My dear apprentice, I told you last time that I had found my valley, and I suspect you went away believing that the finding was the hard part. I believed so myself, for about a week. What came after had nothing to do with whether people came to my door and everything to do with what I said once they arrived. I mean the price. I will give you numbers tonight, and I ask your patience, because I have noticed that those who dislike arithmetic and those who dislike being told what they are worth are very nearly the same people, and for a long while I was both.
You will remember that I cut my price twice before I found a single true customer. On the dockside I asked fifteen coppers, which Brogan thought a poor exchange for a pair of boots. I lowered it to thirteen for the cooper’s apprentice, who never saw it. And on the evening I first met Corin, I cut it to eight, a single copper above what the ingredients cost me. A journeyman in Corvana earned perhaps six coppers a day, so that you have something to stand every number against. I told you I called that second cut kindness, and that whether it was something else belonged to a later evening. This is that evening.
I called the weeks that followed the first ten, because that was the number I was counting. Not every vial sold, but only those who bought because a door was closing behind them and came back to tell me what the hour had shown them.
I kept two ledgers on the bench in the tower. The Steadfast Elixir’s had columns for cost and price, and a monthly total that paid the lease with a few coppers to spare. The second belonged to the Elixir of Success, and it had a column for names. Beside Corin and Idony and the four who followed, I had written the word eight. I had not ruled a column for cost. I knew what it cost me. Seven, I said to myself often, in the confident tone of a man reciting a number he has decided not to look at.
Eight was not carelessness. It was a principle, and I was rather proud of it. I had priced the Steadfast Elixir for the pockets of porters, and drawn from that a rule: I would not grow comfortable on the troubles of people who had little, nor sell to a frightened person at the price of his fear. I did not ask whether the hour was worth more than eight coppers to Corin. I asked only whether I could bear to be seen taking more. That is a different question, and a vain one, though it wears the clothes of humility very well.
Twenty-three vials glowed on the shelf above that bench. The seventh name belonged to a silversmith’s apprentice called Lisbeth, who asked me the first question about my price that I could not answer.
She came out of the Hall after eight years at a smith’s bench, thin and straight-backed, with small white burn scars across her knuckles, and looked at me the way she must have looked at a stranger’s silver, turning it over for the maker’s mark. She heard my plain account of the elixir, asked what I wanted for it, and I told her.
“Eight coppers,” she said, slowly, as though checking a weight. “What’s wrong with it?”
I told her nothing was wrong with it.
“Then why’s it so cheap? I’ve spent eight years at a bench where nobody sells a thing under its worth. A man who sells a fine ring cheap is either a thief who stole the silver or a fool who doesn’t know what he’s holding. You tell me this can show a person what to do with the rest of her life. For eight coppers. I’d pay that for a decent pair of tongs. So either you don’t believe what you’ve just said, or it’s plated.”
I told her, with more heat than the moment required, that I priced it low out of consideration for people freed with nothing in their pockets but a paper.
“Then you’ve priced it for my pocket,” Lisbeth said. “Not for the thing. I can’t tell from that number what you think it’s worth, and if you can’t tell me, I don’t know how I’m meant to.”
I had no answer. I had set my price by asking what a freed apprentice could bear, which is a question about the apprentice. I had never asked what the elixir itself was worth.
She bought the vial, saying, “I’ll be testing this. If it’s plated, I’ll be back.” Three days later she sent word through Senna. The hour had worked: it had shown her that what she loved best was mending the heirloom silver of families too poor to replace it. But she had spent the first quarter of the hour looking for the trick, she wrote, waiting for the plating to show. If I had asked twice what I asked, she would have trusted it sooner.
I had thought of my low price as a gift. It had never occurred to me that a price is the first thing a customer learns about your work, and that it speaks on your behalf before you open your mouth. Mine had spoken in a mumble.
That afternoon I found Halbrook arranging dried fish in rows as exact as a surveyor’s chain. “So?” he said, which was his entire greeting and a considerable portion of his philosophy. I asked him how he decided what to charge.
“Everyone asks what I pay the boat,” he said, “as though that were the price of a fish. What I pay the boat is the beginning of it. There’s the salt, and the racks, and the rent of this patch of stones, and the hours I stand here from before light. And there’s every fifth fish that goes to the cats at the end of the week because nobody wanted it. A man who prices at what he paid the boat is working for the fish.”
I said, a little stiffly, that my vials did not spoil.
