'Do you have any questions?' the man with the clipboard asked. He spoke disinterestedly, as if no one could have questions and he knew it was silly to even ask. It reminded Cuthbert of the way the person at McPottage always unnecessarily asked people if they wanted to super-size their pottage, though they already knew the answer - no, not ever.
'So. You got lucky twice. But the law of averages is on my side with this one.' That was how statistics worked, right? Cuthbert covered his mathematic uncertainties with a smile. 'You're going down!'
The cobble stone budget, Cuthbert noted, had only stretched so far. From the palace to the back of the marketplace, to be precise. Behind the town square, the stone slabs were spaced further and further apart until they were more like tripping hazards in the middle of dirt roads than they were cobbled paths.
'It hardly looked like the opposite of winning from where I sat,' the queen called from her throne. Her eyes glittered. 'In fact, I'd say quite the opposite.'
Cuthbert grinned. Then faltered. That did mean she was on his side, right?
It would - with the birds chirping overhead, the colourful array of butterflies fluttering between the flowers, and the warm, dewy scent of spring in the air - have been a bright and cheery scene were it not for two worrying details.
The first was how eerily cheery everything was, with the birds and the butterflies and the dewy scent of spring in the air; nothing else in Once-Upon-Thames had seemed this clean and Cuthbert wondered why.
Cuthbert frowned, trying to picture how this whole improbably-beat-you-with-my-sword-in-my-teeth idea might work.
'Wait,' he said, holding up a hand, 'are we both holding our swords in our teeth? Because you might be right, then. I don't think I'd be much good at that.'
Cuthbert tore up the long, winding staircase that led to the top tower, leaping two, three at a time in a heroic bound. At first. After the first thirty stairs, he slowed to a valiant trot. Then a gallant trudge.
'Proving you cheated would be like proving the sky is blue - everyone's already seen it.'
'Sometimes the sky is black,' Cuthbert pointed out helpfully. 'At night, for example. And during solar eclipses.'
Cuthbert rocked back on his feet, feeling proud of a clever point well-made.
'And sometimes - when it's stormy - the sky is grey. When it's sunrise-'
'The sky is blue!' the woman cried. 'It's blue, and it's obvious, and you cheated!'
'-it's pink. Or orange,' Cuthbert finished, as if he hadn't heard her and his tone was petulant for entirely different reasons. 'And when it's really cloudy, it's white. Because of the clouds. That's just science,' he finished haughtily.
It was hard, in his experience, to argue with science. It was too scientific.
The woman was staring at him. Probably in science-induced wonder and bafflement, having forgotten why they'd gotten onto this point in the first place, like he had.
