It was obvious from LaFollet’s worried expression that the Grayson thought Honor was approaching precisely that mistake. Given the fact that, unlike White Haven, LaFollet was also a practitioner of coup de vitesse—that he regularly sparred with Honor, in fact—the armsman was certainly in a position to judge, and the earl swallowed a bitter mental curse as he watched Honor push herself pantingly back up on her knees, and then stand.

He’d known for years, since the day they first met at Yeltsin’s Star, that Honor Harrington’s temper was lethal. People seldom saw it, and he also knew that the calm and serenity she normally projected were just as real as her temper. Yet it was there, chained and subordinated by duty and compassion, perhaps, but without losing one bit of its power. And sometimes it frayed its leash. There were stories about the times it had almost slipped free, part of the legend which had grown up around “the Salamander,” but that temper was almost never a match for the discipline and strength of will which restrained it.

Almost… but not always. He’d known that, too, but this was the first time he’d ever seen her deliberately free it. That was why LaFollet was worried, and why the “sparring bout” had ended only in the “death” of the remote, and the earl winced again at the recognition of how much pain it must have taken to drive her to that state.

She stood gazing down at the crumpled remote for several seconds, then drew a deep breath, straightened her shoulders, and looked up at LaFollet. She peeled off her sparring gloves, removed her protective mouthpiece, and nodded to him, and the armsman nodded back, obviously trying to conceal his relief, as he pressed buttons on a hand unit. The training remote stirred, then rose and walked off the mat with mechanical calm, completely unaffected by its recent demise, and Honor watched it go. Then she turned and looked at White Haven.

She showed no surprise at seeing him. She must have known he was there, sensed his emotions, from the moment he entered the gym. He smiled at her, but it was a crooked, half-bitter smile, wise with the knowledge of how badly they’d hurt one another without ever meaning to.

He hadn’t realized for a long time that she could actually feel the emotions of those around her. It wasn’t really his fault he hadn’t, because so far as he was aware, no other human had ever shared the treecats’ empathic sense. But once he’d begun to guess the truth, preposterous though that truth had seemed, he’d wondered how he’d ever failed to realize. It explained so much about her uncanny ability to “read” people… and about the way she reached out so naturally to those about her, constantly soothing someone else’s pain or healing someone else’s hurt.

And who can do that for her? Who can give back even a little of all she gives to everyone else? he wondered bitterly. Not me. All I can do is make it still worse by sitting here radiating how much I love her when that’s the very thing ripping both of us apart.