“No. But what did the batches that went wrong cost you? Every batch that went into the wall is a fish you paid for and threw away, and the ones that came out right have to carry them. It’s no sin. It’s only that most men would rather not know the number.” He gave me his flat, appraising look. “You told me what you charge with your shoulders up round your ears, like a man hoping I’d say it was too much. A man who doesn’t count his hours has decided they’re worth nothing, and the market takes him at his word.”
I thanked him, admired his words the way one admires a fine tool in another man’s hand, and told myself that fish and vials were different trades. They were. The arithmetic was not.
I went next to Corin’s shop above the dye works, every wall hung with thread in colors I had no names for. He had sold out in a week, taken on a boy to spool for him, and earned more in three weeks than in the last year of his bond.
I asked him, with my heart going rather fast, what he would have paid for that hour if I had asked for more.
He put down his spool and looked at the wall of thread a while. “That week, I’d have given you everything I had. Which was forty coppers and a good winter coat, and I’d have had to think about the coat. Forty, gladly. Sixty, I’d have grumbled, and found it somewhere. A hundred, I’d have walked away and been the poorer for it.” He looked at me. “You didn’t know that.”
I told him I had never asked.
“You couldn’t have, before. Nobody knows what the hour’s worth until he’s had it. But you’ve had a handful of us now. The next one on those steps, you tell him what it did for us, and then you name your number. That’s all my trade is. A weaver who runs short mid-bolt loses days he can’t get back. I don’t charge him for the dye. I charge him for the days.”
As I turned to go, he pressed eight more coppers into my hand, for what the hour had done. I gave them back so quickly the coins rang on the floor. He looked a little hurt, and then amused. “In my trade,” he said, “we call that leaving thread on the spool.”
I carried his three numbers into the street, forty, sixty, a hundred. I had thought of a price as a single point. He had given me a map: the near shore, where a man pays without thinking, the middle ground, where he pays and grumbles, and the far shore, where he will not pay at all. I had been standing at the water’s edge, at eight, never once looking up to see that the land went on.
The eighth was a rope-maker’s apprentice named Wenna, sent by Idony, a stout, quick-tongued young woman with hands as rough as tarred cord. I told her the elixir was eight coppers.
“I’ve five,” she said.
I want you to understand how short a time it takes to do a thing like this. Before she finished the word I had thought: it costs me seven. And in the next breath I thought of the sealed paper in her hand, and of Idony telling me she had no coin for dreams, only for supper. “Five will do,” I said, and stood on my own steps with five coppers, two fewer than the vial had cost me, feeling a warmth in my chest that I mistook for virtue.
I told Osric that evening at the Anchor and Rope as a story about a generous man. When I finished, he set his cup down very carefully.
“She said she had five. Did you ask what she’d pay if you held at eight and let her think on it a day? That wasn’t a price, Eldric. That was a prayer. When a man asks me to take a tenth off a hull repair, I do it sometimes, but I ask what I’m getting for it. A discount’s a trade. What did you buy with those three coppers? A man who’s chosen can tell you why. You flinched.” Then, more gently: “A man who always takes less never has to hear no. It’s a comfort. It also means he never finds out what yes is worth.”
A discount is a decision. It has a reason, a limit, and an end, and you can say all three aloud to the person receiving it. A flinch has none of these. It is only the sound a man makes when his number meets a disappointed face, and it feels so exactly like generosity that it takes a friend to tell them apart. A week later Wenna sent me a coil of fine cord. A customer who sends you a gift worth more than the price is telling you what she thought the price should have been.
The ninth, a glazier’s apprentice named Hob, paid eight without a word, and I never heard from him again. Not every customer is a story, and the ones who are not are most of what a business is made of.
The tenth was a potter’s apprentice named Joss, whose master had sent him off with a small purse. I walked to the Hall saying numbers under my breath, as a man tests the ice on a pond. Fifteen stuck in my throat. Fourteen did no better. Thirteen I could manage only with my eyes on the ground. Twelve I could say in an ordinary voice. It was not what the hour was worth. It was the highest number I could say without flinching, which is how a great many prices are chosen.
I said twelve so quietly he asked me to repeat it. Joss did not blink. “That seems about right for what you’re describing. I’d thought it might be more.” It was not triumph I felt. It was the feeling of finding a door behind a bookshelf in a house you have lived in for months. And then the thought that undid me: I did not know which of the nine would have paid twelve, or eleven, or ten, because I had never asked a single one of them for more than eight. That night I wrote twelve beside his name, and in a smaller hand, the word exception, because he had a purse and the others had not. It was the most expensive word I ever put in a ledger.
