Barrayar

Cordelia Naismith came to Barrayar as an offworlder and a former enemy officer, and she has married into the household of Lord Aral Vorkosigan expecting, if not peace, at least a private life. Instead the old Emperor dies and names Aral Regent for the child Gregor, handing him the most dangerous job on a planet where politics has always been conducted with poison and knives. Cordelia is pregnant. When an assassination attempt fills the house with a military toxin, the antidote does more harm than the poison, and the child she is carrying must be transferred to a uterine replicator to survive at all. Barrayaran opinion is unambiguous about what should be done with a damaged heir, and Cordelia's refusal sets her against her husband's entire culture. Then a rival claimant moves, the capital falls, and the Regent's family is scattered into hiding while the war runs its course. Bujold's account of the Vordarian Pretendership is tense, funny and frequently savage, and its finest sequences belong not to the soldiers but to a pregnant woman from a civilised world who has decided, calmly, exactly what she is prepared to do to get her son back.