“I’m coming!” cried Pettifog, leaping clear of Victoria’s teeth. “Thank you for the audience, Your Majest — eek!” He whirled around and looked accusingly at the iguana. “That monster stole my handkerchief!”
Victoria, who seemed to be chewing on something, smiled. Pettifog leaned forward to yank a corner of handkerchief from her jaws, but Marigold pulled him away. “We don’t have time,” she whispered.
“But it’s my best one,” Pettifog complained, “with the cornflowers on it. And anyway, I don’t mind seeing Rosalind.”
“You will when she takes one look at our Torville,” Marigold said. They hurried past the guard in blue hose and out of the throne room. Even Rosalind, who was never nosy, would have questions to ask if she got a good view of Collin. Right now, for example, Collin was swooping down a spiral staircase two steps at a time, looking very much like a ten-year-old boy and not at all like an ill and evil wizard. “Stalk and mutter!” Marigold hissed at him, but there wasn’t much point. If the queen’s watch kept good time, they had less than half a minute to leave the palace before Rosalind arrived. Maybe she would be late, Marigold told herself, trying to remember which of three archways they were supposed to pass under. She chose the archway to the right and ran through it, dragging Collin with one hand and Pettifog with the other.
Of course Rosalind wasn’t late. She was perfectly prompt and striding down the corridor toward Marigold, escorted by two Blumontaine guards and several straggling advisers from Imbervale. In the new clothes the palace dressmaker had sewn for her, with a golden circlet on her head and a brave, determined look on her face, Rosalind was even more impressive than Marigold had remembered. She did not seem like the sort of princess who would dress in old wizard’s robes, tell lies to Queen Hetty, or be frightened by Victoria.
Marigold stopped short. Pettifog took a sharp breath inward, and Collin almost tripped over the carpet. Twenty feet down the hall, Rosalind stopped, too.
“Pettifog!” she said. “What are you doing here? Is that Torville? And who in the world . . . ?” She took a step forward then, squinting at Marigold.
Marigold couldn’t think what else to do: she scooped out a whole fistful of traveling powder, seized Collin’s sleeve, and threw the powder into the air. The hallway filled with purple smoke. “Torville’s fortress!” she shouted. “Now!”
There was a bang loud enough to make Marigold’s ears ring. When the smoke cleared, she was still holding on to Collin, though his hood had fallen down around his neck, and he looked positively terrified. This was probably because Pettifog had leaped onto his shoulders. But Rosalind and the advisers and the blue-hosed guards had all disappeared, and so had Blumontaine Palace. They were standing, Marigold realized with amazement and relief, in Torville’s fortress workroom. Torville himself was on the rim of his dinner plate, staring at them — or at least Marigold thought he would have been staring if he’d had eyes.
“Did you do it?” Collin blinked and looked around. “You did! Marigold! You did a spell that worked!”
“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.
