War Of Honor

"I know it wasn't your idea," she told him. "It wasn't Sam's either, but . . ."

She looked down at Nimitz. He was staring at his mate, his long, sinuous body stiff with a shock as deep as Honor's own, but he turned his head and looked up at her when he felt her gaze.

She wanted to scream at him, and at Samantha. If someone had given her ten years to think about it, she couldn't possibly have come up with something better calculated to make everything immeasurably worse. When the newsies heard about this, any trace of momentum the attacks upon her and White Haven might have lost would return tenfold.

Even now, after the 'cats had been "talking" for almost four T-years, much of the Manticoran public continued to regard them as little more than pets, or, at most, very young children. The notion that they were a fully sentient species with an ancient, sophisticated society, might have been accepted intellectually, but it would be decades yet before that acceptance replaced the earlier general view of treecats as adorable, fluffy animals.

Which meant it would be all too easy for the character assassins to convince people that the only reason Samantha was with White Haven was because Honor had given her to him. Efforts to explain what had really happened would be dismissed with a knowing, leering wink as nothing more than a clumsy pretext, a maneuver the seductress Harrington had concocted as a cover to let her stay close to the object of her adulterous affair.

Yet bad as that was, there was worse. Nimitz and Samantha were mates, even more deeply fused in many ways than Nimitz and Honor. They could be parted for a time by things like military necessity, as wedded human warriors had been over the mille

And that was the one thing, above all, which she and White Haven dared not be.

It was insane. There was no way High Ridge and North Hollow could have begun to conceive all the ramifications of the sleazy political maneuver they'd embraced. But even if they'd been able to, it wouldn't have stopped them, because aside from the potential to complete the rupture between Grayson and the Star Kingdom, it was working perfectly for them. And if they ever spared a single thought for the Alliance, which Honor doubted, they undoubtedly continued to think of Manticore as the dominant benefactress and Grayson as the grateful suppliant. Whatever infantile tantrums the Graysons might pitch, they would return to the fold like obedient little children when Manticore spoke firmly to them.

They truly didn't have a clue, not a suspicion of how severely they'd wounded the special relationship Elizabeth and Benjamin had created with one another, or how deeply they'd offended the common steaders of Grayson. And so they would gleefully exploit this latest disastrous turn, completely oblivious to its consequences beyond the narrow confines of the domestic arena.

Which meant that the adoption of a single human by a silken-furred being who weighed barely eight kilos could topple an alliance which had cost literally trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to forge.

"I don't know how it happened," she repeated, "and I don't have any idea at all where we go from here."

Where they went was White Haven, the seat of the Earls of White Haven for four hundred and forty-seven T-years. It was the last place in the universe Honor Harrington wanted to go, but she was too exhausted to fight any longer.

She stared without speaking out the window of the air limo at the stingships flying escort, and White Haven was wise enough to leave her to her silence. There was nothing more either of them could have said, anyway, and even though he shared her dismay at what had happened, he couldn't damp the bright sparkles of joy still flickering through him as he contemplated the warm, silken weight in his lap. Honor understood that perfectly, but it didn't make things any easier on her, and so she sat at the eye of a magic circle of stillness, feeling White Haven beside her and Andrew LaFollet and Armsman 1/c Spencer Hawke behind her, and watched the stingships.

On Grayson they would have been Harrington Steading aircraft. Here on Manticore, they wore the blue and silver colors of the House of Winton, and Colonel Ellen Shemais, second in command of the Queen's Own Regiment and Elizabeth's personal bodyguard, had personally explained to the pilots of those escorts that both of them had better already be fireballs on the ground before anyone got into range to shoot at Duchess Harrington.

Usually, Honor's mouth quirked in a wry smile at that thought, but not today. Today, all she could do was gaze out the window at the cobalt blue sky, watching the stingships glow in the reddening light of late, barely substratospheric afternoon, while she hugged Nimitz to her breasts and tried very hard not to think at all.

She failed, of course.

She knew she shouldn't be doing this, that White Haven was the one place she must not go, yet the knowledge was useless. The maelstrom of emotions which had battered her in the gymnasium had joined with the exhaustion of months under bitter attack and her growing grief and sense of utter helplessness as she watched herself being used as the wedge to drive two star nations she loved apart. She'd given all she had to the struggle, held her head up publicly in defiance of her enemies, spent her strength and her political capital like a wastrel, and nothing she or any of her allies could do had changed a single thing.

She was tired. Not physically, but with a soul-deep heart sickness that had driven her spirit to its knees, and she could no longer fight the inevitable. Not when Hamish wanted her to make this trip so badly. And not when some tiny i

The limo sped on into the north while the sun sank lower and lower in the west, and Honor Harrington sat silently in her seat, empty as the thin, icy air beyond the crystoplast, and waited.

White Haven was much smaller than she'd expected.

Oh, it covered more ground than Harrington House did on Grayson, but that was because it had been built on a planet friendly to humans, not one where humanity's most deadly enemy was the planetary environment itself. It could afford to sprawl comfortably over the gently rolling slopes of its grounds, and its low wings, none of them more than two stories tall, seemed to invite visitors to join it. It was made of native stone, with the immensely thick walls the first-wave colonists had used as insulation against the harsh winter climate of these northern latitudes, and it possessed a certain imposing presence, despite the fact that its oldest, central block had obviously been designed and built before its owners realized they were about to become nobles. It was only a little more ostentatious than an extremely large and rambling, extended farmhouse, but it didn't really need to be anything more impressive than that, and subsequent generations had been wise enough to insist that their architects coordinate the centuries of expansion with the original, simple structure. Other noble families had possessed less wisdom, and all too many of their family seats had become hodgepodges of architectural cacophony as a result.

White Haven hadn't. It had grown much larger over the years, yet it was what it was. It refused to be anything else, and if at first glance it might seem that newer, more modern estates—like Harrington House—were grander and more magnificent, that was only at first glance. Because White Haven had what those new and splendid homes' owners simply couldn't buy, however hard they tried. It had history. It had lawns of ankle-deep sod, pampered by generations of gardeners, and Old Terran oak trees a meter and a half through at the base, which had made the journey from Old Earth herself aboard the sublight colony ship Jason four centuries earlier. It had thick, soft Terran moss and immensely dense hedges and thickets of crown blossom and flame seed that draped around stone picnic tables, gazebos, and half-hidden, stone-flagged patios, and it sat there, whispering that it had always been here and always would be.