The voice sounded muffled, as if someone were talking in another room. Marigold couldn’t see the speaker anywhere. When she walked around the cauldron, her spirits sank: the blob of glop on the dinner plate was still a blob of glop. Collin and Pettifog were looking around, too, searching for the voice’s owner. “Torville?” Pettifog said, sounding dubious. “Is that you?”
“Of course it is!” the voice called. “Who else would it be? Has Marigold grown peaches between your ears this time?”
Pettifog stared down at the glop. “It’s talking!” he said. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so,” said Collin. “But if it’s not —”
“The mirror!” cried Marigold. “Look!”
The long mirror against the opposite wall still reflected nearly half the workroom: the cauldron; the shelves and windows; Pettifog and Marigold, wearing identical stares; and Collin crossing the room to join them. But in the mirror’s reflection, they weren’t standing next to a blob of glop on a dinner plate. They were standing next to Torville.
“Why are you all staring at me like that?” Torville in the mirror looked concerned. He examined the palms of his hands and the soles of his shoes. “Marigold hasn’t given me an extra head, has she? Or . . . egad!” He brought both hands to his mustache, which was in its usual place just below his nose. “Well, that’s all right. I don’t understand why you’re not happier to see me.”
Collin nudged Marigold. “Do you think he knows?”
“I don’t want to be the one to tell him,” said Pettifog. He gave Marigold a meaningful look.
She sighed. “I’ll do it. I suppose it’s my fault again.” At least the reflection of Torville didn’t look angry. He was dusting off his robes and shaking out his elbows and wrists, as though they’d been cramped for quite a while. “Torville,” said Marigold as gently as she could, “the spell only turned you back to yourself in the mirror. Out here with us, you’re still a blob of glop.”
“I know that!” said Torville. Marigold couldn’t quite believe how pleased she was to hear his voice, faint and cranky as it was. “I can see myself right there on that dinner plate. Not much to admire, am I? But here” — he flung his arms wide in the mirror image of the workroom — “here, I’m glorious.”
“Did she work the spell wrong again?” Pettifog wanted to know. (Marigold glared at him.)
“I don’t think so.” Torville frowned. “It’s a surprise to me, too, but I think she got it right for once. Unfortunately, the spell was only reversed in the mirror, so the mirror is the only place where it came undone. You might have considered that earlier, Marigold.”
“But you were the one who told me to use a mirror in the first place!”
Torville did not seem to like being reminded of this. “I had a hunch! But even I don’t know everything. For example, I don’t know who that boy is or what he’s doing in my house. You’re the one they’ve been dressing up as me?”
Collin took a brave step forward. “Yes, sir.”
“You should walk more grandly,” Torville told him, “with your head held high and your spine as stiff as a candlestick. Allow me to demonstrate.” Torville took a turn around the mirror-workroom, letting his robes billow behind him. “It’s wonderful to walk again,” he said, returning to the front of the reflection. “I can’t express how much I loathed oozing around on that blackboard.”
“Is there anything beyond the mirror frame?” Marigold asked. She didn’t entirely understand how Torville’s reflection was managing to move around in the mirror while his real self was still burbling on the floor, but she supposed it wasn’t much more confusing than the peach trees had been. “Can you go farther than the workroom, I mean? Do you have a whole reflected fortress over there?”
Torville looked around the mirror with interest. “That’s another thing I don’t know,” he said. “Let me find out.” He billowed just out of Marigold’s view but returned almost at once. “No good,” he said. “Everything goes gray and flat past the edge of the frame. Where the reflection stops, I stop, too.” He leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the far side of the mirror glass. “It’s rather unsettling.”
“Don’t you worry, Torville.” Pettifog put his hands up to the mirror, and Marigold thought she heard the slightest wobble in his voice. “We’ll bring you back good as new. We’ll search every spell book in the house —”
Torville waved a hand at him. “Don’t bother with that now! There isn’t time. Whatever Marigold’s done to me, it’s obviously not the sort of spell that’s easily lifted, and no book of mine will change that.”
