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:
“Like silent footsteps on the stairs,
like rot that creeps upon a tree,
like fairies’ cries and goblins’ hairs
and mold beneath a ripened pear
and all the world’s unnoticed cares —”
Marigold stopped again. The last four words of the spell were the most important of all, and she needed to get them just right. She needed to keep her rhythm; she needed to keep her intention. But her whole body was trembling now, and the awful bubbling paste kept rising in the cauldron — and the higher it rose, the more Marigold wondered just what it would do to Rosalind. Would Rosalind be hurt? She had never tried to hurt Marigold. And Marigold supposed it wasn’t Rosalind’s fault, really, that she was so intensely good, or that her hair gleamed like the summer sunshine, or that everyone loved her. Marigold should have loved her, too.
“Intention!” Torville snapped. “Finish the spell! Now!”
“So may you be!” Marigold shouted.
As the words left her mouth, the paste rose up to the top of the cauldron, still bubbling furiously. The smoke grew thicker and filled the room. Then there was an electric yellow flash and a boom like a thunderclap, and Marigold was knocked off her feet.
It took a full minute for the smoke to clear, and almost as long for Marigold to catch her breath. She stood up gingerly and looked around the workroom. It was a mess. Books and jars and pieces of chalk had fallen off the shelves, the blackboard had rolled across the floor, and a few of the leaded-glass windowpanes were cracked. The cauldron didn’t look damaged, but it was completely empty. Pettifog sat on the workroom floor, dusting off his suit with his handkerchief.
