Thrice Upon a Marigold Read Free

the biggest business were those selling the little striped squashes, the detail-perfect miniatures, the glass-bead necklaces, and the least stinky cheeses, though the crier himself preferred the ones that smelled like old socks. Not everyone’s taste, he knew, but anyway . . . Extra firewood could be picked up outside the cooper’s workshop.)
    Winter was on the way out. Soon darkness would fall later, there would be no ice in the morning washbasin, and there would be even fewer visitors at the library. Phoebe thought summer was always the perfect time to sit out in the sunny gardens, reading, but the problem seemed to be that people stayed out in the gardens doing something else—weeding? games? courtship?—and didn’t want to tear themselves away long enough to come into the quiet, orderly library. Even Queen Marigold and King Christian, normally big readers, were reading less since Princess Poppy had shown up. The servants who usually came in to borrow books for the royal family hadn’t been by for weeks.
    Phoebe shut the window and burrowed into her shawl. She should be closing up and going home, but she liked the library better than the dank stone quarters that had been Boris’s. She’d had nowhere else to live after her father’s exile, so she had scrubbed and painted and brought in colorful fabrics and pillows. But certain nasty stains proved impossible to remove, and she remembered all too well the torture devices that had once stood where she now had her little kitchen table and her wardrobe, and her rocker and footstool.
    Boris’s instruments of torture had been ordered to be destroyed when he was sent away, but Phoebe was pretty sure he had managed to take his favorites with him—the Tongue Tearer, the Roman Pincers, the White-Hot Mitt, and the Dragon’s Teeth. Boris especially loved the Dragon’s Teeth. He had invented it because he loved dragons—their size, their ability to throw flames, their armor-plated scales. All of it fascinated him. It was a passion he shared with Vlad, but Vlad, who was of a different sensibility than Boris was, loved dragons for their cleverness, their wiliness, their beautiful iridescence. And he, too, had an invention that honored the dragon: the infamous and dreaded Dragon’s Sweat poison.
    Phoebe imagined Vlad had smuggled some of it, as well as other toxic mixtures, into exile with him, just as Boris had done with some of his own tools of the trade. It had been a happy day when evil Queen Olympia had fallen into the river, after which King Swithbert had put a stop to all the poisoning and torturing that Olympia had encouraged, and then exiled the perpetrators. Phoebe knew she could never forgive her father for all the terrible cruelties he had inflicted—the damage he had done to her own life was nothing compared to that—and she also knew she never wanted to see him again.
    As she put away the books she had been reading, she realized it had been almost three weeks since Sebastian had borrowed the King Arthur book. She hoped he would bring it back on his own, because she didn’t want to have to track him down to retrieve it; he might be living in Vlad’s previous quarters. They were certain to be nicer than her own inherited rooms (Vlad loved fine things, while Boris could care less), yet she didn’t want to set foot in a place where poisonous vapors had once floated.
    She trudged homeward, thinking,
Maybe he’ll return it tomorrow.
    Â 
    After a consultation, the wizard Wendell had said he believed he
could
determine if any of the fairy gifts were dangerous—on purpose or inadvertently—and Marigold hoped this was true.
    She wished she didn’t have to have the Welcome Party at all. She wanted only to be with Christian and Poppy, in their private quarters, reading and talking, telling elephant jokes and playing together. She must remember to include the dogs, too. She knew Flopsy,