The Outsorcerer's Apprentice (21 page)

And this seriously weird person was the single most powerful entity in the known world.

Um, he thought.

“
W
hat we need,” Buttercup said thoughtfully, “is a name.”

“You what?” replied Sir Turquine through a mouthful of nails.

Buttercup balanced a turnip on top of the pile, turning it slightly so that its best side was facing the street. “For the stall,” she said. “It needs a name. A distinctive identity.”

“What it needs—” Turquine paused to hammer in a nail; which he did, eventually, after hammering other things in the process, his thumb included. “What it needs is a roof, in case it rains. Here, pass me that bit of wood. No, not that one, the other one.”

Buttercup, daughter, niece, granddaughter, great-great-granddaughter and so on back to an infinite succession of expert carpenters and cabinetmakers, didn’t say anything. Instead, she smiled. Turquine bent a couple of nails in the crossbar, which then peeled off sideways and hit him on the head. He said some words that knights probably weren’t supposed to know, and started again. She liked him for that. Ninety-nine knights out of a hundred at this point would’ve vindicated their honour by reducing the stall to matchwood with a battle-axe.

“Something people can remember,” Buttercup said. “That way, you foster customer loyalty and ensure sustainable market share. It’s essential.”

Turquine looked at her in amazement for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “Call it Turquine and Buttercup’s. Or Buttercup and Turquine’s, if you think that’s—”

“Oh no.” She shook her head. “Where’s the hook in that? Where’s the
je ne sais quoi
?”

“You what?”

She frowned. She’d never heard the words before, but she knew. “It means: I don’t know what.”

“You don’t know what?”

“That’s right.”

“Sorry, I’m getting confused here. What don’t you know?”

She sighed. “
I
don’t know, do I? It’s just an expression. It means—”

“You don’t know what it means?”

“
It’s an expression
.” She took a deep breath, and the bluebirds, which had ducked for cover under the eaves of a nearby house, crept back out and carried on singing. “Just our names won’t make a very good name for the stall. We need a
word
.”

Pause. “Names are words.”

She drew in a breath, but forbore to use it, and a thought struck her. Maybe, she thought, this is what happy-ever-after actually is; in real life, if it’s capable of existing there at all. Maybe happy-ever-after means not always seeing eye to eye, now and then letting slip a less than kind word, maybe even once in a while wanting to throttle the other half of one’s very soul with one’s bare hands; all that, but it doesn’t really
matter
, because even so, in spite of that and his occasional annoying turns of phrase and the fact he can’t even knock a nail in straight; even so—

Um. Even so what? Oh,
je ne
bloody
sais quoi
. It doesn’t
matter
, that’s all. And that’s happy-ever-after, not the simpering, cow-eyed adoration, the hands-over-the-eyes-guess-who soppiness she’d been brought up on and never quite managed to believe in. And belief was everything, wasn’t it?

“All right,” Turquine said suddenly. “How about Turquine’s Excellent Stall?”

She turned and stared at him. “Actually,” she said, “that’s not bad.”

“Well, it’s a bit long.”

“Oh, that’s all right, people’ll shorten it. Probably right down to the first letters of each word.”

He mouthed the initials silently under his breath. “You know—” he said.

“And we need to make it sound a bit more–well,
bigger
, if you know what I mean. Like, it’s different from all the other stalls, it’s not just two buckets, a sheet and some planks of wood, it’s a
thing
. With an
identity
.”

“Okay.” He thought for a moment. “How about The Turquine’s Excellent Stall
Company
? That’s like more sort of—”

“Corporate,” she said. “Yes, you’re right, that’s brilliant.”

“I’m not sure,” he said doubtfully. “It’s rather a mouthful, isn’t it?”

“Not when people shorten it down, like I said.” She took a step back to admire her work. “How much did we pay for these swedes?”

“Fourpence a ton.”

