The Art of Scorpions — Erin Bow

GRETA IS A DUCHESS AND CROWN PRINCESS -- AND A HOSTAGE TO PEACE. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. And you must keep the peace; start a war and your hostage dies.

Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives, a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. A boy who opens Greta's eyes to the brutality of the system they live under -- and to her own power.

With her nation on the verge of war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing her -- unless she can she find a way to break all the rules.