The history of Grimsward and its three peoples

Grimsward's humans are native to the land. They are not Highlanders. The social divide between Grimsward's three peoples needs a well-explained history.

• [Book 1 spoiler]"Towering mountains and knife-edged valleys", where winter "rarely let go". Its people are forged by rock and cold, with enemies pressing on their borders.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Its elves still send tribute to Luna and fly elven Luna's banners, bound by "old pacts and shared blood".
• [Book 1 spoiler]The dwarves are native to the western deeps. Around 1100–800 BL many came east along the Iron Road to build Luna for its human knights.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Around 1100–800 BL elves from Eldanarë came to rule the western deeps. The Solastis court rose here, and here it mustered most of the conquest army of 705 BL.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The elves live easier than the Highlanders. The dwarves' strength comes from the mines. The Grimsward dwarves cremate their dead in the furnaces.

• [Book 1 spoiler]The valley clans (a working name) are the native human people of the western valleys. They herded the high summer meadows, farmed the lowland mouths of the valleys, and kept to their hearths through the long winters.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The dwarves lived and mined in the deeps beneath the same mountains.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The old exchange bound the two peoples: bread, meat, wool and timber went down into the deeps, and iron, tools and stonework came back up. It was a partnership between neighbours who needed each other, not a rule of one over the other.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The border enemies of Book 1 pressed on both peoples. Neither had a standing army, and each defended its own ground: the dwarves their gates, the clans their valley heads.

• [Book 1 spoiler]Who came: small parties of elves came up from Eldanarë, few in number but long-lived, armoured and carrying luminarite.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The bargain: they offered what neither the clans nor the dwarves had, a standing body of knights to hold the borders. In return they asked for the sunny high terraces and the meadows above for themselves, and a share of the valleys' work.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The first pacts were fair on paper. The dwarves swore their oath to the elven knights, the same kind of oath their kin who went east later swore to Luna's human knights. The clans owed labour days: a set number of days' work each year, in the foundries, on the roads and on the elven estates.

• [Book 1 spoiler]Elven memory. An elf lord who sealed a pact could still be ruling ten human generations later. Only the elves remembered the original terms. Each new reading of them was "what was always agreed", and no human was alive to say otherwise.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The days became the Levy (a working name). Labour days were turned into a hereditary duty owed by every household and recorded in elven ledgers. Debts carried down to children, and a household that could not give its days owed them doubled. Within a few centuries most clan families were permanently bound.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The move to the valley floor. Water-driven foundries were built at the falls on the shaded valley floor, and the bound households were moved down beside them. The clans lost the meadows, which became elven summer grounds, and the lowland farms, which became elven estates. The valley floor town is what remains.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Arms. The knights disarmed the clans "for the safety of the passes". Humans now carry weapons only when they are levied into war.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Dwarves above humans. The dwarves kept their halls, their guilds and their oath. They were valued, skilled and armed in the deeps, so they stood above the humans in the order. The old exchange soured: it was elven stewards, not the clans, who now bought dwarven iron.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Why it held:
  • [Book 1 spoiler]the border enemies were real, so the knights' protection was worth something;
  • [Book 1 spoiler]the elves controlled the lowland grain;
  • [Book 1 spoiler]the dwarves kept their oath;
  • [Book 1 spoiler]no living human remembered anything else.

• [Book 1 spoiler]The muster. The Solastis court mustered here. The conquest host was elven knights leading levied valley-clan humans and dwarven engines and sappers. The levied humans died in the greatest numbers, and their dead lie in the valley's mass graves.
• [Book 1 spoiler]The court moved east. Grimsward became a provincial seat of a court that now lives in Luna. Since then it has sent tribute and ore, and its pressed labour is shipped to Luna to rebuild its slums. The old Solastis seat in the high town is held by a governor.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Today:

• [Book 1 spoiler]Tensions for the story:
  • [Book 1 spoiler]western separatists, families descended from the labour battalions, and deep-shaft cults;
  • [Book 1 spoiler]the Levy ledgers themselves, as evidence.

• [After the books spoiler]Elves. They revere luminarite as the light of Eldanarë, an elven heritage and a gift. It is a quiet faith, because in Grimsward the elves never needed a holy war to justify their rule: they came by pact, not by conquest. The Creed of Luna, founded in 0 AL by Aiduin, who was born here, keeps chapels in Grimsward out of loyalty to the court, but without Luna's zeal.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Dwarves. The fire of the deeps, and the Bellows Saint in the buried forge. Their dead are burned in the forge furnaces, and the ash returns to the stone.
• [Book 1 spoiler]Valley clans. Hearth and ancestor shrines from before the elves, kept quietly. Charon's ferry, for a people who bury too many of their own. A Creed chapel they are expected to attend.