I looked skittishly out at the Asura in the sky, still close, still a threat. “Can we go back inside? The palace will keep us safe if any of them try to follow.”

“We don’t have to do that,” said Lej. He sounded kinder, which made me realize that, for once, it wasn’t me he was angry with. “The Asura won’t attack us.”

Ashwini scoffed. “Why not?”

Lej’s voice was bitter. “It hasn’t attacked yet, has it? Kiki came this close to breaking the gandaberunda’s eye and it didn’t even try to stop her. Why not?”

My knees wobbled. My brain was always so crowded and noisy that I hadn’t been able to pay attention to the important stuff, but the moment Lej’s words sank in, all those small, important clues came rushing out of the dark corners. Like how a demon king imprisoned the one person who could banish him rather than kill her. A set of keys dropped outside a locked cell. An empty fortress. A locator spell that was never used. An eye that had to be broken. Thunder. An Asura that hadn’t attacked.

They were little things, not much on their own. But when I put them together, what I saw was that I had been twisted and turned like a puppet. Each of those little things had been a nudge down one specific path, to get me all the way to this moment, to right here.

I swallowed. “The Asura didn’t attack me when I climbed up to the gandaberunda because it wanted me to break the eye.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Ashwini burst out. “Why would it have wanted that? If you’d broken the eye, they would have lost everything!”

Mahishasura’s first words to me came rushing back. Such a small girl, he had said. To think that you made this world, and hold the keys to my way out of it, and yet you cannot even look me in the eye without trembling.

He had said it to make me feel small and helpless, and it had worked, but that wasn’t what I felt now. Now I could think only of the little bit in the middle, a tiny piece of information he had probably never meant to let slip:

I held the keys to his way out of this world.

“He would have been free,” I whispered. I felt sick.

Lej nodded. “You worked it out quicker than I did.” Had he been anyone else, I would have said he sounded impressed, but he was Lej, so the odds were very much not in favor of that.

“We made a mistake,” I said to Ashwini, whose face had turned to stone. “If I had broken the eye, this world would have collapsed back into ink and everyone who had come here from somewhere else would have been sent back to their own world. Like me, and like Mahishasura. We assumed he would be sent back to the Nowhere Place, but that’s not his world. My world is his world. And that’s where he would have gone. He would have gotten exactly what he wanted.”