My eyes widened. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to put a sword in my hands. I’m really good at sketching swords, but not good at actually using them.”

“How do you know that if you’ve never even picked one up?” Ashwini countered. “You have to try, Kiki. They’ll come after us when we’re up there and they’ll tear us off that statue if we let them. You need to be able to defend yourself.”

Mahishasura flashed across my mind. The flare of his nostrils, the growl of his voice. The way his cruel eyes glittered when he made the old man break the coconuts just because he could.

If he ever gets hold of me, I won’t stand a chance. If the winged Asuras of his army come after me while I’m on top of Mysore Palace, I won’t stand a chance. And if I fail, what will happen to Pip and Ashwini and the other Crows? What will happen to Mum?

But if I had something to protect myself with . . .

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, I’ll give it a go.”

“That’s more like it,” Ashwini beamed at me. “And if it makes you feel any better, there are tons of different weapons here. If a sword isn’t right for you, chances are something else will be!”

That made sense, didn’t it? After all, with so many options, chances were that I’d be good at using one of them.

But, because this was me, that was not the case.

If my life had been a movie, the next two hours would have been the Dramatic Training Montage part. Like Mulan training to become a soldier, or Captain Marvel discovering what she could really do with her powers, this scene was Kiki Kallira Learning to Become a Warrior. And while I had hoped it would be an inspiring scene with awesome music, in reality it was more like a panel in a comic book where the main character falls flat on their face with an action bubble next to them saying SPLAT!

Because, as it turned out, I was absolutely, unquestionably, unbelievably terrible at the whole warrior thing.

The first arrow I tried to fire almost took out Lej’s eye. And he was behind me. I cut myself when I tried to use a knife. The soft practice ball I tried to fire from a slingshot went the wrong way and hit me in the face. I dropped Suki’s axe and it was only dumb luck, everyone agreed, that it missed my big toe when it clunked onto the ground. I picked up the witch’s wand to turn a book into a pebble and turned Pip into a monkey instead. I couldn’t even lift the swords. And it’s probably best I don’t mention what happened when I reached for a trident.

By the time I had tried and failed to use my twenty-second weapon, I was surrounded by wide eyes and slack jaws. Even Lej, who had had serious doubts about me from the moment we met, looked shocked.