Marigold flushed. She supposed princesses never got stepped on, either — not even the wicked ones.
Back in the dining room, the wizards flocked around Marigold’s tray like hungry crows. One of them, she noticed as she returned to her place against the wall, slightly resembled her parents’ third undersecretary. On the other side of the room, Gentleman Northwinds wandered over to the fireplace and bent over in front of it, as if he were searching for something in the flames.
“Elgin! I’ve found her!” Vivien appeared from out of nowhere, twice as terrifying in person as she had been in the gazing ball. Her voice was pitched at a shriek, she wore a bloodred dress under a velvet cape that made Marigold think she’d grown wings, and her fingernails were sharpened and polished into scarlet talons, which she used to hold Marigold by the chin. Marigold squirmed, but she couldn’t get free. “Scrawny,” Vivien said, pinching hard, “and wan. You remind me of a wrung-out dishcloth. See here, Elgin?” To Marigold’s enormous relief, Vivien let go of her chin. “It’s the new child Torville’s captured. She’ll know what he’s up to.”
“She will!” Elgin was at Vivien’s side now, boxing Marigold into the corner of the room. His voice boomed just as loudly as his sister’s shrieked. Both Miseries smelled so powerfully of magic that Marigold wondered if they’d cast a spell to find her in the crowd. She wished desperately that she could escape, but the Miseries had her trapped.
“Tell us, child,” said Elgin, “is Torville really ill, or is he just too frightened to face us? Is he wriggling out of our wicked plans again?”
“Speak the truth,” Vivien advised. She took hold of Marigold’s chin again.
“He’s . . . he’s not himself!” Marigold tried to look for Pettifog in the crowd, but she couldn’t see much past the Miseries, and she wasn’t sure what Pettifog could do to help her, anyway. “He’s up in his bedroom. He prepared the whole party, and then —”
“Lies,” said Vivien, gripping harder. She turned Marigold’s head toward the tall windows. “The curtains aren’t drawn. Torville always draws the curtains.”
Marigold flinched. They’d locked Torville away before he’d had a chance to mention that detail. “Pettifog and I helped him with the party,” she admitted. “But he really is still here.”
“We’ll see about that.” Elgin turned briskly, heading for the servants’ door. Vivien sneered at Marigold, let her go, and followed him.
Marigold ran after them into the green-flickering hallway. “You can’t see him!” she called to the Miseries. “You’ll get skin-crawling sickness, too!”
“Your concern for our health is touching, child.” Elgin glared at Vivien as she shoved past him on the stairs. “But you don’t know Torville like we do. He wriggles out of things; he always has. Do you remember, Vivien, what he did with those kittens we captured when we were children?”
“He let them go,” Vivien said in disgust. “We were going to practice turning them into scorpions, but they just happened to slip away while Torville was watching them.”
“I cast a boiling spell on his bathwater after that,” Elgin said, chuckling. “He cried and shouted that he was going to be the wickedest one of us all someday, but now he’s fully grown and still making excuses for himself.”
Vivien snorted. “When we told him to kidnap Princess Rosalind, he claimed to be allergic to children.”
“Really?” said Marigold. As awful as the Miseries were, she couldn’t help being interested.
“I told him if he couldn’t even manage to lock a screeching child in a tower, he had no business calling himself a villain.” Elgin shook his head. “He didn’t like that, did he, Viv?”
“And then he lost her!” Vivien shrieked from the top of the stairs. “He had a dozen excuses for that, too. First he said rescuers from Imbervale must have tied that rope to the fortress wall; then he accused us of stringing it up to make him look bad.” With Marigold and Elgin at her heels, she strode down the hallway and banged on Torville’s bedroom door. “Wake up, you ninny!”
“If you’re even there at all,” Elgin added.
“Or have you run away from us again?” Vivien called. “You can’t hide behind Gentleman Northwinds’ robes anymore, you know.”
The hall was utterly silent. Elgin rattled the doorknob so hard that Marigold thought it might come off in his hand, but he couldn’t budge the lock. “You see?” he said. “Once a wriggler, always a wriggler.”
Vivien grabbed hold of Marigold again, this time by the wrist, and shook her. “Tell us where he’s gone!”
“I already told you!” Marigold shouted. Vivien’s talons really hurt. “He’s in there, I swear!”
On the other side of the bedroom door, someone coughed.
“Can’t you all be quiet?” That was Torville’s voice — weak and faint, but undeniably his. “I’m practically dead in here. If I must depart this mortal sphere, I’d rather not listen to a screaming fight while I do it.”
Vivien dropped Marigold’s wrist. “Torville? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s me, Viv. Who else would it be? Didn’t Pettifog tell you I was ill?”
“Yes,” said Vivien, frowning, “but —”
“He sounds awful,” said Elgin. Marigold suspected he was pleased about this. “Your skin’s crawling right off your body, Torville?”
“I’ve got earlobe skin on my toes and toe skin on my ears,” Torville replied. “As for the skin on my legs, I think it’s about to skulk out of this room without me. You’d better stand aside.”
Elgin took half a step backward.
“Why don’t we go back to the party?” Marigold asked the Miseries. “You’ve got to try the goat milk cheese! Of course, there’s sheep milk cheese if you don’t like goat, and dragon cheese if you don’t like sheep —”
“He could be fibbing!” said Vivien. “How do we know you’re not fibbing, Torville?”
There was another miserable cough from the other side of the door. “You could come and kiss my fevered brow,” Torville moaned, “but if you set foot in this room, I don’t think you’ll last the week. I certainly don’t plan to. Take care of the Thing, will you, when I’m gone?”
Vivien frowned at the doorknob. “I could open it by magic, you know,” she said to Elgin. “Or you could, if you weren’t such a coward.”
Elgin’s jaw went tense. “What did you call me?”
“Too cowardly to unlock that door,” said Vivien. She gave him a smug little smile. “And much too useless at magic.”
“It’s an elementary spell!”
“Then it’s a shame you can’t do it.”
“I opened that lock on your garden shed, didn’t I?”
