“Too ambitious, Marigold. You’re not ready for dreamwork.”
“A spell to make toads and snakes fall from someone’s mouth?”
“Who do you think you are, the Twice-Times Witch?”
“Fine.” Marigold flipped backward through one of the spell books. She had read it all the way through, or at least she’d thought she had, but now her fingers came to rest on a page near the back that she’d missed before. “‘The Overlook Curse,’” she read aloud. “‘A spell to’— oh! It’s a spell that causes someone to be ignored!”
This time, Torville didn’t exactly sneer. “And who are you planning to cast it on?”
“Rosalind, of course!” Marigold skimmed the page of instructions; the ingredients didn’t look impossible to collect, and the incantation was simple enough. “It’s the perfect curse,” she said. “Even Pettifog won’t be able to mock it. What could be wickeder than taking away all of Rosalind’s attention?” Marigold scrambled to her feet. She could imagine it already: the fireworks vanishing from the night sky, the throngs of visitors wandering back to their own kingdoms, and Rosalind left all alone in the palace, wondering why even her own parents didn’t have time for her anymore. It was the worst feeling Marigold could think of.
“Ignoring Rosalind!” Torville curled his mustache thoughtfully around a fingertip. “What an interesting idea.” He took the spell book out of Marigold’s hands and studied the curse. “It isn’t designed for novices,” he said, “and it’s a long-distance enchantment, not one you can bottle. It will bounce right off the palace’s anti-wizard defenses.”
Marigold thought quickly. “I’ll cast it in the early morning,” she said. “Rosalind likes to go out for a ride before breakfast.”
“In that case,” said Torville, “you may as well try. The spell is certainly wicked, and you’ve got a strong intention. But you’d better have your ingredients prepared and your incantations learned before your week here is up.” He closed the spell book and handed it back to Marigold. “I’ve never met a beetle who could stir a cauldron properly, and I doubt you’ll be the first.”
Torville had been right. The Overlook Curse wasn’t going to be easy for Marigold to cast, even with a whole storeroom full of strange ingredients at her fingertips. She spent hours digging through the jars on the shelves, ignoring Pettifog’s frets and reprimands to be careful, until she’d found two of the ingredients she needed: a canister of snail shells and a jug of swamp mist. Then the snail shells had to be ground by hand into a fine powder and the swamp mist measured out by teaspoonfuls into a smaller container. Using a mortar and pestle to grind up the shells gave Marigold blisters, and when she accidentally knocked over the jug of swamp mist, it cast a thick haze over the ground floor of the fortress that made it impossible to go anywhere without walking into a wall. “She’s going to make me break my nose, Torville!” Marigold could hear Pettifog yelping from somewhere in the murk. “Can’t you stop her?”
“I doubt it,” Torville shouted back. He had refused to help Marigold prepare her curse, but at least he wasn’t trying to interfere with it. And Marigold didn’t mind being left alone; she had plenty of other ingredients to gather. They were the ones that couldn’t be found in a storeroom: a fistful of fresh ragweed harvested under a new moon, the first yawn of a morning, a strand of hair from the person to be cursed, and a pinch of salt. There was salt in Torville’s pantry, but how could Marigold collect a yawn? And how was she supposed to get a strand of Rosalind’s hair? She couldn’t walk back to Imbervale and yank some from her sister’s perfect head. Worst of all was the problem with the ragweed: it grew in the fortress garden, but according to Torville’s almanac, the new moon wasn’t going to rise until dawn on Saturday, almost a full day after Marigold’s deadline. When she asked Torville if he could please make the new moon arrive a little earlier, he laughed so loudly and for so long that porridge came out of his nose, and Pettifog told her in the meantime that no enchanter, good or wicked, could work a spell as enormous as that. So Marigold handed Torville a napkin and decided to collect the ragweed on Thursday, under an almost-new moon. Collin had told her that he sometimes made small changes to Cook’s recipes, swapping brown sugar for white or lime juice for lemon, and, in his opinion, the swaps made the food taste even better. Maybe, Marigold thought hopefully, it was the same way with magic.
