Marigold scrubbed furiously at the ladle. “Even in a wizard’s fortress?”
“Oh, she didn’t approve of our work, but she used to say that even a person as awful as Torville shouldn’t live in squalor.” Pettifog waved the fluffy towel around the kitchen. “Torville, as you can see, is useless at housework. He hates a mess, but he can’t be bothered to clean one up, and all his wicked spells leave a scum around the fortress.” Marigold passed him the ladle, which he studied for only half a second before handing it back again. “You should hope you’re better at being wicked than you are at dish washing.”
Torville, who had disappeared as soon as the scrubbing began, returned to the kitchen with an armload of tattered black cloth. “You can borrow these, Princess,” he said, dumping the cloth on the table. “They’re the old robes I wore when I flooded half of Blumontaine in molasses, and they’ve still got a stench to them, but they look decent enough, and it’s the appearance of things that counts. Flowing robes! Flickering candlelight! Creaks in the floorboards and bumps in the night! When you look wicked, it’s easier to be wicked.” He took in the sight of Marigold’s party dress, which the wildwood had thoroughly ruined. “Right now, you look ridiculous.”
Marigold wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to be grateful or insulted. She could smell the molasses now, and when she turned off the faucet, she thought she could hear a high-pitched wailing noise, like a teakettle set too long on the stove or the screams of a hundred mice in the walls. It seemed to be coming from a distant part of the fortress, and it was growing louder by the second. “What is that?” Marigold asked. “It’s awful!”
“It’s the Miseries.” Torville sounded even more annoyed than usual. “Unscheduled, of course. I’ll have to go and deal with them.”
“What are the Miseries?” Marigold asked. Pettifog had wrapped his dish towel around his ears to muffle the din, and the freshly washed porridge bowls were quivering on the countertop. “Why do they make that noise?”
Torville ignored her. “Pettifog!” he shouted. “Get the child settled while I’m busy. She can have the spare bedroom. And don’t interrupt me, either of you. Goat wings and fish whiskers, I’ll have Elgin’s head on a plate!” He reached into the folds of his robes, pulled out a pinch of purple powder, uttered a word that Marigold couldn’t catch, and tossed the powdery stuff into the air.
For the second time that morning, there was a tremendous bang and an explosion of smoke. When it cleared a few moments later, Torville was gone and the awful shrieking noise had died away, but everything in the kitchen was coated in a thin layer of purple grime. Pettifog unwrapped the dish towel from his ears and tried to dust off his suit. “I wish he wouldn’t do that.”
“Where did he go?” Marigold asked.
“Only to his workroom. He can’t resist making a scene.” Pettifog gave up on dusting. “Come along, Princess. I’m supposed to get you settled.”
Marigold picked up the spare robes, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the smell of them. “How do I know you won’t feed me to the Thing instead?”
“You don’t,” said Pettifog, “but I work for Torville, and I’m not foolish enough to break my contract of employment. Besides, you were wrong earlier when you said that I hated you.”
Marigold peered at him over the bundle of robes. “You don’t hate me?”
Pettifog shook his head. “I just don’t like you at all,” he said, “and that’s a different thing altogether.”
Marigold followed Pettifog into a long stone hallway, where candles flickered on the walls, giving everything an enchanted greenish glow. A beetle — a marmorated one?— skittered past Marigold’s elbow, and she wondered if it had once been a human who’d been unwise enough to strike a deal with Torville, but it disappeared into the shadows before she could ask.
“This is the servants’ entrance to the formal dining room,” Pettifog was saying. He opened a door in the wall to reveal the banquet hall Marigold had seen earlier. “Torville uses the room for entertaining clients from the Cacophonous Kingdoms who wish to employ his services, and for gatherings of the Evil Wizards’ Social Society, which meets on alternate Tuesdays.” Pettifog pulled the door shut again. “You’re not invited.”
“Not yet,” Marigold murmured. Pettifog snorted.
The next door on the right was the bathroom. “You’ll want to be careful with the toilet,” Pettifog remarked as they passed it. “It’s cursed.”
Marigold poked her head into the bathroom. “It looks perfectly normal to me.”
