“I know you did, Honor. But I told the court I felt you had nothing to add.”

“You told the court?” she looked at him in disbelief. “But I was right there on the bridge. I knew exactly what happened!”

“Of course you did,” he agreed, almost gently. “But I knew you too well to let them put you on the stand.” She continued to stare at him, her eyes shadowed with sudden hurt, and he shook his head quickly. “Don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t worried about anything you might say hurting me or my chances. But the official record already contained everything you could have testified to, including your own after-action report, and you’ve never been noted for your overly powerful self-preserving instincts. If they’d gotten you on the stand, you were almost certain to say something fierce in my defense, and I didn’t want anything splashing on you.”

“I’d have been honored to be ‘splashed on’ if it could have helped you, Sir,” she said quietly.

“I know that. I knew it when I refused to let my advocate call you as a witness. But you had enough enemies of your own already for any midshipwoman, and I wasn’t about to see you throw away the credit you so richly deserved for saving my ship. Not when anything you said wasn’t going to matter, anyway.”

“You couldn’t know that it wouldn’t matter,” she protested.

“Oh, yes, I could, Honor,” he said with a half-bitter, half-amused smile. “Because the fact of the matter was that I deserved to be dismissed from my ship.”

“You did not!” she disagreed instantly.

“I think I’m hearing the midshipwoman who served under me, not the admiral sitting across her coffee table from me,” he observed almost lightly. She opened her mouth, but he raised one hand and shook his head at her. “Think about it—as a flag officer, not a midshipwoman. I don’t say there weren’t extenuating circumstances, but let’s be honest. For whatever combination of reasons, I allowed Dunecki and his ship into point-blank range, and I damned near got my own ship blown out of space, as a consequence. I did get too many of my people killed,” he added in a much darker tone.

“But you couldn’t have known,” she protested.

“You were one of Raoul’s proteges,” he replied. “What did he always tell you about surprises?”

“That they were usually what happened when one captain made a mistake about something she’d actually seen all along,” she admitted slowly.

“Which is precisely what I did.” He shrugged. “Don’t think it wasn’t important to me to know you wanted to speak up in my defense, because it was. And don’t think that because of that one incident I regard myself as some sort of total failure. But neither of those things changes the fact that I hazarded the ship the King had entrusted to me and that I would have lost her, with all hands, if not for the actions of a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise and a quite disproportionate amount of good luck. To be perfectly honest, I was surprised when they only placed me on half-pay rather than dismissing me from the Service entirely.”