Content Warning: This section of the guide features references to enslavement.

“All Logen could do was make for the mountains, and try to save his own sorry life. You have to be realistic. Have to be, however much it hurts.”

Logen, fighting for his life against a rampaging Shanka, must abandon his clanmates in order to survive. He regrets the decision, but he is fatalistic about it. While his people live by a code, he can’t adhere to it if he’s dead. Survival is his top priority—live today, deal with the rest tomorrow. In the merciless wildlands of the North, survival at all costs is both practical and forgivable.

“A prison where we have made slaves of the innocent and guilty alike in the name of freedom. A stinking hole where we send those we hate and those we are ashamed of to die of hunger, and disease, and hard labour.”

Commenting on his tenure as administrator of the Angland mines, Glokta does not verbalize his true feelings—that the mines are a convenient dumping ground for the undesirables and politically inconvenient. His comment invokes images of prisons housing individuals that society prefers not to deal with. Glokta’s time in a Gurkish prison has certainly jaded him but perhaps also given him a unique insight into the structural problems of incarceration.

“‘Bloody idiots,’ hissed Jezal under his breath, but he would have loved to be one of them.”

On his training run, Jezal encounters Prince Ladisla and his entourage, a fawning, sycophantic bunch of “dandies.” He sees them for what they are—status-seekers and flatterers who will do anything to be in the Prince’s inner circle—but while inwardly condemning them, he admits he’d love to join that inner circle. Jezal’s inner conflict is suggestive of the classic “the-grass-is-always-greener” conundrum. Because Jezal is born of noble blood, he is graced with good looks and shows great promise as a swordsman, but he can’t help but feel that he deserves more.