“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.
“Earthshakes,” I whispered, and I looked up, picturing the vast weight of the rock that hung over our heads.
“Just so, my lady,” Pierre replied, and the glass balls settled gently back onto a table.
Shivering, I wrapped my cloak around me tightly. The earthshakes came often. Sometimes they were hardly noticeable, but there had been times when I’d been knocked off my feet or seen our house and barn shake so badly I was certain they would collapse. I had always been afraid of the quakes – any rational person was – but my fear took on another level as I considered the implications of having a half a mountain worth of rock dangling over my head.
“You shouldn’t worry, Cécile,” Tristan said from where he’d stood silently in the corner. “Not so much as a stone has fallen in my lifetime or even my father’s.”
“I’m not afraid. Much,” I amended, seeing him roll his eyes. Blast this cursed connection between us. Nor did the sense of confidence radiating from him do much to chase away my fear. He hadn’t said that rocks never fell; only that one hadn’t fallen in a long time. That meant it was possible, and I didn’t have troll magic to protect my head from falling objects.
With greater understanding, I examined the chart once again. “This line,” I said, “it shows the motions then?” Pierre nodded. I traced my finger along the line, noting the dates where the line spiked. Many of them were burned into my memory. “Our barn nearly collapsed during this one,” I murmured, tapping one of the spikes and remembering our panic as we ushered all the animals out. It was the highest one on the chart, which went back only thirty years, if I was reading it correctly. “Do you have one that goes back further?”
“I have charts going back nearly five centuries, my lady. It is an old craft, and one made exceedingly relevant by the Fall.” Pierre’s stool rolled across the floor and he extracted another chart from the cabinet and smoothed it out on the desk.
“How old is your father?” I asked, my heart skipping a beat at the sight of a spike in the line that eclipsed all the others.
Tristan cleared his throat. “Forty-three.”
The spike was fifty years ago. “What happened?”
Tristan shrugged, but I could feel his discomfort. “We are better prepared, now.”
“Did rocks fall?” I demanded. “Couldn’t they catch them?”
“It happened in the middle of the night,” Tristan replied. “A portion of the city was lost – you walked through it when you came through the labyrinth.”
I blanched, remembering the crushed rubble of homes on either side of the tunnels. “Did trolls die?”
“Four hundred and thirty-six lives lost – crushed to death in their sleep.”
A shiver ran down my spine. They wouldn’t have even seen it coming.
“There are worse ways to go,” Tristan muttered.
Uncomfortable silence stretched until Pierre broke it. “Perhaps she will feel better once you show her the tree.”
“I somehow doubt that,” I muttered.
Tristan smiled. “Have a little faith, Cécile.”