Time in Cormy’s interdimensional rip had little meaning. Sparrow’s wounds seemed to take forever to heal, and now that she thought about it, Sparrow couldn’t remember feeling hunger, thirst, or even the need to relieve herself, since that first conversation with Cormy. Though, as she squinted at the shifting walls of the protective bubble Cormy had conjured around them, she decided that was probably a good thing. She wasn’t sure where she’d go to defecate if she had to, or what would happen to her leavings if she did.
Instead, she dwelled in her thoughts, but those were no refuge from the strangeness of her situation, either. Doubts gnawed at her. Glancing over at Cormy, who was speaking with his hatchlings in whatever nonverbal language the tokagi used with each other, Sparrow reflected that feeding those doubts had probably been the tokagi’s aim all along. It was what all tokagi did, wasn’t it?
Despite her mixed feelings, Sparrow edged over to the family. She smiled wanly as Sophia turned to show her a trick she had learned with some string and a coin with a hole in it, and then Sparrow interrupted Cormy when the tokagi’s attention next wavered from his offspring.
“Cormy, why do you think that lightrune was meant for me?” she asked. Where did you really get it? was her actual question, but Sparrow doubted Cormy would answer that one outright. A person had to be tricky to get a straight answer out of a tokagi.
Cormy looked up, slow and hard to read. “I had thought that would be obvious. Your soul is well-suited to one such as Carro, and so the lightrune was naturally attuned to you.”
