There was something strange about the midnight paint. Marigold had expected it to be black, but it was really a deep blue mixed with fiery bits that shone like stars, and the more of it she used on the walls, the quieter and colder her room became. The paint gulped up sunlight, making it hard for her to see. It gulped up birdsong, too, and footsteps, and warmth from the kitchen stove on the floor below. By the time Marigold had painted all four walls, her room was full of hush and shadows.
She couldn’t wait to show off her work to Pettifog. “Doesn’t it look sinister?” she asked him as he stood in the doorway, taking it all in: the midnight paint, the heavy drapes, the bouquet of thorns. “Don’t you think a truly wicked person must live here?”
Pettifog tilted his head one way, then the other. He shrugged. “It’s not really my taste.”
Marigold flopped down on the bed, making the ancient springs shriek. “I was a dying star for twenty-three minutes this morning,” she told him. “That’s got to count for something.”
“And now you’re a princess who needs to help me chop vegetables,” said Pettifog. “We’re having rabbit stew for dinner.”
“But making stew isn’t wicked!” Marigold protested.
“It is if you’re the rabbit.” With a swish of his tail, Pettifog turned away. “Only six days left to impress me, Princess. You’re going to have to try harder.”
Pettifog trotted off toward the kitchen, but Marigold didn’t follow him. She had rarely obeyed the rules back in Imbervale, and she wasn’t about to start now. Instead, she climbed the dark, narrow staircase to Torville’s tower workroom and knocked on the door at the top of the stairs.
“What?” called Torville from the other side. He sounded grouchy, Marigold thought, but not furious, the way he had been earlier that day. And he hadn’t told her to leave or threatened to turn her into a bug. She pushed the door open.
“Oh, it’s you.” Torville was sitting in a threadbare green armchair, kicking his feet against the curved stone wall of the tower. He hardly bothered to look over at Marigold as she stepped inside. The sun was starting to set over the wildwood, and the sky glowed fierce and orange through the leaded windows. “Didn’t I tell you not to interrupt me?”
Marigold looked around the workroom. This was one place in the fortress, she guessed, where Rosalind hadn’t spent much time; it was cluttered with books and tools, and the wooden floorboards were stained with splotches of long-forgotten potions. The air smelled of damp and magic. There was a large iron cauldron in the center of the room — empty, at least for now — and a pedestal holding a clouded glass gazing ball as big as a giant’s marble. A standing blackboard was chalked with symbols and equations, but Torville wasn’t even looking at it. “You don’t seem very busy,” Marigold pointed out.
“I’m wallowing.” Thump went Torville’s foot against the wall. “It takes a lot of effort.”
Marigold could guess what had put him in such a gloomy mood. “The people you were talking to earlier,” said Marigold, “the ones you called the Miseries, are they —?”
Thump. “Was there something you wanted, Princess?”
“Yes,” said Marigold, “there was. I mean, there is.” It wasn’t easy talking to someone who was wallowing. “I want to learn how to cast a curse,” she told the side of Torville’s head. “I need you to teach me.”
Both of Torville’s feet went thump at once, and his armchair scraped backward. “No,” he said, standing up to face Marigold. “First of all, I’m busy. And second, I don’t want to.”
“But I’ve got to impress Pettifog,” Marigold explained, “and he doesn’t care how many cans of midnight paint I use on my walls. What impresses him is curses. Your curses, especially,” she added, remembering her etiquette tutor’s advice about the usefulness of a well-placed compliment. “He’s given me a whole book of them. I’ve already read about how you tied the roads in Tiskaree into knots and about the plague of invisible lizards you sent to Foggy Gorge.”
“That was five years ago, and they’re still trying to round those lizards up. I heard the crown prince found one in his pillowcase last month.” Torville cracked a smile, but only for a moment. “Those spells are much too advanced for you to learn.”
“Then teach me something simpler! Didn’t you say I had potential?”
Torville sat back down. “I’m getting a headache.”
He was stubborn, but Marigold could be stubborner. It had taken her fifteen tries to rig up her boat contraption with moving sails, but she’d gotten it to work in the end. “If you don’t agree to teach me,” she said, “I’ll throw a very loud tantrum.”
“If you do,” said Torville, “I’ll enchant away your voice.”
“I’ll smash your gazing ball.”
“Then I’ll curse you with itches that can’t be scratched.”
“I’ll tear up the record of your wicked deeds,” Marigold threatened, “and I’ll sink the pieces in the moat.”
Torville rubbed his temples. “I’m beginning to see,” he said, “why Imbervale doesn’t want you back. Meet me here at ten o’clock tomorrow, and don’t even dream of being late.”
In all Marigold’s years of lessons, she had never had a tutor quite like Torville. He didn’t hand her an armload of books to read or set out a paper and pen for note-taking. He erased the blackboard with a swoosh of his robes, sending a plume of chalk dust into the air. And he spoke so briskly that Marigold felt as if she were chasing after him, trying to catch his words between her fingertips before they vanished.