“Perfect. We can charge a farthing a pound, undercut the competition by fifty per cent, and still make out like bandits.” She wrote in a number on a scrap of plywood and perched it on top of the pile. “This is such a good idea,” she said. “What amazes me is that nobody’s—”

He was squinting at the piece of plywood. “What does ‘organic’ mean?”

“Oh, that. It means it was grown entirely free from chemical fertilisers or pesticides. Which means you can charge double, at least.”

“Ah.” He frowned. “But nobody round here uses that stuff.”

“Yes, but—”

“Nobody can afford to, it costs an arm and a leg. That’s why the yields are rubbish.”

“Yes, all right, but it’s still
true
. All our produce is hundred per cent organic. So, if it’s true, why not say so?”

“Because nobody knows what organic means?”

She smiled. “They will,” she said. “Trust me, they will.”

Turquine drove the last nail into the canopy frame. This time, he managed to catch it before it hit him. “It’s not going to rain,” he said briskly. “We don’t need a canopy.” He threw the hammer into the toolbox and sat down on an upturned bucket. “What’s sustainable market share?” he said.

“What? Oh, that’s when people keep coming back to your stall rather than anyone else’s. We need that. Good for business.”

“Fine. Only, I never heard it called that before.”

“Nor me,” Buttercup admitted. “The words were suddenly just there in my head, and I understood them. It happens quite a lot, actually.”

“Is that right?” Turquine looked at her a bit sideways.

“Yes. A lot more often just lately, mind.”

Turquine put down the sack of carrots he was carrying. “I knew a girl once who suddenly got words in her head,” he said. “Trouble was, the words were stuff like
drive the Elves out of Tarn Gethemir
, and when the Elves got to hear about it, I have to say, things did not go well for her. Yours aren’t anything like that, are they?”

“Certainly not,” Buttercup said sharply. “Mostly it’s stuff
like
macroeconomic climate
and
exchange rate mechanism
, and what’s really strange about it is, I know what they mean.”

“Really?”

“Yes. No.” She scowled. “I know that price-to-cash-flow ratio is calculated by dividing share price by cash flow per share to find the number of years of free cash flow required to recoup the initial purchase price, but—”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know what
that
means. It’s just there, in my head. It’s like I learned it by heart years ago and then forgot I’d ever seen it before. I mean, what’s a share, for crying out loud?”

“I know that,” Turquine said. “It’s the steel bit on a plough. I heard somewhere you make them out of swords or something.”

“Oh. Yes, but cash doesn’t
flow
. It sort of rolls and bounces.”

Turquine thought hard. “I think it must be magic,” he said. “Wizard stuff.”

“I’d sort of gathered that. But what does it—?”

“It’s a spell,” Turquine said. “For farmers and blacksmiths. You pour the money it takes to buy a plough over the blade thing, and it tells you–no, that doesn’t work. You can’t have heard it quite right, in your head.”

She sighed. Well, at least he hadn’t told her she was imagining things, and not to be so silly. And maybe he couldn’t knock a nail in straight, but if she wanted nails driven in properly, she could hire a man to do that, she didn’t have to marry one. Happy-ever-after; realist’s shorthand for
not too miserable quite a lot of the time
. She looked round the marketplace, at the apple-cheeked countryfolk, the cheerful woodcutters, the laughing children, the shoppers with their baskets over their arms, chatting with the jovial stallholders. That’s happy-ever-after, she thought–also happy before and
happy during, always happy, nothing but happy, and why? Because they were being
fooled
, was why.

“Buttercup? Are you all right?”

Sweet of him to be concerned. “I’m fine.”

“No you aren’t. You’ve gone a funny colour and you’re shaking.”

“Oh, I just realised something, that’s all.”

He looked closely at her. “More words in your head?”

“No.” She closed her eyes for a moment while she thought. “It’s like–it’s like I’ve had a particular bit of knowledge for a long time without realising, and I’ve just tripped over it and noticed it’s there.” She reached out and grabbed his arm. “Turquine,” she said, “what exactly do you know about the wizard?”

