This is book 14 of the "Miles Vorkosigan" series.

This note does not contain major spoilers for the book.

 

Quick convenient reread. Except I don't seem to have logged the first read? Not sure what form I read, may have been pre-release that I couldn't talk about.

So, this is Cordelia a few years after Aral's death. She's still vicereine of Sergyar in her own right (she and Aral held the job jointly, she wasn't there just as his wife).

And there's a complexity that she has recovered enough to notice. Namely that one of Aral's former male lovers is around, and she finds herself interested.

Also they're both interested in more children, which with uterine replicators and her unquestioned control of Aral's genetic heritage and her own eggs and so forth is quite possible.

They're both thinking about retirement, too. His idea of retirement seems to be to become a field biologist (which Sergyar desperately needs). Hers isn't so explicit, but almost anything would be relaxing after running a planet.

Woven around this are various smaller plot threads, involving flying gasbags that sting (rather reminiscent of one detail in Starman Jones (#4)) and Cetagandan diplomacy and a visit by Miles and Ekaterin and the children (many many children) an a surprise birthday party. There are, in fact, children all over this book, current and future and hypothetical.

It's quite a good book, but it needs the characters of the series to be well-established before you read it, and then it's about very different things from most of the rest of the series (even different from Komarr (#2) and A Civil Campaign (#4)). Some people might not be happy about that, but I liked seeing Cordelia progress rather a lot.