Showing results by author "Lois McMaster Bujold" in All Categories

Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong, and move on to the next job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where a group of humanoids had been secretly, commercially bioengineered for working in free fall. Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation?

A six-year-old shiplost girl draws the kin Jurald family of Vilnoc into complex dilemmas, and sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona into conflict—with each other. It will take all of Penric’s wits, his wife Nikys’s wisdom, and the hand of the fifth god’s strangest saint to untangle the threads of their future.

On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is the Bastard, "master of all disasters out of season", and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric.

When Rozakajin, road-weary bandit and army deserter, spots a hapless blond young man in a country inn with an intriguing treasure map, he thinks he’s scouted an easy and lucrative victim. Attaching himself to odd traveler Penric seems simple enough, but when Roz’s old enemies catch up from behind, his plans take a turn for the much worse. When Pen’s claim that I never travel alone proves true in ways Roz never imagined, his world becomes more frightening still—but also much wider than he’d ever dared to dream.

The half-mad Prince Boleso has been slain by a noblewoman he had intended to defile. It falls to Lord Ingrey kin Wilfcliff to transport the prince to his burial place and to bring the accused killer, Lady Ijada, to judgment. The road he travels with his burden and his prisoner is fraught with danger. But in the midst of political chaos, magic has the fiercer hold on Ingrey's destiny, and Ijada herself may turn out to be the only one he dares trust.

With the future of Athos at stake, Ethan is chosen on behalf of his cloistered fellows for a unique mission: to brave the wider universe in quest of new ovarian tissue cultures to replenish Athos' dwindling stocks. Along the way, he must tangle with covert operatives, killers, telepathy, interplanetary politics, and - perhaps most disturbingly - an indomitable female mercenary named Elli Quinn.

Filled with magic, heroism, and all-too-human characters, Bujold's Sharing Knife saga is both a gripping adventure and a poignant romance. The farmers and riverfolk have long distrusted the power of the mysterious and aloof Lakewalkers. The proud Lakewalkers, meanwhile, have exiled Dag after learning of his marriage to Fawn, the first outsider to be bound to a Lakewalker in their magical way. But as Dag's natural Lakewalker ability to manipulate "ground energy" begins to develop in dangerous directions, he and Fawn realize that big changes are ahead.

Three years have passed since the widowed Dowager Royina Ista found release from the curse of madness that kept her imprisoned in her family's castle of Valenda. Her newfound freedom is costly, bittersweet with memories, regrets, and guilty secrets, for she knows the truth of what brought her land to the brink of destruction. And now the road, escape, beckons...A simple pilgrimage, perhaps. Quite fitting for the Dowager Royina of Chalion.

Lakewalker Barr Foxbrush returns from two years of patrolling the bitter wilds of Luthlia against the enigmatic, destructive entities called malices, only to find that the secret daughter he'd left behind in the hinterland of Oleana has disappeared from her home after a terrible accusation. The search for her will call on more of Barr's mind and heart than just his mage powers, as he tries to balance his mistakes of the past and his most personal duties to the future. A stand-alone story set in the world of the Sharing Knife.

In this novella set in the World of the Five Gods and four years after the events in Penric's Demon, Penric is a divine of the Bastard's Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a "Locator" of the Father's Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend.

Captain Ivan Vorpatril is happy with his relatively uneventful bachelor's life as a staff officer to a Barrayaran admiral. Cousin to imperial troubleshooter Miles Vorkosigan, Ivan is not far down the hereditary list for the emperorship. Thankfully, new heirs have directed that headache elsewhere, leaving Ivan to enjoy his life on Komarr, far from the Byzantine court politics of his home system. But when an old friend in Barrayaran intelligence asks Ivan to protect an attractive young woman who may be on the hit list of a criminal syndicate, his chivalrous nature takes over. It seems danger and adventure have once more found Captain Vorpatril.

Dying is easy. Coming back to life is hard. Miles Vorkosigan should know - having done both once already. Thanks to his quick-thinking staff and the artistry of a medical specialist, Miles' first death wasn't his last. But it does take some recovery, a fact he has been reluctant to admit. When he makes the mistake of returning too soon to duty, he finds himself summoned to face the security chief, Simon Illyan. But Miles' worst nightmares about Illyan are nothing compared to Illyan's own nightmares.

Learned Penric, a sorcerer and divine of the Bastard's Order, travels across the sea to sunlit Cedonia on his first covert diplomatic mission, to attempt to secure the services of a disaffected Cedonian general for the Duke of Adria. However, nothing is as it seems. Penric is betrayed and thrown into a dungeon, and worse follows for the general and his kin.

Some eight months after the events of Penric and the Shaman, Learned Penric, sorcerer and scholar, travels to Easthome, the capital of the Weald. There he again meets his friends Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. When the body of a sorceress is found in the woods, Oswyl draws him into another investigation, and they must all work together to uncover a mystery mixing magic, murder, and the strange realities of Temple demons.

Lord Miles Vorkosigan has a problem that all his new power can't solve: unrequited love for the beautiful Vor widow Ekaterin Vorsoisson. Ekaterin is violently allergic to marriage as a result of her first exposure. But, as Miles learned from his late career in galactic covert ops, if a frontal assault won't do, go to subterfuge.

Filled with magic, heroism, and all-too-human characters, Bujold's Sharing Knife saga is both a gripping adventure and a poignant romance. In this second volume, Fawn Bluefield, the clever farm girl, and Dag Redwing Hickory, the seasoned Lakewalker soldier-sorcerer, are newly married. Their arrival at Dag's home on Hickory Lake Camp is met with prejudice and suspicion, as many in the camp deny the literal bond between Dag and Fawn, woven in blood in the Lakewalker magical way.

An unholy attack upon his brother-in-law, General Arisaydia, pitches sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon, Desdemona, headlong into the snake pit of Cedonian imperial politics. But they will not travel alone. The mission from his god brings Penric some of his strangest new allies yet and the return of some of his most valued old ones.

In the wake of interplanetary war, former commander Cordelia Naismith has deserted her own planet to marry the leader of the defeated enemy, Aral Vorkosigan. On his home planet of Barrayar, two rival factions are eyeing the recently vacated throne, and Aral, recently appointed Regent of Barrayar by the Emperor on his deathbed, must stand between them. Lord and Lady Vorkosigan, Aral and Cordelia struggle to establish stability in a fragile government thrown into confusion by the transition of power.

Miles Vorkosigan makes his debut in this frenetic coming-of-age tale. At age 17, Miles is allowed to take the entrance exams to the elite military academy; he passes the written but manages, through miscalculation in a moment of anger, to break both his legs on the obstacle course, washing out before he begins. His aged grandfather dies in his sleep shortly after, for which Miles blames himself.

Young, pregnant Fawn Bluefield has just fled her family's farm to the city of Glassforge, where she encounters a patrol of the enigmatic soldier-sorcerers known as Lakewalkers. Fawn has heard stories about the Lakewalkers, who are wandering necromancers with no permanent homes and no possessions except the clothes they wear and the mysterious knives they carry. What she does not know is that the Lakewalkers are engaged in a perilous campaign against inhuman and immortal magical entities known as "malices".