He shrugged, and her eyes slowly widened as she stared at him.

Chapter Nine

“NO.”

Queen Elizabeth III looked into Honor’s eyes and shook her head fiercely.

“Please, Elizabeth,” Honor began. “Right now my presence is doing more harm than good. If I go home to—”

“You are home,” Elizabeth interrupted sharply, her warm mahogany face hard, and the treecat on her shoulder flattened his ears in reaction to his person’s anger. That anger wasn’t directed at Honor, but that made it no weaker. Worse, Honor could taste it almost as clearly as Ariel could, and for just an instant she wished she had matching ears that she could flatten in response. The whimsical thought flickered briefly through her brain, then vanished, and she drew a lung-stretching breath before she spoke again, as calmly as she could.

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said, then closed her mouth once more as Elizabeth waved one hand in a chopping-off gesture.

“I know it wasn’t.” The Queen grimaced and shook her head. “I didn’t mean for it to sound that way, either,” she went on a bit contritely. “But I don’t apologize for the thought behind it. You’re a Manticoran, Honor, and a peer of the realm, and you deserve one hell of a lot better than this!”

She gestured at the wall-mounted HD, and against her will, Honor followed the gesture to where Patrick DuCain and Minerva Prince, hosts of the weekly syndicated political talk show “Into the Fire” were grilling a panel of journalists in front of huge holograms of Honor’s face… and White Haven’s.

The sound was switched off, a small mercy for which Honor was profoundly grateful, but she didn’t really have to hear it. She tried to remember who it was back on Old Terra who was supposed to have said that something was “déjà vu all over again.” She couldn’t, but that didn’t matter either. She didn’t have to recall names to know precisely how whoever had rendered that masterpiece of redundancy must have felt, because watching DuCain and Prince brought back agonizing memories of the vicious partisan confrontations which had followed the First Battle of Hancock. She’d been one of the focuses for those bruising exchanges, too, so she supposed she should be used to it by now. But she wasn’t. No one could grow accustomed to it, she thought bitterly.

“What I may or may not deserve has very little bearing on what’s actually happening, Elizabeth,” she said, her voice still calm and level even as she felt the stiff tension in Nimitz’s long, wiry body on her own shoulder. “Nor does it have any bearing on the damage being done while this goes on.”

“Perhaps not,” Elizabeth conceded. “But if you retire to Grayson now, they win. Worse, everyone will know they won. And besides,” her voice dropped and her ramrod-straight spine seemed to sag ever so slightly, “it probably wouldn’t make any difference, anyway.”

Honor opened her mouth again, then closed it. Not because she was prepared to give up the argument, but because she was afraid Elizabeth was right.