Senna climbed the tower stairs some weeks later, on an evening of thin rain. She had thought about a standing arrangement for a month, she said, and would like to see my books. She read both, one finger moving down the margin. “What does a vial cost you?” Seven coppers. “The lease?” Forty a month. “How many can you make?” Thirty, if I did nothing else. She nodded, as one nods at an honest account of a bad harvest.
“Then I make it this. You’ve sold ten, counting only those who count. Eighty-one coppers came to you for them. Seventy of that is what it costs to make ten more. So eleven coppers, for two months of mornings on my steps. And the tower is forty, which this book pays.” She tapped the Steadfast ledger. “Your tonic for aching backs is paying for your tonic for hours, and I’d guess the porters have no notion they’re your patrons.”
I told her the first ten were not meant to pay but to teach me.
“Then learn from them. A first customer is a question, not a sale.” She set her finger on Joss’s line. “Twelve. And beside it, exception. That’s the only number in this book you’ve ever asked the market. Everything else is you answering for them. Idony scraped eight together from two days of sewing. Corin would have paid forty. Both are true at once, and you’ve built one number that fits neither of them.”
I was angry, apprentice, and I tell you so because the anger is part of the lesson. I told her coldly that she was a clerk and not an alchemist, and did not know what it was to see a person’s face when they could not pay.
“I’ve watched faces at my counter for six years, Eldric. I know the face of someone holding a paper that says they’re free to choose, who can’t bear to be the one who chose wrong. You’ve worn it since I opened your ledger. I don’t think you’re being kind. I think you’re afraid someone will say no.”
The silence was long enough that I heard the rain on the high windows.
“I won’t tell you what to charge,” she said at last. “I know what makes a ledger lie, not your trade. I’ll keep sending names, and call it a standing arrangement, if two things hold. You show me this book at the end of every month, the true one, with the cost and the hours. And your price gets a date. You like dates. You’ll name the day you stop answering for them and put a real question to the market.”
I said, with a stiffness I think she found rather touching, that I would look at the price again when the shelf was empty.
“All nineteen?”
“Every vial.”
She wrote something in a small book with her ink-stained fingers. “Then I’ll hold you to the shelf,” she said, and went down the stair with her lantern.
I sat long after, and did on a clean page what she had done. The Steadfast Elixir cost one copper and sold for three. The Elixir of Success cost seven and sold, across my first ten, for a little over eight. The humble tonic was earning me nearly twice what the elixir that changed lives was earning, and I still did not write down my hours, or Halbrook’s cats.
I lay awake with her sentence in the dark and went looking for the place in myself where it was untrue. I found instead Daven setting a vial back on my dockside table for want of coin. Every price I had cut since had been addressed to him, a boy two towns north who would never see it, and to myself, so that no one standing at a table of mine would ever again have the chance to turn away.
One more sum. Had the ten paid thirteen, they would have brought me sixty coppers clear rather than eleven. I do not know that they would have paid it. That is the entire point. I will never know, because I never asked. I thought I was running a kindness. I had been running an experiment with the one variable that mattered held perfectly still, and reading its silence as an answer.
And I decided, as men in that position generally do, that the remedy for a thin margin was more customers. It is not. Every new customer carries the same small loss as the last, and makes you busier while you take it. But that lesson belongs to its own season.
The first ten customers are not there to make you rich. They are there to tell you what the next hundred will pay, whether your arithmetic can survive them, and whether the people who need your work will say so aloud. Mine told me all three. I had simply arranged matters so that I could not hear the first.
The next morning I sold the eleventh vial for eight coppers, as I had said I would. The shelf held nineteen, and then eighteen. I told myself I had a date, and a man with a date has already decided. I did not yet see how easily a date can be kept in the letter and abandoned in the spirit, and how quietly.
Before you go, my dear apprentice, sit with this one question, and carry it into whatever you are building.
Look at the number you charge, or mean to charge, and ask yourself honestly whether you chose it because you asked what your work is worth to the person who needs it most, or because it was the one number no one could ever refuse.
Until next we meet in the laboratory.
Eldric
Eldric & The Entrepreneurial Elixirs is published by ProfSpirit LLC.
Continue below for the Alchemist’s Ledger: a practical exercise for learning what your work is truly worth, telling a discount from a flinch, and putting a real question to the market.
