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That thought brought her back to the present, and she looked up at her Queen and sighed.

“I don’t know, Elizabeth,” she said, and her own voice sounded flat and defeated to her. Her shoulders sagged, and she scrubbed her eyes wearily with her right hand. “I just don’t know what might help anymore. Maybe going to Grayson would be a mistake, but all I know for certain is that every day I stay here and appear in the House of Lords seems to make it worse.”

“It’s my fault,” Elizabeth told her sadly. “I should have managed this whole thing better. Willie tried to tell me, but I was too angry, too badly hurt to listen. I needed Allen Summervale to shake some sense into me, and he was dead.”

“Elizabeth—” Honor began, but the Queen shook her head.

“I should have held onto my temper,” she said. “Should have tried sweet reason until I could find the issue to split them up instead of declaring war against them and driving them together!”

“Whatever you should or shouldn’t have done is beside the point now,” Honor said gently. “Personally, I don’t think there ever was any ‘wedge issue’ you could have used to break them up. Not with the threat of the San Martino peers hanging over them.”

“Then I should have gone the whole nine meters,” Elizabeth said bitterly. “I should have said damn the constitutional crisis and refused to accept High Ridge as my Prime Minister. Let them try to govern without the Crown’s support!”

“That would have flown in the face of every constitutional precedent we have,” Honor shot back in her defense.

“So what? Precedents can be modified or replaced!”

“In the middle of a war?” Honor challenged.

“A war we were winning… until I let those unmitigated bastards accept Saint-Just’s ‘truce’!” Elizabeth snapped.

“Stop it, Elizabeth!” Honor half-glared at her monarch. “You can second-guess yourself forever, and it won’t change a thing. You were like a captain in the middle of a battle. She has to decide what to do now, while the missiles and the beams are still flying. Anyone can sit down after the fact and see exactly what she ought to have done. But she had to make her choices then, with what she knew and felt at the time, and you didn’t know how the war was going to end. And you certainly didn’t know a High Ridge Government would use the truce talks to avoid a general election!

“Of course you could have provoked a showdown. But you can’t foretell the future and you’re not a mind reader. So you chose not to risk completely paralyzing our government when you didn’t know how the war would end, and then High Ridge mousetrapped us all with these unending truce talks of his. No one’s ever said he and Descroix and New Kiev don’t understand how domestic politics work, especially the dirty variety.”

“No. No, they haven’t,” Elizabeth agreed finally, and sighed. “I wish the Constitution gave me the authority to dissolve Parliament and call new elections myself.”