Circe tells Penelope that magic is more about will than bloodlines and teaches her about herbs while Telemachus goes to work fixing things about the house. Medea, for all her stubborn insistence that Jason loved her and they would rule happily forever, has been proven wrong. As Circe predicted, Jason has set her aside at the urging of his people. Furious, Medea kills her children and takes a dragon chariot back to her father’s home. As unexpected as this news is, Circe supposes that it makes sense: “Aeëtes wanted an heir, and there was none more like him than Medea. She had grown up trained around his cruelty, and in the end it seemed she had not learned how to hold any other shape” (338).

Circe considers Telemachus to be innocent because he is direct and has no hidden agenda:

I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open (340).