“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?”
“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.
