“So do I,” Honor said. “But it doesn’t, so you can’t. Which brings us back to me. Because unlike you, High Ridge can call for new elections whenever he decides to, and if he can use Hamish and me to keep this bloodfest alive long enough, he may be able to push the public opinion polls far enough in his favor to decide the time is right.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Elizabeth conceded, obviously against her will. “But even if you are, I don’t think going ‘home’ to Grayson is the answer, either, Honor. Bad enough that it would look like they’d run you out of town, but domestic politics aren’t all we have to worry about here, are they?”

“No.” Honor shook her head, because this time, the Queen had a point.

The Star Kingdom’s mores were essentially liberal, and Honor and Hamish’s “crime” in Manticoran eyes was that any affair between them would have violated the sanctity of a personal oath White Haven had chosen to swear in a particular sacrament of marriage. Other religions and denominations accepted other, less restrictive versions of marriage, and each of them was just as legally binding and just as morally acceptable in the eyes of society as a whole. In many ways, that made his alleged offense even worse, because he had voluntarily bound himself to a particular, intensely personal union with his wife when there’d been no social or legal requirement that he do so. If he’d now chosen to offer his love to another woman, then he had evaded a personal responsibility he’d chosen freely to accept. That was bad enough, but on Grayson, where there actually was—or had until very recently been—a universal religious and social code and a single institution of marriage, the damage was even worse.

What surprised Honor about the Graysons’ reaction wasn’t its strength, but the fact that such a small percentage of them put any stock at all in the allegations. She’d thought, especially after her relationship with Paul, that most of the population would be ready to believe the worst and to condemn her for it. But the reverse was true, and it had taken her a while to realize why that was.

White Haven enjoyed immense public respect on Grayson in his own right, yet that was almost beside the point. It was Honor who mattered, and they knew her. It was really that simple. They actually knew her there, and they remembered that she’d never denied she and Paul had been lovers, never tried to pretend she was anyone but who she was. Even those who continued to hate her for who she was knew she would have refused to deny the truth, and because of that, they recognized the lie when they heard it.

Which was precisely why the damage was even worse. The Graysons weren’t angry at her over any allegations of impropriety which they knew were false; they were furious at Manticore for allowing those allegations to be made. They saw the entire agonizing ordeal as a public insult and humiliation to the woman who had twice saved their world from conquest, and at least once from nuclear bombardment by religious fanatics. Honor had always felt horribly embarrassed by the Graysons’ unabashed hero worship of her, not least because she felt it denigrated the sacrifices made by so many others in the battles she’d fought at Yeltsin’s Star. But her worst nightmares had never envisioned anything like this.