Even if his own emotions hadn’t shown, and even if the Queen had greeted him with smiling affability rather than the cold-eyed silence in which she watched him cross the office, the treecat on the back of her chair would have been a sure and certain barometer of the hostility coiled in that office. Ariel’s tufted ears were more than half flattened and his bone-white claws sank deep into the upholstery of the Queen’s chair as his green eyes watched High Ridge.

The baron came to a halt before her desk, standing there—like, he thought from a lava field of resentment, an errant schoolboy and not the Prime Minister of Manticore—and she regarded him as coldly as her treecat did.

“Your Majesty,” he managed to get out in very nearly normal tones. “Thank you for agreeing to see me so promptly.”

“I could hardly refuse to see my own Prime Minister,” she replied. The words could have been courteous, even pleasant. Delivered with the tonelessness of a computer they were something else entirely.

“Your secretary indicated that the matter had some urgency,” she continued in that same chill voice which pretended that she didn’t know precisely what had brought him here.

“I’m afraid it does, Your Majesty,” he agreed, wishing passionately that the unwritten portion of the Star Kingdom’s Constitution didn’t require the formality of a face-to-face meeting between a prime minister and the monarch at a time like this. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid it, although he’d toyed—briefly, at least—with the thought that since this was technically only a violation of a truce and not a formal declaration of war he might have evaded it.

“I regret,” he told her, “that it is my unhappy duty to inform you that your realm is at war, Your Majesty.”

“It is?” she asked, and he heard his own teeth grinding together at the proof that she intended to spare him no smallest fraction of his humiliation. She knew precisely what had happened at Trevor’s Star, but…

“Yes, unfortunately,” he replied, forced by her question to formally explain the circumstances. “Although we’ve received no notification that the Republic of Haven intended to resume active military operations, their Navy violated Manticoran space this morning at Trevor’s Star. Their task force was engaged by our own forces and driven off after suffering relatively light casualties. Our own forces suffered no damage, but the Republic’s action in violating the Trevor’s Star territorial limit can only be construed as an act of war.”

“I see.” She folded her hands on her desk and looked at him steadily. “Did I understand you to say, My Lord, that our own forces drove the intruders off?”

The emphasis on the possessive pronoun was subtle but unmistakable, and High Ridge’s eyes flickered with rage. But, again, still trapped by the prison of formality and constitutional precedent, he had no choice but to reply.

“Yes, Your Majesty. Although, to be more precise, they were driven off as a result of the joint action of our forces and those of the Protectorate of Grayson.”