Her eyes flashed. “Yes,” she said bitterly, “he is. He’s the monster you forced me to fight.” In a rush, the words that must have been bottled up for so long came tumbling out. “Look at what you did to me! An Asura slayer? What a life to be stuck with. I had to fight monsters. I had to look after all the others. I had to be tough and brave all the time. I never got to be a kid, or to have fun. I never got to be scared or fall apart. I couldn’t, because there was no one to look after me. I had to fight, no matter what. And the worst part, of course, was that I could never have won. None of us could have beaten him. We were doomed to fight and fight and fight with no way out.”

“He did that, Wini,” Lej protested, the nickname as heartbreaking as it was unexpected. “He made us real. Kiki never wanted any of this to happen.”

“But he gave me a way out,” she said. “He told me that I could try to run away as soon as I crossed over to the real world, but if I did that, he’d kill all of you. But if I helped him escape, he promised me that he would take me with him. I’d be able to have whatever life I wanted in the real world. I would be free.”

“While the rest of us became ink and paper,” said Lej hoarsely. I noticed, for the first time, that there were tears on his face. He was devastated.

Guilt turned Ashwini’s cheeks red, and her eyes were wet, too. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” she said, pleading with him to understand. “I couldn’t keep being the one everyone depended on.”

I couldn’t bear it. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You’re the one who has to live with the choices I made, so I get why you hate me. I do. And I don’t blame you.”

She stared at me like she hadn’t expected that. Then she bit her lip and said more quietly, “I want to hate you, but I don’t. What I said to you last night, about how there’s nothing wrong with you? I didn’t say that because I was playing a part. I want you to know that. That was real. There were a lot of times when I pretended to be your friend, but that wasn’t pretend.”

Somehow, that almost hurt more. I didn’t know how to make sense of someone who had been real and false at the same time.

“How you felt was real,” the palace said quietly. “None of it was pretend for you. You can trust that.”

I looked up from my cold clenched fist on the rail. Ashwini and Lej were both watching me. “I made it so easy for you to lie to me.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” she said. “You’re kind and you care, which is why you were so easy to trick. Lej certainly helped me make you feel guilty, even if he didn’t know it,” she added, and Lej flushed red. “You didn’t have to come here, but you did. You wanted so badly to fix the mess you’d made. You shouldn’t be ashamed of that.”