War Of Honor

"That would have flown in the face of every constitutional precedent we have," Honor shot back in her defense.

"So what? Precedents can be modified or replaced!"

"In the middle of a war?" Honor challenged.

"A war we were wi

"Stop it, Elizabeth!" Honor half-glared at her monarch. "You can second-guess yourself forever, and it won't change a thing. You were like a captain in the middle of a battle. She has to decide what to do now, while the missiles and the beams are still flying. Anyone can sit down after the fact and see exactly what she ought to have done. But she had to make her choices then, with what she knew and felt at the time, and you didn't know how the war was going to end. And you certainly didn't know a High Ridge Government would use the truce talks to avoid a general election!

"Of course you could have provoked a showdown. But you can't foretell the future and you're not a mind reader. So you chose not to risk completely paralyzing our government when you didn't know how the war would end, and then High Ridge mousetrapped us all with these unending truce talks of his. No one's ever said he and Descroix and New Kiev don't understand how domestic politics work, especially the dirty variety."

"No. No, they haven't," Elizabeth agreed finally, and sighed. "I wish the Constitution gave me the authority to dissolve Parliament and call new elections myself."

"So do I," Honor said. "But it doesn't, so you can't. Which brings us back to me. Because unlike you, High Ridge can call for new elections whenever he decides to, and if he can use Hamish and me to keep this bloodfest alive long enough, he may be able to push the public opinion polls far enough in his favor to decide the time is right."

"Maybe you're right," Elizabeth conceded, obviously against her will. "But even if you are, I don't think going 'home' to Grayson is the answer, either, Honor. Bad enough that it would look like they'd run you out of town, but domestic politics aren't all we have to worry about here, are they?"

"No." Honor shook her head, because this time, the Queen had a point.

The Star Kingdom's mores were essentially liberal, and Honor and Hamish's "crime" in Manticoran eyes was that any affair between them would have violated the sanctity of a personal oath White Haven had chosen to swear in a particular sacrament of marriage. Other religions and denominations accepted other, less restrictive versions of marriage, and each of them was just as legally binding and just as morally acceptable in the eyes of society as a whole. In many ways, that made his alleged offense even worse, because he had voluntarily bound himself to a particular, intensely personal union with his wife when there'd been no social or legal requirement that he do so. If he'd now chosen to offer his love to another woman, then he had evaded a personal responsibility he'd chosen freely to accept. That was bad enough, but on Grayson, where there actually was—or had until very recently been—a universal religious and social code and a single institution of marriage, the damage was even worse.

What surprised Honor about the Graysons' reaction wasn't its strength, but the fact that such a small percentage of them put any stock at all in the allegations. She'd thought, especially after her relationship with Paul, that most of the population would be ready to believe the worst and to condemn her for it. But the reverse was true, and it had taken her a while to realize why that was.

White Haven enjoyed immense public respect on Grayson in his own right, yet that was almost beside the point. It was Honor who mattered, and they knew her. It was really that simple. They actually knew her there, and they remembered that she'd never denied she and Paul had been lovers, never tried to pretend she was anyone but who she was. Even those who continued to hate her for who she was knew she would have refused to deny the truth, and because of that, they recognized the lie when they heard it.

Which was precisely why the damage was even worse. The Graysons weren't angry at her over any allegations of impropriety which they knew were false; they were furious at Manticore for allowing those allegations to be made. They saw the entire agonizing ordeal as a public insult and humiliation to the woman who had twice saved their world from conquest, and at least once from nuclear bombardment by religious fanatics. Honor had always felt horribly embarrassed by the Graysons' unabashed hero worship of her, not least because she felt it denigrated the sacrifices made by so many others in the battles she'd fought at Yeltsin's Star. But her worst nightmares had never envisioned anything like this.

Grayson's attitude towards the Star Kingdom had shifted dangerously over the last three T-years. There were still immense reservoirs of gratitude, admiration, and respect for the Royal Navy, for the Centrists, and—especially—for Queen Elizabeth, herself. But there was also a deep, seething rage directed at the Kingdom's current government and the arrogant fashion in which it had arbitrarily and unilaterally accepted Oscar Saint-Just's truce offer when unequivocal victory had been within the Alliance's grasp. That decision was widely regarded as a betrayal of all of the Star Kingdom's allies, and especially of Grayson, which had made by far the greatest contribution—and sacrifices—of all those allies.

Nor had High Ridge's subsequent policy mitigated that outrage in any way. It was as obvious to Grayson as it was to the Havenites themselves that High Ridge and Descroix had no intention of negotiating in good faith. There might be different interpretations of the reasons for that, but recognition of their duplicity was virtually universal. High Ridge hadn't made things any better by continuing as he had begun, simply a

Benjamin IX and his Council, as well as a working majority of the Grayson Keys, recognized the unique and dangerous balance of political power within the Star Kingdom. They knew what was happening, and they were no strangers to complex internal political battles of their own. Yet even with that knowledge, it was difficult for them to restrain their anger and to remember to direct it against High Ridge and his cronies, rather than at the Star Kingdom as a whole. For the elected members of the Conclave of Steaders—and especially for the vast bulk of the Grayson population, who were not only less "sophisticated" but also less fully informed about the ramifications of which Benjamin was only too well aware—it was even more difficult.

And now the same people who'd already infuriated Grayson public opinion had falsely and publicly attacked their greatest planetary hero, who was also the second ranking officer of their navy, the Protector's Champion, only the second person in history to have received the Star of Grayson not merely once, but twice, and one of their eighty-two steadholders.

And a woman. Even now, the surviving strictures of Grayson's pre-Alliance social code absolutely precluded public insult to a woman. Any woman. And especially this woman.

Which meant that the very tactics which had so thoroughly neutralized Honor in the domestic Manticoran political calculus had produced exactly the opposite effect on Grayson. Public opinion and support there had rallied about her even more fiercely than before, but it was an angry public opinion. A rising sea of infuriated outrage which had turned her into a symbol which threatened the outright disruption of an alliance Benjamin was already holding together by his fingernails.