Honor felt her shoulders hunching once more as Emily calmly spelled out what she’d already realized for herself.

“The most damning point of their ‘indictment’—and the one I find the most personally infuriating—is the allegation that you and Hamish have betrayed me,” Emily continued, and although her voice remained as level and thoughtful as before, she couldn’t hide her own seething anger. It was an anger Honor understood only too well, the fury of someone who knew she had been cynically used as a weapon against all she believed in and stood for.

“If they choose to involve me in their games and machinations,” Emily told her, “then I think it’s only fitting that I respond. I realize neither you nor Hamish have asked me to become involved. I even understand why.”

She looked very steadily into Honor’s eyes for a moment, her own eyes very dark and still, and Honor felt the fusion of fury and compassion at her core.

“To an extent, Honor, I was willing to stay out of the fray if that was what the two of you wished. In part, I’m ashamed to admit, because I was… afraid to do otherwise. Or perhaps not afraid. Perhaps I was simply too tired. My health has been particularly poor for the past year or so, which is undoubtedly one reason Hamish has tried so hard to keep me out of this. And that ill-health may also explain why something inside me quailed every time I thought about becoming involved, anyway. And there may have been… other reasons.”

Again, their eyes met, and again Honor felt the complex freight of emotions hanging between them.

“But that was cowardice on my part,” Lady Emily continued quietly. “An abandonment of my own responsibility to stand and fight against anyone who wants to destroy my life. And certainly of my responsibility to prevent moral pygmies with the ideology and ethics of back-alley rats from raping the political processes of the Star Kingdom.”

She paused for a moment, jaw clamped, and this time Honor tasted something else in her emotions. A scathing self-condemnation. Anger at herself for having evaded her obligations. And not, Honor realized, solely because of weariness or ill health—or even Hamish’s desire to shield her. This was a woman who had looked into her mirror and faced her own resentment, her sense of hurt and shame, and her perfectly natural anger at the younger woman whose name had been so publicly linked with her husband’s. She’d faced those things and overcome them, yet a part of her could not forgive herself for taking so long to do it.

“One reason I asked Hamish to invite you here,” Lady Emily told her unflinchingly, “was to tell you that whatever he—or you—may wish, this is not simply your fight. It’s also mine, and I intend to take the battle to the enemy. These… people have seen fit to drag me and people I care about into their tawdry, vicious games, and I won’t have it.”