She was silent for a moment, so I told her what Vishnu had said. She looked uneasy. “He really said you had to kill Mahishasura? Kiki, in the nicest possible way, you’re not exactly . . .”

“I know, it’s ridiculous,” I said emphatically. “There’s absolutely no way that I can fight him and win. Much as I’d love to be you, I’m very, very much not.”

Ashwini’s smile was slightly crooked. “You don’t want to be me.”

“You’re everything I wish I was.”

Her brow furrowed and she considered me in silence.

“Vishnu must have known about the gandaberunda anyway,” I went on. “If Brahma told you about the statue, the other gods probably know about it, too.”

“And yet he thinks you should fight Mahishasura,” said Ashwini.

“Apparently,” I said, gnawing on my thumbnail.

The kettle whistled. Ashwini took it off the stove and poured hot water into cups. I spooned in chocolate powder and added some milk to each cup.

“I get that destroying Mahishasura will get rid of him for good,” Ashwini said. “That’s probably why it’s the more attractive option for Vishnu, but it’s not realistic. Trying to fight him will get you killed. Breaking the gandaberunda’s eye, on the other hand, will save both our worlds for a hundred years.”

“So we stick to Plan A?” I asked.

“I think that would be best.”

I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t relieved that all I had to do was break a statue’s eye (you know, once we figured out how to get past a mistrustful palace), but even that seemed like such an enormous thing to someone whose biggest adventure until today had been the time I fell into a pond and swallowed a bug.

What if I couldn’t do it? What then? I thought about Mum, asleep in her bed in our house, unsuspecting and alone, with no one to protect her when the monsters came. I couldn’t fail. I couldn’t.

I had a headache. It was too much. I had made a world just for me, and it had been taken from me, and transformed by a monster, and now it was up to me to save it. It was too much.

It was only when Ashwini’s eyes dropped to my hand that I noticed the pitiful state of my thumbnail. I forced myself to stop. She looked like she wanted to ask me about it, but, kindly, she didn’t.

Instead, she said, “Let’s take this tray out to the others, shall we?”

We went back to the front room, where the others were. There were books everywhere. Even Simha, the lion, had one open in front of him.

“Any luck?” Ashwini asked.

“There are no spells in the witch’s spellbook that will make Kiki fly,” Suki said, closing an enormous tome with a clomp of dust.

“There are absolutely no clues about how to defeat the palace in any of the old kings’ diaries,” said Jojo.

“There are no maps of Mysore Palace in the atlas,” said Samara.