“So . . . if it’s half past breakfast here, it will be luncheon there?” Delia asked. It didn’t make any sense. Wasn’t it always the same time everywhere? “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Jonaton sighed, and picked up an apple from the breakfast table, and placed it in front of her. “The world is shaped like—well, a ball, not an apple, but this will do. The sun goes around it like this.” He picked up another apple and moved it around the apple in front of her in a circle. Then he picked up a knife—

“If you carve a line into my table, I will put that apple somewhere very unpleasant,” Isla said, giving him the side-eye.

He moved the second apple a little farther away from the first and put the knife between them in a straight line. “So, the sun directly overhead means that it is noon here—” he pointed to the place on the first apple where the knife touched it. “But what would it be here?” He moved his finger to a spot on the apple in front of where the knife was.

She tried to envision it. It was hard, but eventually it dawned on her. “Uh. Morning?” she hazarded.

He nodded. “And here?” He moved it to behind the knife.

“Afternoon?”

“And that’s how mages discovered the world is round and the sun goes around it, because nothing else makes any sense,” Jonaton confirmed. “When we were able to create Gates that went a very long way, we began to realize that when we stepped through them, although we thought no time had elapsed, if we were going east or west, the time was either later or earlier than it was on the other side of the Gate.”

“But why do days and nights happen, then?” she asked.

“A very good question. And the answer is that the sun travels east to west, really slowly, so for us on the world, we get night and day.” He cocked his head at her. “Didn’t you learn this in school?”

“I didn’t go to school,” she confessed. “I had a tutor, and all he taught me was how to read and write and figure. This wasn’t in any of the books I ever read.”

“Well, all right. I suppose this is something that only mages and people doing things all over the Empire really have to reckon with,” he admitted. “It isn’t as if most people go through very long-range Gates all that often.” He handed her the first apple, and took the second, and began carving off bits to eat. “Anyway, what we call Absolute Noon is when the sun is directly over the Capital City. So, if it’s breakfast here, it’s halfway to luncheon where Kordas is, so you see the difficulty.”