But Pettifog shook his head. “Torville tried to install it himself, and he accidentally cursed it. Watch.” He stepped inside the bathroom, raised the toilet lid, and flushed. Instead of swishing down the drain, the water in the bowl gurgled and rose. The toilet itself began to shake. “WHO DARES DISTURB MY SLUMBER?” boomed a voice from nowhere.
Marigold leaped backward, almost dropping her robes. Pettifog shut the toilet lid hastily. The gurgling and shaking stopped at once, and the booming voice died away. “It’s a minor curse,” said Pettifog, “but I prefer to use the upstairs bathroom.”
The door on the opposite side of the hall led to a large storeroom crammed with the magical supplies Marigold had expected to find in the pantry. There was a jar of bats’ ears, she was pleased to see, and dozens of other vials and urns that someone — Rosalind, most likely — had marked in tidy handwriting: STINGING NETTLE and BELLADONNA, BLOOD MEAL and BONE DUST, FAIRIES’ TEARS (DISTILLED), something called COBWEB PICKLE, and a small green bottle labeled DISAPPOINT-MENT. The colorful powders on the highest shelf, Pettifog explained, were Torville’s ready-made spells, not to be touched without permission. But Marigold was more interested in the lower shelves, which held stirring spoons, scale pans, weights, bolts, lengths of wire, and spools of thread — all even nicer than the contraption-making materials she’d abandoned back in Imbervale. “Can I touch these?” she asked. “The bolts and wires and things?”
Pettifog looked sideways at Marigold. “I can’t imagine you’ll be here long enough to need any of Torville’s supplies at all. I’m simply showing you where things are in case you’re asked to fetch something. Now, if you’ll follow me . . .”
“What are all these books about?” Marigold wandered farther into the storeroom, ignoring Pettifog. The shelves along the back wall were nothing like as grand as the Imbervale Palace library, but they held creased paperbacks, yellowing notebooks, and scrolls of parchment, sorted by category. Marigold read the labels in the same tidy handwriting: SPELLS OF DESTRUCTION and SPELLS OF ILLUSION, EVERYDAY CURSES and BIG MAGIC, a heap of scrolls marked INCANTATIONS FOR ENEMIES, and a much smaller pile of INCANTATIONS FOR FRIENDS.
“Don’t!” cried Pettifog as Marigold reached for one of the scrolls. “Rosalind organized everything in a very particular fashion, and I won’t let you make a mess of it.” He fluttered his wings and ran his fingers along the spines on the shelves until he found a thick leather-bound book in a section marked HISTORY. “If you insist on reading something, why don’t you start with this? It’s a record of all the evil spells Wizard Torville has cast throughout his life, from his very first batch of toenail-growing powder to the ghoul he summoned last week when the queen of Carroway hired him to frighten the queen of Hartswood.” He set the book on top of Marigold’s pile of robes. “I think you’ll find that Wizard Torville is at least six times more wicked than you’ve heard.”
“Impressive,” said Marigold, trying to balance the book under her chin. She supposed that a catalog of Torville’s awful accomplishments might give her some ideas about how to prove her own wickedness. But as she followed Pettifog out of the storeroom, another book caught her eye. It was a slim paperback at the end of the shelf, with its title, Evil in Twenty-Three Minutes a Day, printed in tall red letters on the cover. Underneath that were smaller words printed in black: Exercises for the Mind, Body, and Soul to Unleash the Villain Within. Quickly, before Pettifog could ask why she wasn’t keeping up, Marigold slipped the book off the shelf and added it to her pile.
Pettifog led Marigold deeper into the fortress, past a room full of shadows and shivers, a room full of creaks and whispers, and a room full of raspberry jam. (“A mistake,” explained Pettifog, hurrying by. “Torville needs to speak more clearly when he casts his spells.”) He showed Marigold the dungeon, which was scary; and the underground eel pit, which was scarier; and the walled garden, which was worst of all because bluebells and buttercups still sprang up cheerfully in between the nettles and poison vines. “Rosalind used to love working out here,” Pettifog explained. “When she was six, Torville told her to collect toads for a wart-growing spell, but she sat on that stump for hours, talking to the toads and asking all about their families. Torville had to barge in with a net in the end.” Pettifog shook his head a little sadly as he pulled up a bluebell. “Now that she’s gone, Torville will soon have the place all gloomy and overgrown again.”
