She gave me a small rueful smile. “If it helps, I’m not happy about it. When Mahishasura discovered that the tear had opened up on a page of your sketchbook that featured just me and one of his Asuras, he knew only we would be able to cross over into the real world. So he found me and convinced me to help him. He said he needed you. As the architect of this world, you were the only one who could break the gandaberunda’s eye and free him. You were also the only one, we assumed, who could get past the palace traps. So the Asura and I broke out of your sketchbook, had that dramatic fight in London, and then I convinced you to come back here with me.”

“And the other fight you had, with Mahishasura and the demons in the street?” I asked, my voice unsteady. “That was faked?”

“Of course,” she said. She sighed. “Then Vishnu turned up, which was unbelievably inconvenient, and I was sure you’d find out the truth the moment you told him you’d been asked to break the gandaberunda’s eye. But he didn’t want to listen to you, so you never got to tell him. And then you came up with the idea of the Good Witch.”

“That’s why you wanted to go break her out of the fortress,” Lej said furiously. “You knew it would be easy. You told Mahishasura that Kiki needed her, so you knew he would let us take her.”

“That was just a distraction,” said Ashwini, waving a hand. “I never actually planned on going to the fortress. The moment Kiki found out about the Good Witch’s locator spell, I knew she’d go back to the tear sooner or later.” My face flushed with shame, and with fury that she’d deliberately used the mess inside my brain against me. “When she did, Mahishasura’s minions were waiting to capture her.”

“And then Mahishasura let me escape with the Good Witch,” I finished for her.

“What about Pip?” Lej growled.

For the first time, Ashwini’s expression cracked. “He wasn’t supposed to go with her,” she said. I remembered her horror when we came back, the way she had stood there and said “This should never have happened” over and over. “Even after he got himself captured, too, he was supposed to escape with Kiki and the Good Witch. But then Mahishasura . . .” She looked down at her hands.

I clenched my hand on the balcony rail. My heart felt so bruised and sore that I didn’t know how to cope with it.

“And then the storm,” said Lej.

She looked up and nodded. “He didn’t want to wait anymore. He pretended to try to rip the tear between worlds wider, but he just conjured up a lot of thunder. The point was to make Kiki feel like she was out of time. It worked,” she added with a faint smile. “You got here, didn’t you?”

“But why?” I hated how desperate my voice sounded, like I needed her to give me a reason that would somehow make all this okay. “Why would you help him? He’s a monster!”