Beyond the signpost, the road widened, taking them past brightly painted cottages and low stone walls. The gardens here were crowded with elfpurse flowers, goldengowns, and a strange vine that seemed to grow everywhere Marigold looked: over fence posts, up chimneys, and even around the trunks of trees. It had unpleasant prickles all along its length, but its deep-blue blossoms were beautiful and as large as Marigold’s fist. “I’ve never seen this sort of flower before,” she said, mostly to fill the silence. If she leaned to one side and reached out her hand, she could almost touch the petals as the carriage rumbled by.
This caught the wizard’s attention. “You must be far from home,” he said. “The indigo strangler grows everywhere it can in these hills, and in a few places it can’t.”
Marigold pulled her arm back into the carriage. “It’s a strangler?”
“Oh, it won’t strangle you. The trees it climbs might not live another season, but the worst the vine can do to a person is prick her fingers. If you tried to bring those flowers home to your mother, you’d spend the rest of the day pulling barbs out of your thumbs.”
The wizard chuckled, as if the thought amused him, but it stung Marigold just as much as any prickling vine might have done. Her mother did love flowers. She’d always filled the palace with her two favorites, roses and marigolds, mingled together in tall glass vases. Marigold had sometimes pulled other flowers from the palace gardens to make into clumsy bouquets for her parents, which sent the royal gardener into fits, but Queen Amelia always forgave her. That had been long ago, though, before anyone had realized that Marigold was wicked. She didn’t think her mother was likely to forgive her so easily any longer.
The carriage came around a bend in the road just then, and Marigold caught sight of two figures walking up the next hill into the city. One was tall and dressed in black; the other was shorter, with wings. “Those are my friends!” she cried. “Did you know we’d find them on this road?”
The wizard didn’t answer. He was leaning forward to get a better look. “Tell me, is that Torville himself?”
Marigold was sure that someone who’d once been Torville’s teacher wouldn’t be fooled by Collin’s disguise for long. “It’s not Torville,” she told him, wriggling out of the furs. “You can let me out here. I’ll catch up to the others on foot.”
“If you’re sure.” The wizard frowned, but he brought the carriage to a stop.
As Marigold climbed down to the road, the wind she’d felt on the hillside picked up again, swirling clouds of dust around her ankles. “Thank you for your help,” she said, although she wasn’t sure help was exactly what the wizard had given her.
He touched the brim of his hat. “I hope we’ll meet again. And, child?” He raised his voice to be heard over the wind. “If you do notice anything unusual in Torville’s fortress, I would very much like to know about it.”
Pettifog was still seething.
“Reckless girl!” he snapped, not even bothering to stop walking when Marigold caught up with him and Collin. “I told her not to let go. But did she listen?” He glared up at Marigold. “Of course she didn’t.”
Collin, at least, was as relieved to see Marigold as she was to see him. “Did the traveling powder send you far from here?” he asked.
“Only halfway up a mountain.” Marigold glanced over her shoulder, but the white carriage wasn’t anywhere in sight. “Pettifog, do you know the wizard who taught Torville when he was a child?”
Pettifog looked pointedly in the other direction.
“Don’t mind him,” Collin said. “He’s upset because the traveling powder dumped us in that field across the way. It was awfully muddy. Pettifog spent at least ten minutes trying to wipe off his hooves.”
“And I did not succeed,” Pettifog said gravely. “I can’t believe I’m expected to attend a royal audience in this state.”
Marigold, who had been thinking about everything except the royal audience, checked her own clothes. Her robes were a little damp from the snow, but with her hood pulled up, she still looked the part of Torville’s wicked assistant. “We never did decide exactly what to say to Queen Hetty,” she reminded the others. “What shall we say Foggy Gorge is plotting? A curse to turn soldiers into swans or to melt the queen’s jewels at her next jubilee?”
“We could say they want Torville to put all of Blumontaine under a sleeping spell for a hundred years,” Collin suggested, “like the Twice-Times Witch does in storybooks.”
Pettifog shook his head. “Sleeping spells are out of fashion,” he said. “It’s wide-awake spells that everyone’s asking for now. Those are much wickeder. We could tell Queen Hetty we’ve been hired to rouse her too early in the mornings or to keep her up at night listening for creaks in the walls.”
As they reached the top of the hill, Marigold could see the city of Blumontaine spread out in front of her in bright bursts of color: red rooftops, white walls, and flags as blue as indigo stranglers that flew from every pole and turret. The market square in front of the palace was crowded with fruit sellers and vegetable growers, bakers and cheesemongers, and people of all sorts who’d come from miles around to fill their sacks and baskets with food from the stalls. Marigold was surprised by how familiar it all was. Blumontaine, she’d heard her parents say often enough, was a disagreeable place with more than its fair share of sneaks and scoundrels, but at least from a distance, it seemed very much like Imbervale. Maybe the unpleasantness of the place wasn’t noticeable until you got closer.
Collin was already heading toward the crowd in the market square. “This looks like the only road to the palace,” he said, pulling his hood forward to hide his face. “Do you think the people of Blumontaine are used to seeing evil wizards march through town?”
“They must be,” said Marigold, hurrying after him. “Papa says this place is full of villains. I’m sure we won’t surprise them at all.”
But Marigold was wrong. The marketgoers drew away, murmuring, as the three of them passed by. The parents in the crowd put arms around their small children. The fruit sellers and vegetable growers gawked; the bakers and cheesemongers gaped. A few people ducked behind the market stalls, as if they thought they might be struck by a carelessly thrown curse.
“Keep walking, both of you,” Pettifog muttered behind them. “It’s what Torville would do.”
So Collin stomped and shook his fist, just as he’d practiced, and Marigold strode alongside him. By the time they reached the center of the square, the onlookers had grown curious. “That’s Wizard Petronella, I think,” she heard one of them say.
“Of course it isn’t!” said another. “It’s Wizard Torville! He’s famous for his mustache.”
“She means the smaller one,” said a third.
“That must be the Twice-Times Witch,” a child said confidently, “with one of her imps.”
“She’s not even real,” someone else objected. “I bet Tiskaree’s sent these wizards to curse us.”
“Or Puddlewater,” the others agreed. “Or Carroway. Or Imbervale!”
Marigold was shocked. “Imbervale doesn’t send wizards!” she whispered. “Don’t they know that here?”
Pettifog only snorted.
On the far side of the market square, the palace gates stood open. Marigold wondered if the two guards in blue hose would stop them for questioning, but they didn’t even blink as the false Wizard Torville and his entourage passed through. They seemed to be mostly decorative.
“Did you see me stomping?” Collin whispered. Marigold couldn’t see his face, but she could tell he was grinning underneath that hood. “Did you hear those people gasp as we went by? I think we really fooled them!”
“Well, we can’t stop now,” Marigold warned him. “If Blumontaine’s palace is anything like Imbervale’s, we’ve got about five more sets of guards to pass before we can see the queen.”
This guess, at least, turned out to be correct. Two more blue-hosed guards stood at the top of the palace stairs, flanking the grand-looking door. These guards looked more than decorative: at their waists, they wore pouches that Marigold guessed were full of spells stirred up by their royal magician. Her parents had once explained to her that each of the Cacophonous Kingdoms had its own type of magical protections. If she didn’t speak carefully to these guards, she’d find out exactly how Blumontaine’s protective spells worked.
The right-hand guard stepped forward to meet them. “Wizards?” she said. “And an imp? You’d better state your business.”