Marigold hoped this was true. She was finding it hard to walk through the fortress without imagining how Rosalind might have done it. In the cobwebbed passageways, she thought of Rosalind holding friendly conversations with the spiders. As she climbed the back staircase, she pictured Rosalind polishing the banisters, humming a tune as she worked. Torville was probably glad to be rid of her.
On the second floor of the fortress, Pettifog ushered Marigold past one closed door (“the stairs to Torville’s workroom”), another (“Torville’s bedroom”), and a room with a door that Pettifog quickly pulled shut, though not before Marigold glimpsed a neatly made imp-size bed, an ironing board, and a stack of crisp pressed shirts (“No need to gawk, Princess”). They passed several closets: one full of cobwebs; one full of forgotten things; and one full of regrets, with a doorknob that wouldn’t budge when Marigold tried it. “The closet of regrets,” Pettifog told her, “is strictly off-limits to everyone but Torville — and especially to you.”
Finally, they arrived at a small room with a wrought-iron bed and whitewashed walls. Its window was framed with lace curtains, and its floor was decorated with a cheerful rug. Someone had woven a soft green blanket for the bed, and someone had left a jug of dried flowers on the windowsill.
“Your bedroom, Princess,” said Pettifog.
Marigold sighed. “It used to be Rosalind’s, didn’t it?”
“If you don’t like it, you can sleep in the room full of creaks and whispers. Or in the dungeon, I suppose, or along the edge of the eel pit —”
“No, thank you,” said Marigold before the imp could get any more ideas.
“In that case,” said Pettifog, “I’ll leave you here. You can help yourself to food from the pantry — but not the chocolates; those are mine. And don’t bother Torville. If he wants you for something, he’ll come and find you.” He flicked his tail and smirked at Marigold. “Best of luck being wicked.”
“Seven days,” Marigold muttered, “to do something vile.” She wriggled out of her damp party dress, threw it in a corner, and put on one of the plain work dresses that still hung in Rosalind’s wardrobe. “What a ridiculous test!” The wizard’s robes, when she pulled them over her head, proved to be at least three sizes too large. Marigold studied herself in the mirror, hoping to see a wicked child reflected back at her, but all she saw was a scruffy girl with dark circles under her eyes and crumbs of porridge clinging to the corners of her mouth. No wonder Pettifog had smirked.
Still, Marigold comforted herself, there was no reason why she had to spend the rest of her life as a beetle. She really was wicked. Every time she thought about Rosalind, she could feel her heart race and her temper flare. And there was no way to stop thinking about Rosalind. Rosalind was standing on the cheerful rug. Rosalind was swinging her legs off the side of the bed. Rosalind was arranging the flowers in their vase. Rosalind was pushing the curtains aside and climbing out the window, heading off to Imbervale to ruin everything.
Marigold squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve got to fix this room,” she said. She rolled up the cheerful rug and shoved it into the wardrobe along with the flowers and the lace curtains, which she hid behind the row of work dresses. The soft green blanket she kept — it was cold in the fortress — but she tugged at its threads until it looked ragged and moth-eaten. She even threw open the window and looked for the curious rope that Rosalind had used to escape. There was no sign of it; at least she wouldn’t have to stuff it into the wardrobe, too. The bedroom still wasn’t quite gloomy enough, but from a certain angle, it was starting to look like the sort of place where a wicked child might live. And it was the appearance of things that counted.
From the garden, Marigold picked a bouquet of thorns and nettles to replace the flowers in Rosalind’s jug. From the storeroom, she retrieved a bolt of heavy purple velvet that could be fashioned into drapes. Over a snack of toast and jam, Marigold cracked open Evil in Twenty-Three Minutes a Day and practiced the first exercise, which instructed her to close her eyes, take deep breaths, and imagine herself exploding like a dying star. Then, pleased with her progress, she knocked on Pettifog’s door.
