But my heart leaped. “Did you say wolf Asuras?”

“Yes,” she said, frowning. “You can tell by the shape of the head and the four legs. Stay here. I should be able to get them both out of the way.”

I grabbed her arm before she could pull her sword off her back. “No,” I said quickly. “If you fight them, others might see. It’ll attract too much attention.”

Ashwini looked bewildered. “But how else are we to get to the palace?”

“There was once a little girl,” I said, with the kind of mischief Pip would have been proud of, “and she met a wolf in a deep dark forest.”

Her eyes widened. “You’re not going to . . .”

I pulled an apple out of Pip’s satchel and took a bite.

The instant my teeth broke the skin of the ripe fruit, both Asuras snapped their heads in our direction. Their muzzles snapped and their eyes flashed yellow. Even though Samara had told me wolves couldn’t resist the scent of apple juice, it was frankly terrifying to actually see it in action.

I threw the fruit down the line of houses, as far away from the palace as I could.

Silent, breathless, Ashwini and I watched as the wolves wrestled with themselves, trembling from the effort of not following the scent of the fruit. “We cannot,” one growled to the other. “We must not.”

“It would only take a moment or two to find it,” the other argued. “What would be the harm?”

They hesitated for a split second, and then one broke rank, bolting in the direction I’d thrown the apple. The other snarled, realizing he was about to miss out, and ran after the first.

“You know,” Ashwini said, sputtering a laugh, “when Samara first told me that story, I was pretty sure she’d made it up. I owe her an apology.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe you packed an apple.”

“I packed two, thank you very much!”

With our way temporarily cleared, we raced across the wide street to the palace gates and ran down the brick drive, heedless of the thorns in the overgrowth. We stopped at the arch over the palace entrance, where the last time we’d been here, the porch had crumbled into an endless ravine and had almost taken Lej with it. The impassable darkness between us and the doors felt like a taunt.

I felt Ashwini take my hand and squeeze. “We can do this,” she said. “We need to do this.”

She approached one of the tall columns that lined the front of the palace and started to unwind the coil of rope. “I figure if we can loop the rope over the spikes of that balcony, we can use it to climb up this column. And then we—”

“Do you hear that?” I asked.

She paused, turning back. I hadn’t moved. I could hear something.

“I can’t hear anything over the storm,” she said. “Come on, I need your help with these ropes.”