Pettifog’s wings sagged. “Then you might never come back?”
“You look as miserable as Queen Elba did when that scorpion spell backfired,” Torville told him. “Cheer up, old friend. You haven’t gotten slurped yet! And now is no time to fret about the Archdemon. How are the preparations going?”
Marigold couldn’t think what he meant. “Preparations?” she asked.
“For the Evil Wizards’ Social Society.” Torville raised his voice, as if he thought Marigold hadn’t been paying attention. “Don’t tell me you haven’t gotten started! The Miseries will be here on Tuesday evening, along with twenty-odd of the wickedest magic workers I’ve ever met, and they’ll have expectations. Wine! Strawberries! Twelve types of cheese, each served on its own kind of cracker. You’ll need the best table linens ironed as usual, Pettifog, and the silver polished, and the dining room scrubbed so thoroughly that Vivien will be able to see her own hideous reflection in the tabletop. That boy can make some kind of dinner, can’t he? Oh, and keep in mind that Wizard Petronella eats nothing but stewed cauliflower stems, and Old Skellytoes summons up shrieking fiends whenever he sees a vegetable. You’ll have to seat them a safe distance apart.”
Marigold looked at Pettifog. Pettifog looked at Collin. Collin looked at Marigold. Then they all looked back at Torville.
“You’re still a blob of glop,” said Marigold, “and you’re trapped in a mirror on top of that, and the Miseries want to work big magic, and Rosalind is gathering all the kingdoms’ rulers together to put you out of work for good, and you’re worried about table linens?”
“Yes,” said Torville, “exactly. The linens are important, and the cheese, and all the rest of it. Everything at the gathering must be up to my usual standards — which, I assure you, are breathtakingly high. I have been hosting the Evil Wizards’ Social Society for seven years, and if even a salad fork is out of place, someone is going to notice. They’ll be suspicious. They’ll wonder whether I’m truly stuck in bed with an unfortunate relapse of skin-crawling sickness, or whether I might be dragging my gelatinous corpus across a platter in hopes of absorbing a morsel of cold porridge with my foot-mouth. They’ll go sticking their noses where noses don’t belong — Vivien is notorious for that — and although most of them aren’t very clever, someone is bound to figure out what’s happened. They’ll laugh at me! The wickedest wizard in half a century, turned to glop by a child!”
“Are you, sir?” Collin asked with interest.
Torville scowled. “Am I what?”
“The wickedest wizard in half a century,” said Collin. “I didn’t realize.”
“Of course I am!” Torville stomped his foot. “And the others are just waiting for a chance to cut me down. They’ll happily leave me to starve, Marigold, while you fend off unkillable wasps and poison clouds and vampire hens and all those other plagues of nasties that the Villains’ Bond mentions. You’ll never get my situation sorted out, and I’ll lose any chance I might still have to live a life outside this mirror frame. Do you understand?”
Marigold did. She could imagine it all, more vividly than she would have liked. “No one told me about the vampire hens.”
“From the scorched prairies of the demonic realms,” said Pettifog. “They’re even more terrifying than you’d think.”
“And that,” said Torville, winding back around to his point, “is why someone will need to iron the napkins.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier, sir,” said Collin, “if we told all the evildoers to stay at home this week? On account of your illness, I mean?”
This sounded to Marigold like a much nicer plan than trying to keep twenty-odd wizards fed and fooled for an entire evening, but Torville only glowered. “Wizard Torville does not make cancellations. You’d all better get to work. And bring me my porridge, Pettifog, so I don’t burble away into nothingness.”
In the mirror, Torville swished his robe and turned his back. On the dinner plate, the blob of glop turned its back, too.
“But what about the Miseries?” Marigold demanded.
Both incarnations of Torville made a quarter turn to look at her. “What about them?”
