If there had been any way in the world to refuse tonight’s dinner invitation without wounding Emily, Honor would have done it. She couldn’t be here. She didn’t know where she could be, but she knew it wasn’t here. Yet she’d had no choice but to come, and she and Hamish had done their level best to act completely normally.

She was quite certain she’d failed, but for the first time in years, however hard she tried, her own empathic sense had failed her. She couldn’t sample Emily Alexander’s emotions for the simple reason that she could not separate herself from those of Emily’s husband. Not yet. It would take time, she knew—lots of time, and matching amounts of effort—for her to learn to tune down and control this new awareness. She could do it. If she had enough time, enough peace to work at it, she could learn to control its “volume” just as she had finally learned to control the sensitivity of her original empathic awareness. But for now, the blinding power of her bond to Hamish was still growing, still gaining in power, and until she could learn to control it, its power and vibrancy would drown out the mind-glow of anyone else as long as he was present. And she couldn’t do it yet. She couldn’t disengage herself from the glowing background hum of Hamish, and she felt oddly blinded, almost maimed, by her inability to reach out to Emily.

“—so, yes, Honor,” Emily was saying in response to Honor’s last attempt to keep something like a normal dinner table conversation moving, “I’m afraid Elizabeth is entirely serious. And to be honest, I don’t know if I blame her for her attitude.”

“Willie certainly doesn’t,” Hamish put in. He handed Samantha another stick of celery, and she took it with dainty, delicate grace. Even without that maddeningly glorious link with Hamish, Honor would have recognized the ease and familiarity into which their adoption bond had blossomed.

“I suppose I can understand it, myself,” Honor admitted with a troubled expression. “It’s just that she’s painting with such a broad brush. She’s lumping Sidney Harris, Rob Pierre, Oscar Saint-Just, and Thomas Theisman into the same group, and I’m telling you, there is no way in the universe that Theisman belongs in that same category.”

“But what about this Pritchart?” Hamish asked in a tone of reasonable challenge. “You’ve never met her, and she is their President. Not to mention having been some sort of terrorist before the Pierre Coup. What if she’s the one driving it all and Theisman is just going along? From all you told me about him, he sounds like someone who would do his duty and obey duly constituted authority whatever his personal feelings.”

“Hamish,” Honor said, “this is the man who overthrew State Security, probably shot Saint-Just personally, single-handedly convinced Capital Fleet to support him, called a constitutional convention, turned power over to the first duly elected President of the star nation whose constitution he had personally rescued from the dust bin, and then spent the better part of four T-years fighting a six or seven-cornered civil war in order to defend that constitution.” She shook her head. “That’s not the description of a man who’s a weakling. And a man who would do all of that because he believes in the principles the old Republic of Haven’s constitution enshrined, is not a man who’s going to stand by and watch someone else grossly abuse power.”