War Of Honor

But there were a lot of things about Emily Alexander that astonished Honor. She was totally unlike Honor's mother, except in one way: both of them radiated that calm sense of knowing exactly who they were, not just in matters of duty, but in those of the heart, as well. Honor had always envied that in her mother, almost as much as she'd envied—and resented—Allison Harrington's beauty and unabashed sensuality when she herself had been an ugly-duckling, raw-boned, too-tall, gawky adolescent. She'd known even at her most resentful that she was being foolish. Her mother couldn't help her beauty any more than she could help being who she was, and even if she could have been someone else just to make her daughter feel less outclassed and homely, it would have been wrong for her to do so. Wrong for her to be anyone but herself.

She and Honor's father had taught their daughter that, almost without realizing they had. They'd done it by example and by loving her, without limit or qualification. They'd made her whole in all of the ways that mattered most, even while she was wounded in that one secret regard. The quiet place in her heart where she'd been supposed to keep the belief that anyone could truly love her . . . unless they had to.

It had been stupid, stupid, stupid, she told herself. If anyone in the entire galaxy could know that, then certainly with her parents and Nimitz she'd been that one person. But it hadn't helped, and then, at the Academy, had come Pavel Young and Mr. Midshipman Carl Panokulous—the would-be rapist and the man who had hurt her more cruelly still. The damage they'd done had been terrible, yet she'd survived it. Survived and, with Paul Tankersley's help, actually learned to heal. To know that there were people who could—and would—love her. She'd actually, physically felt the love of so many people in her life now, in so many ways. Paul. Her parents, James MacGuiness, Andreas Venizelos, Andrew LaFollet, Alistair McKeon, Jamie Candless, Scotty Tremaine, Miranda LaFollet, Nimitz . . .

Yet deep inside her, somewhere all the healing had failed to reach, there was the fear. No longer the fear that they would not love her, but that they would not be allowed to. That the universe would punish them if they dared to, for all too many of those who had loved her had also died because of it.

It wasn't logical, and she knew it, but she'd lost too many lives, and every one of them had torn its own hole in her soul. Officers and ratings who had served with her and paid with their lives for her victories. Armsmen who had died so that their liege lady might live. Friends who had knowingly faced Death—and lost to him—for her sake. It had happened too often, cost too many too much, and the terror that anyone who dared to love her was marked for death mocked her, for logic was a weak weapon when matched against the unreasoning assurance of the heart. She'd made progress in her fight against that irrational certainty. She knew that, too. But if she'd won a few battles, she had yet to win the war, and the tangled weave of emotions and needs, fear and the obligations of honor, that wrapped about her feelings for Hamish Alexander like a shroud threatened to cost her even more ground in the fight.

"So," Hamish said finally, his voice almost startling after their long, mutual silence, "did the two of you decide how we ought to tackle this?"

He kept his tone light, almost droll, but he didn't fool anyone at the table, including himself, and Honor looked at Emily.

"I think we've found a way to at least start getting a handle on it," his wife told him with a serenity Honor was half-surprised, even now, to realize was genuine. "I don't say it will be easy, and I'm not sure it will be quite as effective, under the circumstances, as I would have liked—" she glanced sideways at Honor for a heartbeat "—but I believe we can at least blunt the worst of their attack."

"There's a reason I've always relied on you for the necessary political miracles, Emily," Hamish told her with a smile. "Give me a fleet problem, or a naval battle to fight, and I know exactly what to do. But dealing with scum like High Ridge and Descroix—?" He shook his head. "I just can't wrap my mind around how to handle them."

"Be honest, dear," Emily corrected him gently. "It's not that you really can't do it, and you know it. It's that you get so furious with them that you wind up climbing onto your high moral horse so you can ride them under the hooves of your righteous fury. But when you close your knight errant's helmet, the visibility through that visor is just a little limited, isn't it?"

Her smile took most of the bite from her words, but he winced anyway, and that wince was at least partly genuine.

"I realize any good political analyst has to know when and how to be brutally honest, Emily, but somehow that particular metaphor doesn't do an enormous amount for my self image," he said so dryly Honor chuckled despite herself, and Emily looked at her with a twinkle.

"He does the affronted-but-too-polite-to-admit-it, stiff-necked, aristocratic naval officer quite well, doesn't he?" she remarked.

"I don't think I'll answer that question," Honor replied. "On the other hand, there's something to be said for the . . . directness of a Don Quixote. As long as the windmills don't hit back too hard, at least."

"Granted, granted," Emily conceded. She was eating one-handed with the grace of decades of practice, but now she paused to set down her fork so that she could point with one finger for emphasis. "I'll even grant that the political process needs people willing to shatter themselves on the rocks of conviction rather than countenance deception or deceit. We'd be better off if we had more of them, and the ones we do have have a responsibility to serve as the conscience of our partisan bloodletting. But they can do that effectively in isolation, maintaining our concepts of morality by serving as examples of it whether they ever accomplish anything else or not. But to be effective in the political process requires more than personal rectitude, however admirable that may be. You don't have to become the enemy, but you do have to understand her, and that means understanding not simply her motives but her tactics. Because when you understand those two things you can design counter tactics. You don't have to descend to the same level; you simply have to recognize what the opposition is up to and allow for it."

"Willie understands that a lot better than I do," Hamish admitted after a moment.

"Yes, he does, and that's why someday he'll be Prime Minister and you won't. Which is probably just as well," Emily said with another, wider smile. "On the other hand, much as I love Willie, he'd make a terrible admiral!"

All three of them laughed, but then Emily cocked her head and looked thoughtfully at Honor.

"I haven't had as long to observe you, Honor," she said, "but I'm a bit surprised by the fact that you seem to be rather more . . . flexible than Hamish. Not that I think you're any more willing to sacrifice your principles on the altar of expediency, but in the sense that you clearly do a better job of putting yourself inside the other person's head."

"Appearances can be deceiving," Honor replied wryly. "I don't begin to understand how a High Ridge or a Janacek thinks. And to be perfectly honest, I don't want to."

"You're wrong, you know," Emily disagreed so firmly that Honor looked at her in some surprise. "You don't understand why they want the things they want, but you can accept that they do. And once you've done that, you also do an excellent job of analyzing how they might go about getting them."

"Not always," Honor said in a darker tone. "I never saw this—" she waved one hand around the table in a gesture which encompassed all three of them "—coming."

"No, but now that it's here, you know exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish. That's why it hurts you so much to see them getting away with it," Emily said gently. "No one can fault you for being surprised by gutter tactics so alien to the way your own mind works, Honor, but even at your angriest, you haven't let anger blind you. And from what I've seen of you both in the 'faxes and on HD, as well as here, now that I've had a chance to meet you in person, I think you could turn into a very effective politician, with time."