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I stifled a snort. “Your name is Begonia?”
Onal crossed her arms. “Do you find that amusing?”
Rosetta had begun to scrape fur from the skin with her bone knife. She said, “Begonia has always hated her name—”
“It’s a stupid name,” Onal cut in.
“—?so she decided she was going to change it to Nola, after the first warden. But she used to always get her letters switched around when she was trying to write, so instead of spelling it N-O-L-A she wrote O-N-A-L. I teased her about it mercilessly.”
“No! You?” Kellan said.
“So she kept it just to spite me.”
“Not just to spite you,” Onal said. “Any name was better than Begonia.”
“I used to call her Beggie. And Goney,” Rosetta continued. “She had a lot of nicknames, my little sister.”
“And you wonder why I left and never came back.” Onal’s thin eyebrows were arched dangerously.
“Maybe if you’d stayed, you’d have aged a little better,” Rosetta said with a shrug. “Grandmother lived over four hundred years, and you look just like her now, at a mere one hundred and twenty.”
Kellan and I both gaped. I’d never been foolish enough to ask Onal her age, but if I’d had to guess, I would have put her at seventy—at the most.
“You’re one hundred and twenty years old?” Kellan asked incredulously.
“In another two months.” Onal’s lips pinched together. “It’s not something I typically advertise.”
“Onal ages slowly, like any daughter of the woods,” Rosetta said, “even if she was born lowly and talentless and
left home in shame.”
Onal folded her long fingers under her chin. “You make it so hard to like you.”
I looked at Onal with new eyes. “Now I know where you come by all your herb knowledge. But never in my lifetime would I ever have guessed—”
“That’s the folly of the young,” Onal replied. “Seeing all the years lining a person’s face without fathoming all the life that was lived to gain them.”
“Did Mother know any of this? Your family, your ties to feral magic, your slow aging?”
“No. Nor did your father. I never told anybody; it was dangerous enough to be so adept at the healing arts. Why bring any more scrutiny upon myself than was necessary?” She looked down her nose at me. “A question I wished you’d asked yourself more regularly over the years.”
“Simon knew, didn’t he?” I thought aloud. “How else would he have known you could help us find Rosetta?”
“I don’t see how he could have guessed it,” Onal said. “I had planned to take the secret to my grave.”
“You got awfully close, sister,” Rosetta said. “You should feel proud.”
Onal tipped her head. “What secrets did you take to yours?”
They both glared at each other with an animosity so sharp, it could have been honed only by sisterhood.
“Are all feral mages like this?” I asked. “Slow to age, quick to anger?”
“I’m not a feral mage, and she’s not just one,” Onal replied. “She’s the warden of these woods.”
“What does that mean?”
“Once every age, one of the female descendants of the Mother goddess is chosen to maintain balance among her creations, to ensure that the patterns and cycles she created continue on through the generations.”
