“Circe!”
“Don’t wear my name out.” The enchantress’s wide, ruby-lipped smile drained all the hope still lingering in me that she would make this right. “It’s a simple enough task, Astra, and this is tradition. A labor for a reward, always an exchange. It’s about time someone brought you up in the old ways.”
“Circe, I can’t possibly. There’s no time -”
“There’s time,” she said confidently, dismissing my desperate pleas with a flippant wave. “And there’s a lot of it. Time flows differently here than it does out there, Astra. That’s how it is on the boundary between the worlds. And that’s all I’ll say about it - the rest is up to you. I’m leaving now, but when you return here with the Leafstone, I’ll come to you.”
Leaving! My despair sank to new depths as thoughts of my mother suffering a
