We all know how I feel about Bujold by now, right? It's nice to get some resolution to the love story (which, to be fair, we all knew where it was going). The story itself was...fun albeit Milesian. And Milesian is not a criticism because I love Miles deeply and forever (even if I would murder him if I had to live with him).
There is an interesting thing I want to write about Miles versus Penric as models of...an overinhabited mind, let us say. And as people who are constantly in over their heads and getting themselves out with a truly extraordinary and unexpected skillset.
But later. For now, I'm much more interested in Bujold's recent focus on...for lack of a better term, polyamory.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen is the most explicit in terms of working out how the arrangement would go, but I counted three different triads in this novella, each of which was negotiated in a different way. (I would like some confirmation that Nikys and Adelis's mothers were lovers--representation is good, after all--but that might require a POV shift and I think the subtext is there, but I also think that we don't really have the models for homosocial bonding in polygyny, but whatever.) So Tanar/Sura/Adelis as a future possibility and Penric/Nikys/Desdemona at the close of the book. And none of these triads are love triangles in the traditional sense of choice; they are all left somewhat open-ended with the presumption that resolution is negotiation and not choice. Which I find fascinating, though I'm not quite sure where it goes from here. There's a kind of "Beta colony's attitudes towards sex are more codified and in the open than usual, but human beings have been figuring this kind of thing out for a very long time" feel to it, but I'm trying to figure out what these four models--Aral/Oliver/Cordelia as the fourth--are saying.