“Some spells are wicked,” Torville said, “and some, I’m sorry to say, can be used for good. Some spells must be used as soon as they’re prepared; others can be dried and bottled up until you need them. Some spells are big magic, which means you need to gather a whole group of wizards to work them, and others are small and simple enough that a mere child can perform them on their own.” Torville raised an eyebrow at Marigold. “But every enchantment requires three things: ingredients, incantations, and intention.” He wrote these three words on the board.
“The ingredients are the physical stuff of spell-casting — serpents’ toenails and onions’ tears, distilled fog, bottled fear. Each ingredient must be weighed out precisely and added to the cauldron in the proper order. Get the mixture wrong, and you’ll have a calamity on your hands. The incantations are the words you say while you’re mixing, and you’ve got to be just as precise in your speech as you are with your measurements. One mispronounced word, and . . . ?” Torville nodded at Marigold, waiting for her to supply the answer.
“Calamity?” she guessed.
“Exactly. But listen closely: even if you’ve gathered all the right ingredients, and even if you say all the proper words, none of that will matter if you don’t have the correct intention.” Torville circled the third word on the blackboard, making the chalk squeak. “Benevolent magicians must truly want good things to happen, and evil wizards must truly want miserable things to happen. If you don’t want your spell to work, it’s bound to go wrong. Even a moment of regret can ruin the whole recipe.”
Marigold thought of Torville’s closet of regrets, which she still hadn’t figured out how to sneak into. “Does that ever happen to you?”
“Not anymore,” said Torville proudly. “If you hold wickedness inside your heart for long enough, the heart shrivels and shrinks, and its twinges become too small to notice. I haven’t had to worry about mine since I was thirty.”
Marigold put a hand on her chest to feel the beating of her own heart, frustratingly strong and steady. “I don’t think mine has shriveled much at all.”
“You’re still young,” Torville said, “which is why if you insist on casting a curse, you should start with something simple. Would you like to make a rain cloud over a picnic? Or turn someone’s ears green? You could conjure up a humming noise that always seems to be coming from the other side of the room but is impossible to find.”
Marigold frowned. “I don’t think Pettifog will be impressed by any of those spells.”
“He should be!” Torville set down his chalk. “Simple curses are important. They’re how every evil wizard stays in business. I spend half my time filling orders for sneezing powders and unseasonable glooms, and the other half helping the rulers of the Cacophonous Kingdoms get revenge on one another. I don’t often have a chance to do something truly horrible, just for me.” For a moment, Torville looked almost wistful. “But you can’t make invisible lizards, Marigold, so don’t bother asking me again.”
Marigold sighed. “All right,” she said. “Do you have any other suggestions?”
Grumbling about the demands of ungrateful princesses, Torville led Marigold down to the storeroom and loaded her arms up with spell books, most of them plucked from the shelves marked EVERY-DAY CURSES. Back in the tower, Marigold sprawled on her stomach and flipped through the books while Torville puttered around the workroom, making chalky calculations on the blackboard and using a balance to weigh out tiny amounts of dried nightshade and powdered dragonfly.
The wicked spells in Marigold’s books looked fairly impressive, but she could tell that most of them really were beyond her talents. She didn’t have any idea how to collect most of the ingredients — tears from a man who never cried or three scales freshly plucked from the hide of a local dragon — and the mathematical formulas for calculating the necessary amount of each ingredient made her head spin. So did the incantations, many of which were written in languages she’d never seen before. Some spells required a miniature model of the object to be enchanted, like one of Marigold’s contraptions but twice as detailed. And all of the most impressive-sounding spells noted that the cauldron full of ingredients had to be mixed not by the wizard’s own hand but by “a creature called forth from the flames and shadows.”
“What does that mean?” Marigold asked Torville the third time she’d seen the phrase. “It’s in the flying spell, the invisibility spell, and the spell to send someone to the moon.”
Torville laughed. “It means I’ll melt my arms off if I try to stir the cauldron myself, so I get Pettifog to do it.”
Marigold had been wondering what Pettifog got up to when he wasn’t drying dishes or giving tours. “Is he a creature from the flames and shadows, then? Did you call him forth?”
“I did, indeed!” Torville set his work aside. “Every evil wizard needs an imp, but not every evil wizard can manage a trip to the demonic realms to hire one. You’ve got to dodge the changeable lava pits, ride in a stagecoach pulled by fire-breathing mules, and negotiate with the Archdemon, which isn’t anyone’s idea of fun. I wrote all about the journey in my record of wicked deeds.” He craned his neck to look at the spell Marigold was studying. “I hope you’re not planning to send someone to the moon. You’ll never succeed.”
“I’m not!” Marigold swore. “I was just curious.”
Torville turned back to his balance. “I’ve noticed that.”
A few spells in the books sounded promising, but each time Marigold asked Torville if she could try one, he would sneer and explain why Marigold couldn’t. “What about this spell to ruin a friendship?” she asked. “That sounds decently wicked.”
“You’d need ice from the northern seas for that,” said Torville without looking up, “and I don’t have any.”
“A spell to give your enemies nightmares?”
