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Marigold came into the world as most ordinary children do, squinting and squalling. This time, the king and queen of Imbervale had taken precautions: every sneak and scoundrel had been swept out of the kingdom; the royal magician had woven a web of protective spells around the palace grounds; and at the moment Marigold was born, six royal guards were appointed to watch over the little princess day and night. Soon enough, however, it became clear to everyone that no evil wizard was going to steal so much as a glance in her direction. Her smile was kind, but it couldn’t mend a scraped knee. Her laughter was bright, but it had no obvious effect on any of the plants in the palace gardens. She occasionally sulked. And on the morning of her third birthday, when she wasn’t allowed to eat cake for breakfast, she drew in her breath, stuck out her lower lip, and threw such a tantrum that all six of her royal guards resigned on the spot. “I don’t think,” said a nursemaid, slipping cotton wool into her ears, “that Princess Rosalind ever howled quite so loudly.”
Marigold grew up hearing all about Rosalind. The nursemaids talked about her often. So did the gardeners, the cooks, the stable hands, the royal steward, the farmers in their fields, and the shopkeepers in the market square, each of whom seemed to remember a different precious detail about the sister Marigold had never met. Some evenings at bedtime, King Godfrey and Queen Amelia would tell Marigold how Rosalind had once nursed an injured fox kit back to health or about the time that her sweet songs had soothed the temper of the famously irritable Imbervale dragon. Marigold preferred the evenings when they would read to her from storybooks, even if the king and queen insisted on skipping past all the most interesting tales — those about Gentleman Northwinds, who conjured up the chilling breeze that first turned the Cacophonous Kingdoms against one another, or the Twice—Times Witch, who took two journeys into the demonic realms where most humans didn’t dare to travel even once, returning each time with an imp to help her cast her wicked charms. Once Marigold was old enough to read on her own, those were the stories she turned to late at night when she was supposed to be sleeping.
It wasn’t easy for Marigold to do only the things she was supposed to do. This was especially true in Imbervale Palace, which was full of twisting back passageways and long—forgotten staircases that Marigold wasn’t strictly allowed to use. She explored them all, of course. She even found a loose panel in the wall of the Green Gallery, where she could eavesdrop on her parents’ important royal business. When she got bored of listening to advisers and undersecretaries filing through with complaints about the latest disturbances caused by the other Cacophonous Kingdoms — a scourge of mosquitoes sent from Whitby, for example, or a headache spell from Tiskaree dusting the market square — Marigold would sneak away, shimmy out a window that no one ever remembered to lock, and clamber onto the sloping roof of the east tower.
The rooftop was Marigold’s favorite secret spot in the palace. If the weather was clear, she could see all the way to the wildwood, a vast tangle of trees at the kingdom’s edge. Like the palace roof and the Green Gallery, the wildwood was a place where she was not allowed, but unlike the roof or the gallery, it was hard to reach without being caught. Soldiers from Imbervale sometimes rode off in that direction, searching for a path to Wizard Torville’s fortress, but none of them knew quite where the wizard lived, and paths through the wildwood weren’t so easily found.
“I bet I could find a path, though,” Marigold whispered to her best friend, Collin, as they stood in the courtyard one day, watching another bedraggled and unsuccessful group of soldiers return to the palace.
“You probably could,” Collin agreed, “and I’d come with you. We could be two brave heroes, riding through the trees and fighting dragons!” Collin, who worked in the palace as a kitchen boy, loved storybooks, too, but his favorite tales were different from Marigold’s.
Occasionally, Marigold was caught doing things she shouldn’t. Once, while she eavesdropped on the royal steward explaining to King Godfrey that the kingdom of Hartswood had hired a wizard to levitate every pair of shoes in the village twenty feet in the air, she sneezed loudly three times in a row. She hoped no one had heard, but the steward himself — a man in a trim blue suit who was often unimpressed by Marigold — marched across the Green Gallery, pushed aside the loose wall panel, and looked down at her, more unimpressed than ever.
Marigold glowered back at the steward, mostly because she was too ashamed to look at her father. King Godfrey was probably scratching his beard just below the left ear, as he always did when he felt uncomfortable. “Marigold, my love,” said the king, “please come out of there.”
Marigold crawled out of her hiding space and brushed the cobwebs from her dress. “Hello, Papa,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
King Godfrey sighed. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you happened to end up inside the wall by accident?”
Marigold shook her head. She wished it had been an accident; then her father wouldn’t have sounded so disappointed. “I wanted to hear about the shoes,” she admitted. “Why did Hartswood make them all float in the air?”
“Because Hartswood,” said King Godfrey, pulling Marigold onto his lap, “is a place where no one has ever learned to act with decency. The queen herself hires wizards to curse those of us who’ve done nothing wrong!” He seemed much happier to be scolding Hartswood than he had been scolding Marigold. “And the other eight kingdoms are just as bad — always causing some kind of uproar, always bending the rules as far as they’ll stretch. That sort of behavior might be all right in the wildwood and the wastes, but it shouldn’t be allowed in any respectable kingdom. We certainly don’t allow it in Imbervale.” He turned Marigold’s face toward his own. “Especially not from a princess of Imbervale. Do you understand?”
Marigold thought she did. “I’ll be good,” she promised.
King Godfrey kissed her on the forehead. “Good,” he pronounced, as if she already were.
