Circe lowered the letter slowly.
For a long moment, she said nothing. She simply stood there in the middle of the foyer, the parchment held loosely in her hands. The two men waited, watching her with that particular way of people who had prepared themselves for difficult moments such as these. They were evidently waiting for her reaction.
But her eyes strayed back to the letter, unable to help herself.
She read it again. Not because she had missed anything the first few times, but because the words were so absurd that she found herself almost unwilling to accept that they had been written at all.
She couldn't begin to fathom that someone had sat down, dipped a quill into ink and deliberately formed these sentences. Or that the whole thing was handed off to messengers that carried it all this way. All to feed her lies because they thought she was gullible enough to believe them.
The sheer effort of it was almost offensive.
