Verity started hedging when she was fifteen years old. Her abilities – uncontrollable, and downright weird – freaked her fashionable parents out, and they were more than happy to abdicate their responsibility to the Hedge Council. By the time the Council assigned her to her first carer, she had withdrawn almost entirely into the Loam, and lost most of her ability to function in society.
Her first carer was not a success. His strange theories of hedging psychology made a fragile situation worse for all the hedgers under his care. Verity's worsening mental condition caused havoc in the Hedge, and drew the reluctant attention of the Hedge Council once again. However, the prosecution of the carer left Verity to her own increasingly unstable devices. By the time she met Flynn, several years of patchy care and emotional flux had erased most traces of Verity's personality.
Now, at the age of nineteen, she is well on the road to recovery. Her precarious mental health is a unavoidable by-product of her abilities, but her elemental mood swings have stabilised to manageable proportions. Her spirit tree, once formless and chaotic, has taken shape as an Acacia thorn tree, spindly in appearance but with an underlying toughness, and an ability to withstand years of drought.
Like the acacia tree, Verity is a creature of many contradictions. She has sorrow in her soul, but also a wicked sense of humour, and often laughs at herself. She blossoms under praise, but is quick to catch out the insincere. She loves passionately and quickly; but lets go just as freely. She is forgetful and untidy, but extremely observant. She bores easily, but needs constancy.
