hard on you, so you had another TIA, which kept the cycle going.”
“Shit.” She slapped the button and the grinder buzzed away. “Double shit. Stupid damn mantle. Can’t it tell it’s screwing with me?”
“No. The mantle is a magical construct. It isn’t sentient.”
“That’s what Rule always says, but it’s not an artifact like that damn staff you burned. I don’t care what you say.” She rested a hand on her stomach, frowning. “It’s . . . it feels like it’s alive.”
“Oh, yes.”
“But you said—”
“I said it’s a magical construct. I didn’t say it lacked life. Artifacts are charms on steroids. Constructs are—pay attention here, this gets complicated—constructed. And sentient means—”
“Capable of thought and reason. Which, okay, I’m not doing so hot with right now.” She scraped the newly ground coffee into the insulated French press she’d bought Rule a couple months ago. “So the mantle’s alive, but it doesn’t think.”
“Let’s not try to define thinking right now. Suffice it to say that mantles can’t be reasoned with and give no signs of reasoning on their own, which is why it’s doing the wrong damn thing with you. But living things are capable of learning or adapting. Some more than others. Plants pretty much suck at learning, but they can adapt to some extent.”
“So what kind of living thing is a mantle? Plant, virus, bacteria, cute little kitten?”
“The immortal kind.”
She stared. “But they can die. That’s why I’ve got the Wythe mantle in here causing all these problems—to keep it from dying.”
“If the holder of a mantle dies without an heir to receive the mantle, the mantle is lost, not dead. The constructed part is destroyed. The living part goes back where it came from. Back to the Lady. Mantles hold a bit of the Lady’s life within them.”
It made a weird kind of sense. The mantles were what kept lupi from being beast-lost. They imbued Rhos with authority that was literally inarguable . . . and the lupi’s Lady was the one authority lupi would not or could not deny. “Why didn’t I know this?” she demanded. “I’ve asked Rule questions about the mantles dozens of times. I’ve talked with the Nokolai Rhej about them. Why didn’t I already know this?”
Cullen’s mouth quirked up. “Because it’s a secret.”
“Ninety-five percent of everything about you people is a secret!”
“This one is secret from pretty much everyone. Only the Rhejes and the mantle-holders know.”
“Then how did you . . . oh.” Cullen had been born to Etorri, not Nokolai. Etorri was a very small clan, steeped in honor, and—for complicated historical reasons—the heir’s portion of their mantle was shared among all Etorri lupi, not just the one their Rho named heir. Which was—natch—a secret, and meant that Cullen had been a mantle-holder once. Only a small bit of a mantle, but he’d been there, done that, and had apparently been given both the T-shirt and the secret handshake. “You’re breaking the rules by telling me this.”
“Technically, you’re carrying a mantle now yourself. And you need to understand why Rule’s control is splintering.”
She glanced at the hole in the wall. “That’s not hard to understand.”
“If all he does is put his fist through a wall now and then, we’ll be lucky. Rule believes the Lady has betrayed him.”
“Because she shoved this thing into me without clueing us in about the consequences? That pisses me off, too.” Lily had had to give permission, but apparently Old Ones didn’t worry about informed consent.
“Lily.” He sighed. “The Wythe mantle is doing something it should not be able to do. Mantles don’t send out little roots. They are controlled by their holders—within limits for the heirs, and entirely by the Rhos. There’s only one exception, one way the mantles can act without direction by a Rho. They are of the Lady. If a mantle starts doing something wholly new, we have to think that she’s directing it.”
“She’s making it try to kill me?”
“That’s unlikely,” the Leidolf Rhej said.
Lily damn near dropped the coffeepot. “Dammit, how did you do that? You’re not lupus. You shouldn’t be able to come down those stairs that quietly.”
The woman smiled wearily. “Maybe you’re a little preoccupied.”
Maybe so. “Why do you think the Lady isn’t trying to kill me?”
“If you die, the Wythe mantle is lost.”
Oh. That was a lot better answer than the sort of “have faith” argument Lily had been expecting. “Then maybe she’s just not very good at whatever she’s doing.”
“Could be. We don’t have any idea what she is doin.’