A Civil Campaign
Lois McMaster Bujold
 An Imperial wedding is afoot, and love is in the air; Gregor and Laisa are finally to be married. Lady Alys Vorpatril, Ivan's mother, is put in charge of all the arrangements. Miles tackles the task of wooing Ekaterin in his typically deranged fashion: he does everything he can to avoid letting her know that he might just like her, fearful that her previous experience has put her off marriage for life. To let him see her frequently, and knowing of her ambition to become a gardener, he hires her to design a garden for Vorkosigan House. His brother Mark also has relationship problems: he is in love with the warm, empathetic Kareen Koudelka, but her parents disapprove of him, and while this did not seem to bother her on Beta Colony, the sexual mores of Barrayar are much stricter, and she feels that she has to keep their relationship a secret from her family and live chastely while under their roof. A significant subplot involves Mark's profit-inspired theft from a laboratory on Escobar of an engineered insect called the "butter bug," capable of converting waste vegetation into nutritious, edible ... bug vomit. Everything goes horribly wrong when Miles hosts a dinner party. Butter bugs and "bug butter" plague both aesthetics and digestion. A still-recovering Simon Illyan inadvertently blurts out Miles' not-so-secret (except to the intended target) courting of Ekaterin. She walks out after he panics and asks her to marry him. Meanwhile, Kareen's parents forbid her to have anything to do with Mark after they find out that he took her to the Orb of Unearthly Delights, a notorious Betan pleasure palace. The debacle has wider consequences. Two seats on the Council of Counts are up for grabs, one because the incumbent died, the other because the current Count Vorbretten has been found to be part Cetagandan, dating back to the days of the occupation. The seat (and Countship) of the late Pierre Vorrutyer is being contested by a distant cousin, Richars, and the previous Count's sister, Donna, who has undergone gender reassignment surgery on Beta Colony, becoming a fully functional man, Lord Dono, in order to better qualify as a potential Count. As his father's Deputy, Miles is courted by both sides. Richars makes an ill-advised attempt to use Tien's suspicious death as leverage. For security reasons, Miles is unable to defend himself with regard to the Komarran incident. Lord Dono, who as Donna taught Ivan Vorpatril "everything he knew", uses Ivan to recruit his own support among the counts, gaining Miles's vote after Richars's blunder. When Ekaterin finds out about the rumors, she is forced to consult Miles. Miles offers to take the blame, to spare Ekaterin and her son, but she refuses to let him. Somewhat reconciled, they set out to solve their problems, defeat their enemies and ascertain her true feelings. Mark's and Kareen's problems are solved after Miles advises Mark to utilize a most effective weapon: their mother Cordelia. She soon has Kareen's parents cowed and amenable. Miles's troubles culminate in a tumultuous Council session where dirty tricks abound. This results in defeat for the enemy and the very public betrothal of Miles and Ekaterin. The Imperial wedding goes off with only a minor hitch. At the Imperial wedding reception, Miles meets an old, respected acquaintance, ghem-General Dag Benin, who subtly lets him know that the Cetagandans are aware that he and Admiral Naismith are one and the same. Like its predecessor, this novel tells its story from the viewpoints of both Miles and Ekaterin, on occasion smoothly switching from one to the other during a given scene. There are also the viewpoints of Mark, Kareen Koudelka, and even Ivan Vorpatril, whose interior life has not been described at all before this.