying through the night because of a story Marigold had invented? What if someone fell into the quicksand? What if they were hurt, or worse? Marigold tried not to mind, but it was no use: she stayed awake half the night, counting the heartbeats that refused to stop.

Pettifog and Collin were both in high spirits the next morning. Collin had found enough useful ingredients in Torville’s pantry to make a peach cobbler for breakfast, and Pettifog hummed to himself as he helped Marigold clean up afterward. “It’s a folk tune from the demonic realms,” he explained after a particularly dissonant bout of humming. “Parents sing it to their children to soothe them at night. A rough translation of the words might be ‘May your ears fall off your noggin and be consumed by flames.’” He pressed a dish towel to his heart. “My mother used to howl it to me when I was just an impling.”

After the tidying was done, all three of them got to work gathering more of the ingredients for another attempt to cure Torville. Collin ground up snail shells and Pettifog measured swamp mist while Marigold collected ragweed under a moon that was just past new. This time, she had the foresight to pull up much more of it than she needed. Despite Collin’s confidence, Marigold still worried she might need to perform the Overlook Curse backward several more times before she got it right. Did she need to reverse the order of words in the incantation, but not the words themselves? Would someone have to sneak back to Imbervale to steal more strands of golden hair from Rosalind’s comb? Once she’d stuffed all the ragweed in an empty jar, she walked in circles around the workroom, reading the instructions for the curse over and over, trying to imagine how each step might be undone. A spell was a little bit like a contraption, she reassured herself; if you arranged all the pieces properly, there was no reason at all why it shouldn’t work. (She tried not to think about the biplane, which she still hadn’t figured out how to repair.)

Torville, to Marigold’s disappointment, did not look any more likely to turn back into a person on his own. He was spending the morning in his scale pan on the blackboard, practicing shifting his weight to make the pan spin faster. At some point during this exercise, he discovered that he could ball himself up and roll around, which he did with great enthusiasm, making little squelching sounds as he went.

Marigold stopped walking in circles to watch him. He was only spelling nonsense words: QLORP and PLOSH and WAZOO!

“Pettifog says you’re not much better at reversing enchantments than I am,” she told him, “but you must know more about it than I do. How do you think I should turn you back to yourself?”

Torville stopped rolling. Marigold waited while he oozed and bubbled around the edges. She’d noticed by now that the bubbling happened whenever he was thinking particularly hard about something. After a few moments, he rolled himself back up and started spinning the scale pan again, more deliberately this time.

“M-I-R-R-O-R,” Marigold read aloud, watching him. “‘Mirror’? You want me to —? Oh, honestly!” The gazing ball had started to whine, and familiar gray storm clouds were gathering inside it. “Don’t those Miseries ever forget an appointment?”

Torville deflated into a puddle, and Marigold went to fetch the others. No one wanted to answer the gazing ball. “I can’t do it,” Collin pointed out as they hustled up the workroom stairs. “I’ll wear Torville’s mustache, but I don’t know how to talk like him.”

“And I don’t think we can use the vocal powder again,” said Marigold. “The Miseries were suspicious enough the last time we tried it. It’ll have to be you, Pettifog. You do the talking, and Collin can lurk in the background.”

“While you sit back and clip your fingernails, I presume,” Pettifog grumbled. “You’d better do it across the room, then, so the Miseries can’t see you.”

Marigold didn’t want to see the Miseries, either, but she couldn’t help feeling a little swept aside as Collin put on his disguise and Pettifog tapped the gazing ball. She sat down next to the puddle that was Torville. “Maybe the Miseries will be in a good mood today,” she whispered to him.

Torville jiggled a little in the scale pan, as if he might be laughing.

The clouds cleared from the gazing ball, and Vivien’s voice filled the room. “Torville?” she screeched. “Torville, you jelly-brained marmot, what have you done?”

Pettifog winced, as if he thought Vivien might reach her bony hands out of the gazing ball and wring his neck. “Madam,” he said, “it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“It shouldn’t be,” Vivien snapped. “We certainly aren’t pleased. Is that our brother hiding behind you, imp? Is he too ashamed to face us himself?”

Marigold could see the ends of Collin’s mustache quivering. She hoped he wouldn’t bolt out of the workroom. It was only a matter of time before the Miseries wore away even his good cheer.

“If you’ll allow me, madam,” said Pettifog over the sound of Vivien’s shouting, “I’ll explain. Torville is recovering from an illness. Since he’s still very weak, he’s asked me to speak for him.”

“Skin-crawling sickness, isn’t it?” That was Elgin’s voice, deep and contemptuous. “I heard it from Lord Emberhill, who’d heard it from his driver, who’d gotten the news from Countess Snoot-Harley, who apparently knows my own brother’s condition better than I do. Why didn’t you tell us on Friday?”

“Er,” said Pettifog. “Torville didn’t want you to worry.”

“Oh, we wouldn’t have,” said Vivien. “He looked perfectly all right to me.”

Elgin snorted. “You’re not a physician.”

“And you’re not a lord, but that doesn’t stop you from playing cards with George Emberhill all evening while I’m stuck repairing the window of my garden shed.”

“The ghoul had a near escape,” said Elgin, sounding pleased. “By the way, Torville, Countess Snoot-Harley is also saying you’ve got a new imp working for you. Isn’t your old one up to his duties anymore?”

“She’s not an imp!” Pettifog looked positively insulted. “It should be obvious to anyone that she’s a human child! She hasn’t got wings or horns or even a hint of a tail.” He must have seen the way Marigold was waving wildly at him to stop talking, but he pretended not to notice. “Would you like to speak with the girl instead? She’s right here.”

“Eavesdropping?” said Vivien. “The nerve! Come over here, child!”

Marigold had no choice. “You didn’t need to do that,” she whispered to Pettifog as she came up to the gazing ball.

“They would have found out soon enough,” Pettifog whispered back. “Why should I have to do all the talking? I’ve got fingernails to clip, too, you know.”

He started to wander away, but Marigold caught his sleeve. “You’ll stay right here with me,” she told him, “or I’ll unravel all your embroidered tea towels, one by one.”

Pettifog gasped. “You wouldn’t!”

“Stop yammering!” Vivien cried from the gazing ball. “Turn and face us, both of you.” The Miseries were wonderfully quiet for a moment, though Marigold didn’t like how they were studying her.

“It’s a dull-looking thing,” Elgin said at last. He poked a finger in Marigold’s direction. “What’s the point of it?”