And that was one reason—of all too many—for her shock. To the best of her knowledge, nothing like this had ever happened before. Except in very special cases, like that of Prince Consort Justin and Monroe, the ’cat who had previously adopted Elizabeth’s father, treecats recognized “their” people within seconds, minutes at the outside, of first meeting. Monroe had been all but comatose, shattered and almost totally destroyed by King Roger’s death, the first time Justin entered his proximity after the assassination. He’d been truly aware of nothing, not even the grieving family of his murdered person, until the traitor responsible for the King’s death came foolishly within his reach, intent on murdering Justin, as well. The intense emotional shock he and the future Prince Consort had shared in fighting off the killer’s attack had dragged Monroe back from the brink of extinction and forged the adoption bond between them.

But unless the ’cat half of a bond was literally at death’s door, he always recognized the unfulfilled… polarity of the human meant to become his other half. Only Samantha hadn’t. She’d met Hamish scores of times, without so much as twitching a whisker in any sort of recognition.

“I don’t know how,” Honor told Hamish, and realized it was the first thing she’d said since that initial paralyzing moment of shock.

The earl raised his eyes from Samantha at last, and even without her ability to taste his emotions, Honor would have recognized the consternation woven through the texture of his joy.

“Honor, I—”

He broke off, his expression mingling chagrin and apology, joy and dismay and a dark understanding of at least some of the frightening implications. It was obvious that the words he wanted hovered just out of reach, eluding his ability to explain his emotional whirlwind to her. But he didn’t have to, and she shook her head, hoping her own expression concealed the depths of her astonishment… and dread.

“I know it wasn’t your idea,” she told him. “It wasn’t Sam’s either, but…”

She looked down at Nimitz. He was staring at his mate, his long, sinuous body stiff with a shock as deep as Honor’s own, but he turned his head and looked up at her when he felt her gaze.

She wanted to scream at him, and at Samantha. If someone had given her ten years to think about it, she couldn’t possibly have come up with something better calculated to make everything immeasurably worse. When the newsies heard about this, any trace of momentum the attacks upon her and White Haven might have lost would return tenfold.

Even now, after the ’cats had been “talking” for almost four T-years, much of the Manticoran public continued to regard them as little more than pets, or, at most, very young children. The notion that they were a fully sentient species with an ancient, sophisticated society, might have been accepted intellectually, but it would be decades yet before that acceptance replaced the earlier general view of treecats as adorable, fluffy animals.