He frowned. “Well, he’s magical.”

“Yes. Apart from that.”

“Um. Well, he pays good money for dragon carcasses, and the dwarves and the goblins sell him shining yellow rocks—”

“And my family make planks for him.”

“And he’s a whatsisname, philanthropist and patron of the arts, because it was the wizard who originally endowed the Sylvan Youth Orchestra, or so someone told me. Why?”

She pushed him gently away. “Just a minute,” she said. “I need time to think.”

He looked at her sideways. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll just finish setting out the broccoli.”

She sat down on a wall and tried to make sense of the ideas swirling round inside her head. Take love, for example; her own mother and father, thirty years and never a cross word. Or the bashful, smiling woodcutters, forever popping up out of the bushes holding bunches of flowers. It was hard for her, because her own experience was so limited, but it stood to reason; you can’t really love someone for thirty years without yelling at them occasionally, it can’t be done. And if
there’s a form of relationship that can endure that long without blazing rows, slammed doors and flying crockery, it’s something else, it isn’t
love
. It’s love in the same way that a firewood-and-wolf-plunder based economy is an economy. It wouldn’t work for five minutes unless someone was
messing around with it
; someone playing dolls with a whole world.

And who, she asked herself, might that possibly be? Rhetorical question.

She got up and walked over to the stall, where Turquine had somehow managed to get the canopy to stay up. True, it looked a bit like a heavily pregnant flag, but it’s the thought that counts. “Turquine,” she said, “would you mind terribly much if we put the stall on hold for a little while and went and did something else for a bit?”

He looked at her, and his nose twitched. “Such as?”

“I want to go and ask the wizard something,” she said. “And if he won’t give me a straight answer, I want you to hit him until he does. Would that be all right?”

“Oh.” For a moment he seemed almost disappointed, but then he frowned, as if to indicate that, actually, he wouldn’t mind doing that at all. “Sure,” he said. “Only—”

“Yes?”

“You do realise we’ve paid for the pitch in advance? And I don’t think they’ll give us our money back.”

“Turquine,” she said solemnly. “There are some things in this life that are more important than money.”

“Um.”

“Not many of them. In fact, amazingly few. Maybe three. But this is one of them. All right?”

The clear, bright light of trust shining in his eyes was her sun, her stars. “Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

“
Splendid
. Right, get the horses and we’ll be off. Oh and Turquine—”

“Yes?”

She bit her lip. “Better bring your sword and your armour and stuff. Just to be on the safe side. You never know.”

He thought for a moment, and she realised; he’s really quite brave, which is a good thing. Very brave wouldn’t be good, because the dividing line between very brave and fatally stupid is on the thin side, but quite brave is actually
useful
. She turned away, but he called her back. “Buttercup.”

“Yes?”

“What are the other two things?”

“Get the horses.”

“Right you are.” He stopped dead. “Buttercup.”

“Yes?”

“Your basket.” He was staring at it. “Why’s it making that funny noise?”

“What funny—?” And then she heard it too. Like singing. Like the distant sound of the Elves in the forest, but definitely coming from the basket. Instinctively she reached for her hatchet, but, of course, it was where it always was, in the—

“It’s asking me,” Turquine said quietly, “to help me make it through the night.”

They looked at each other. “Make what through the night?”

Turquine shrugged. “It, apparently. I don’t know, do I? It’s your basket, you ask it.”

And then she had one of those little lurches of intuition, the sort she was starting to get used to, the same way you get used to a loved one’s snoring, and she reached down into the basket, groped around until she found Florizel’s strange grey slate, and pulled it out. The noise, the little tinny voice, was indisputably coming from inside it.

“What the hell,” Turquine said, “is that?”

“No idea,” Buttercup said. “But I think it belongs to Florizel. I think he dropped it in the—”