“Um,” she said sheepishly. “About that . . .”

RIP Brave Kiki. She’d been fun for all of the fifteen seconds she’d lasted. If the look on Ashwini’s face was any indication, it seemed matters were not going to be as easy as simply breaking the golden eye of the gandaberunda and then heading back home to my warm, comfy bed. I should have known better than to trust the merry twinkle in Ashwini’s eye.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I asked nervously.

“Well, for one thing, the statue will be guarded by winged Asuras,” Ashwini said. “Now that Mahishasura knows you’re here, he’ll have his minions watching the gandaberunda every minute of every day. It won’t be easy to get past them to break the eye.”

“Great.” I gulped.

“And,” Lej added, “there is also the teeny, tiny problem of the maze.”

The maze?

Oh.

I had come up with it one rainy afternoon. I’d had this idea that when the old kings had been killed, Mysore Palace had rejected Mahishasura and shut him out by becoming an impassable labyrinth. A totally impossible puzzle. Trick staircases, hallways that never ended, a garden full of traps—I’d thrown them all in. Rapidly realizing that no one who went past the line of columns at the entrance of the palace ever found their way back out, Mahishasura was forced to retreat from Mysore Palace and make his fortress in the smaller, less symbolic Lalith Mahal instead.

And while that part of the story had been a lot of fun to create, it was decidedly less fun now. The gandaberunda stood at the top of the tallest dome in the middle of the palace.

“We can’t get to the top, can we?” I winced.

“That’s kind of what we were hoping you could tell us,” Lej said grumpily. “Considering you made it.”

“If we had wings, we could fly up to the statue.”

“We don’t have wings.”

“Then no, I don’t know how to get there,” I said. Lej looked like he was about to explode, so I added, “It’s not as simple as just knowing what to expect! I can tell you that there’s a shifting maze in a botanical garden, and that there are trick staircases that lead to different places, but that doesn’t mean I can figure out a maze that never stays still or find a staircase that’s determined to hide!”

“You had to go and make it complicated, didn’t you?”

It was a fair jab, but I couldn’t help but point out, “I didn’t know any of my silly ideas would actually matter. I would have made some very different choices if I had!”

But Ashwini, who had listened to all this in silence, was not so easily daunted. “Well, it’s worth a try anyway, don’t you think?” she said. “You may not know how to solve the palace’s puzzles, but like you said, you know what to expect, so that gives us a leg up that Mahishasura never had.”