And Mother and Daddy have changed their attitudes, too, she thought sadly.

There’d been a time when her parents had put up with the twins’ personal armsmen only because Grayson law required them to. They’d realized Jeremiah Tennard and Luke Blackett kept a watchful eye on them, as well, but they’d regarded it as a necessary (if rather touching) nuisance in their own case. One to be evaded whenever possible.

Not since the Yawata Strike. Not since Allison Harrington and her grandson had lived only because two of those armsmen had died for them.

They hadn’t raised even a token objection when Honor informed them, firmly, that from now on, they had their own personal armsmen. And despite an initial standoffishness—a defensive reaction born of the hurt of LaFollet’s and Tennard’s deaths—they’d adjusted better than she’d been afraid they might. Not that she hadn’t put some careful consideration into picking the proper guardians.

First, she’d decided, any candidates had to be prolong recipients. None of her own original armsmen had received the antiaging therapies. She knew how that felt, and she wasn’t about to have her parents watch someone that close to them grow old and die before their eyes. Yet that had been only the first (and least difficult) of the qualifications she’d considered when she and Spencer Hawke started reviewing dossiers.

Sergeant Isaiah Matlock, her father’s armsman, was a very rare bird: the son of a forestry ranger on a planet whose wilderness didn’t precisely welcome human intruders. The hearty souls who ventured out into it anyway were regarded as dangerous crackpots by their stay-at-home friends and neighbors, but Matlock’s family, had been involved in managing Grayson’s forests for three hundred T-years. They had a love for those forests which was possibly even deeper than that of a Sphinxian like Alfred Harrington, probably precisely because their homeworld’s wilderness did its level best to kill them every day. Honor expected Isaiah to embrace Sphinx joyfully, despite its gravity, and she was pleased with the compatibility already apparent between him and Dr. Harrington. If anyone was likely to understand her father’s need for an occasional fishing or hunting foray, it was going to be Isaiah…who would undoubtedly help browbeat the rest of the security detail into submission.