“I’ll show you soon enough, but first we must consult with Pierre.” He hesitated, then reached down and fastened up my cloak. “You’ll catch a chill showing that much skin.”

Sighing, I followed him up a set of stairs and into a small home that was cluttered and in need of a good dusting.

“Morning, Pierre!” Tristan shouted as we entered. “Any movement since yesterday?”

“Quiet as a grave,” a high-pitched voice shouted back, and moments later, a badly crippled troll flew into the room, seated on what appeared to be a stool with wheels. He was very small, his back contorted in a strange s-shape, but worst of all, he appeared to have no legs. Without the stool and his magic, I doubted he would have the ability to move very far at all.

“Or would have been,” he continued, rolling to a stop, “if the Barons Dense and Denser hadn’t gotten it into their skulls to have a rock-throwing contest outside my house last night.”

Tristan sighed and looked at me as if it was my fault. “I’ll speak to them about it later.”

“Bah!” The troll threw up his hands. “They’ll just think of another way to disturb the peace. Perhaps next time one of them will do us all a favor and drop a rock on the other’s head. But who is this that you have with you?”

“This is the… I mean, this is my… Cécile.”

“You mean, your lady wife, the Princess Cécile?” The odd-looking troll tsked and shook his head. His wire-rimmed glasses slid down his nose, and he absently pushed them up again as he inspected me. “And even lovelier than I had heard. The poets will write songs about her beauty that will be sung for generations.”

Feeling strangely shy, I let him take my hand, which he kissed and then patted warmly with his gnarled and bent one. “The young ones have no sense of romance,” he said and winked. I giggled, despite myself.

Tristan coughed. “Pierre monitors the motions of the earth.” He gestured around the room, and his orb brightened, revealing tables of equipment and charts.

“I didn’t realize it moved,” I said, walking over to examine a chart hanging on the wall. A list of dates ran across the bottom, with an erratic line running horizontally above them. There were numbers and notations written all over it, and I tried to puzzle it out with little success.

“Ah, but the earth, she is always moving,” Pierre said, and with a theatrical gesture of his hand, dozens of glowing glass balls of various colors lifted into the air and began to rotate around the large yellow one at the center.

“The sun,” Pierre said, and the yellow ball blazed brightly. “The planets and their moons.” I watched with fascination as each glass ball lit up as he named it. “And here, this is us. Earth.” The blue orb brightened. “Always moving, always moving. But what young Tristan here is concerned with is the times it moves like this.” The blue ball shuddered violently.