While she waited for the moon to wane, Marigold practiced reciting the Overlook Curse’s eerie incantation, stomping up and down the fortress stairs to keep the rhythm until Pettifog threatened to lock her in the dungeon if she didn’t quiet down. After that, she practiced outdoors, marching around the moat and keeping a careful distance from the Thing. She chalked simple calculations on the workroom blackboard, and when Torville wouldn’t let her borrow his scale to weigh out her powdered snail shells, she constructed a balance of her own from teacup saucers and string. It wobbled a little more than Marigold would have liked, but she was almost sure it worked properly. On Monday, she found an empty glass bottle to keep by her bed; on Tuesday morning, she yawned into it as soon as she woke up, sealing the bottle with a cork before the yawn could escape. On Wednesday, she took all of Rosalind’s old work dresses out of the wardrobe and searched through them until she found a single long strand of golden hair snagged on a button. In all the Cacophonous Kingdoms, no one else but Rosalind had hair as long and golden as that. Marigold, feeling fairly triumphant, plucked it from the dress.
“I’m almost ready to cast my spell,” she reported to Pettifog in the kitchen that evening. A countess in Whitby had ordered a potion to curse her social rival in Quail Gardens with bad breath, and the potion required such enormous amounts of minced garlic that Torville had enlisted both Pettifog and Marigold to help with the preparation. “I’ve only got the ragweed left to collect.”
Pettifog looked up from his cutting board and studied Marigold from head to socks. “The Overlook Curse is very wicked,” he said at last, “but I don’t think you can pull it off.”
It really wasn’t fair. On top of preparing for the curse, Marigold had been practicing the first few exercises from Evil in Twenty-Three Minutes a Day, training her mouth to scowl and her eyebrows to arch, making lists of all the people who had ever been unkind to her, and stepping on ants in the fortress garden. She hadn’t enjoyed the ant exercise at all; it made her stomach hurt, and she’d ended it after only five minutes instead of the recommended twenty-three. But the scowling was going well, and she scowled at Pettifog now. “I will pull it off,” she told him in what she hoped was a chilling voice. “You’ll see.”
Pettifog wrinkled his forehead. “Why do you look like a toad with a toothache?”
“Oh, honestly!” Marigold scowled harder.
Torville had been scowling more frequently, too. The shrieking teakettle sound had blared through the fortress at least once a day, making Torville drop whatever he was doing and run up to the workroom to have a shouting match with the Miseries. As far as Marigold could tell from eavesdropping, there were only two of them, Elgin and Vivien. But they made Torville more furious than the rest of his clients put together, and it sounded like they were trying to order him around, which seemed awfully bold to Marigold.
Whatever the Miseries wanted, Torville wasn’t happy about it. On Thursday morning, while Marigold was eating porridge and thinking about a dish-scrubbing contraption, Torville poofed into the kitchen with such a loud bang that all the plates and bowls in the room shuddered, including Marigold’s. She wiped porridge from her lap and trained her well-practiced scowl at Torville. “Do you have to do that?”
Torville stomped to the stove, thwacked more porridge into his own bowl, and sat down beside her. “I can do whatever I want,” he said, “and what I want to do is make loud noises and break things. Where’s Pettifog?”
“Outside,” said Marigold, “feeding the Thing.” Marigold wasn’t sure exactly what the Thing ate when it wasn’t eating princesses, and she hadn’t wanted to ask.
Torville groaned. “But I need to complain to him!”
“You can complain to me,” Marigold pointed out. “You usually do that anyway.”
Torville pursed his lips together the way he did when he was weighing out ingredients for a spell; only this time, he seemed to be taking the measure of Marigold.
“Is it the Miseries?” Marigold guessed. “Are they ordering you around again?”
“They always do!” Torville howled. “Elgin is an inconsiderate grump, and Vivien is a nightmare. They keep trying to twist my arm, but I won’t have it. I’m the wickedest one, and the smartest. They should listen to me! I’m supposed to talk with them again tomorrow, but I don’t want to.” He slurped his porridge. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
“Can’t you just curse them?” Marigold asked. “Turn them into marmalade beetles? It sounds like they deserve it.”
“Marmorated,” said Torville. “And, no, I can’t, although I’d very much like to. It goes against the bond. The Villains’ Bond,” he added, answering the question Marigold had been going to ask. “It governs every evil wizard, witch, and sorcerer across the Cacophonous Kingdoms. We’re not allowed to do harm to our fellow villains. It’s necessary, you see, because most of us are absolutely awful. If we didn’t have an agreement, we’d all be at each other’s throats.”
