That was bad enough. Benjamin’s letters might argue that the furor would die down with time, but Honor knew him too well. He might actually believe it, but he was nowhere near as confident of it as he tried to make himself appear in his messages to her. And whether he believed it or not, she didn’t. She’d told herself again and again that her judgment was never at its best when she confronted the possibility of seeing herself used against friends or things she believed in. She’d reminded herself how often Benjamin’s analyses of political and social dynamics had proved superior to her own. She’d even spent hours researching past political crises and scandals, some dating back even to Ante Diaspora Earth, and attempting to dissect their long-term consequences and find the parallels to her own situation. And none of it had changed what really mattered. Whatever Benjamin might believe, whatever might actually be true in the long run, in the short run his enemies had done enormous damage to his ability to preserve the Alliance and keep Grayson in it. And it didn’t matter how Grayson public opinion might view these events fifteen T-years from now if the planet was split away from the Alliance and its relationship with the Star Kingdom this year, or the next.

But dreadful as that potential disaster was, one almost as dreadful loomed in her personal life, because Emily had been right. Honor’s long-standing relationship with Hamish had been a fatal casualty of the attack. The caution—or cowardice—which had kept either of them from ever admitting his or her feelings to the other had been stripped away. Now both of them knew precisely what the other felt, and the pretense that they didn’t was becoming more threadbare and fragile by the day.

It was stupid… and very human, she supposed, although the observation offered absolutely no comfort. They were both mature, adult human beings. More than that, she knew that however imperfect they often seemed to themselves, both of them possessed a devotion to duty and their own personal honor codes which was stronger than most. They ought to have been able to admit what they felt and to accept that nothing could ever come of it. Perhaps they couldn’t simply have walked away from it completely unscathed, but surely they ought to be able to keep it from destroying their lives!

And they couldn’t.

She wanted desperately to believe that her own weakness was the direct consequence of her ability to taste Hamish’s emotions. There might even be some validity to that. How could anyone expect her to feel the love and desire flooding out from him, however hard he tried to hide it, and not respond to it? For the first time, Honor Harrington truly understood what drew a moth closer and closer to the all-consuming power of a candle flame. Or perhaps what had drawn treecats to bond to humans before prolong, when they knew that to do so would cut their own life spans in half. Perhaps she could have walked away from what she felt for Hamish, but it was literally impossible for her to walk away from what he felt for her.