The Sufferance

From the books

In The Outcast Knight the old decrees are a matter of geography. Luna's slums are a maze of crooked, half-rotted buildings whose upper floors nearly meet over the alleys, crowded with hungry people, and neglect has cracked every stone. The trade district, with food the slums never taste, is as close as a slum-born human or dwarf ever comes to the residential spires, even with money in hand. Movement between districts is policed at checkpoints. Seraphina Thorn was thrown into the crypt prison for letting a dwarf slip past the trade district checkpoint.

The broken promise over language also shows in the book. After the rise of the Luminarite creed, public use of Old Speak was branded heretical. High Elvish, built to sound celestial and to set the new faith apart from a supposedly barbaric human past, became mandatory in all official rites. Speaking Old Speak aloud in public is still technically treason in some quarters, and Luna's nobles once had its speakers flogged in the streets. Even so, the old words survived. Fi found them scratched into the walls of the crypt prison, and she spoke the language only in secret until she shouted it across the tournament arena.

Under King Aurelion the laws of purity reach beyond the slums. After the Radiant bank breach the king ordered that the half-bloods in the citadel be questioned. Alerion chose the method: ten of them, one a child of about ten whose small pointed ears marked the crime of mixed blood, were lined up and killed in the courtyard. At the same time, crowds in the streets chanted for purity and against a human queen.