That, Marigold realized, was what set the Miseries apart from Torville’s other clients. They were wizards, too, or something like it. “What happens if you break the bond?” she asked.
“The other villains send a series of plagues,” said Torville. “One hundred and five of them, I think. Unkillable wasps, unquenchable fire, losing your toes one at a time — and those are the pleasant ones. They’re not worth suffering through just to make the Miseries miserable.”
Marigold agreed. She wiggled her toes inside her socks to make sure all of them were accounted for. “Why don’t you ignore their calls?” she asked. “When my parents get messages from the rulers of other Cacophonous Kingdoms, they sometimes pretend to be much too busy to answer.” King Godfrey was always much too busy for the king of Stickelridge, in particular, who had once tricked him into sitting on a porcupine.
“I can’t ignore the Miseries,” said Torville dejectedly. “If I do, they’ll come to visit.”
“Who’s coming to visit?” Pettifog called from the entryway. He clopped into the kitchen, wearing a thick scarf and a panicked expression. “It’s the Miseries, isn’t it? Don’t let them in, Torville; lock all the doors if you have to. Vanish the doors! If you make us invisible, they’ll think we’ve moved!”
“You see?” Torville said to Marigold. “It’s not worth the risk. I’ve got to talk to them tomorrow.” He pushed aside his porridge bowl, even though he’d taken only a few bites. “Today, I’m going to finish that potion for Countess Snoot-Harley. If either of you decides to bother me, you’ll find me in my workroom, reeking of garlic.”
The midnight paint in Marigold’s room made it difficult for her to tell when dawn had arrived, but she woke up early the next morning without any help from the sun. It was Friday, a week to the day since she had crossed through the wildwood. Back in Imbervale, Rosalind was preparing for her morning ride. And at Torville’s fortress, Marigold’s time was nearly up.
She didn’t try to eat breakfast; her stomach felt too tender for food. She pulled on her robes and washed her face, wondering all the while if this was the last morning she’d look in the mirror and see a human girl staring back at her. Pettifog didn’t think she was even a little bit wicked. He was wrong about that; he had to be wrong, but only a perfect performance of the Overlook Curse was likely to convince him otherwise. So Marigold gathered her ingredients — sixty grams of powdered snail shells, five teaspoons of swamp mist, a pinch of salt, one of Rosalind’s hairs, her own bottled yawn, and the ragweed she’d picked from the garden the previous day — and climbed the stairs to Torville’s workroom.
Torville and Pettifog were already there. “Good morning, Princess,” said Pettifog, sounding almost chipper. “Are you here to show me how horrible you can be?”
Marigold set down her supplies. “That’s right,” she said. “I’m going to curse Rosalind. When I’m done with my spell, none of us will even remember her name.” She hoped this was true, although she couldn’t quite imagine what life would be like without Rosalind always hovering at the edge of her thoughts, like a storybook tale she wished she could forget.
Torville and Pettifog watched carefully as Marigold tipped each ingredient into the cauldron. Her hands trembled a little, but she didn’t spill anything. Then Torville handed her a long-handled wooden spoon.
“Remember,” he said. “Ingredients. Incantation. And intention.” He stepped back a few paces. “Please begin.”
Marigold nodded. She began to stir the cauldron, scraping her spoon against its sides to keep the rhythm. Ignore Rosalind, she thought to herself. Ignore. Ignore. Her hands kept trembling, more than they ever had when she’d climbed the palace roof or sneaked into a place where she wasn’t supposed to be, but she recited her incantation:
“Like the spinning of the spheres,
like raven’s breath and lizard’s song,
like stones that crumble with the years
and spiders’ dreams, and termites’ tears
and little children’s deepest fears
and rich men’s wrongs —”
Marigold hesitated. There was no heat to warm the cauldron, but somehow the ingredients inside it had melted and spread into a thick gray-green paste that bubbled and smoked as she stirred it. Every time she looked into the pot, there seemed to be more of it. And the singed scent of wicked magic in the workroom was stronger than ever. Marigold took a deep breath, choked a little on the smoke from the cauldron, and continued:
