Quicksilver

“No matter how tight things were, no matter how many families starved and died, not one resident of Zilvaren would dare to deal in something as dangerous as the gauntlet I had wedged onto my forearm.”

Saeris’s observation that residents of Zilvaren, particularly those living in the Third Ward, would starve before daring to steal from one of Madra’s soldiers indicates the violence of Madra’s millennium-long regime. Though Saeris rebels against Madra, the effects of growing up under a totalitarian dictatorship influence her thinking throughout the novel.

“‘I know that struggling to scratch out a life here is better than bleeding out in the fucking sand! Is that what you want? To die in the street in front of Hayden?’

[…] ‘YES! Yes, of course that’s what I want […] Yes, I want to die and ruin Hayden’s life. Your life. I want to be made a spectacle of. I want everyone in the ward to know me as the glassmaker’s apprentice who was stupid enough to steal from Madra’s guard and got herself killed for it. That’s exactly what I want!’”

Saeris’s sarcastic response to Elroy illustrates that she is not blind to the risks involved in resisting Madra’s rule, but that she sees these risks as worth it, given that the alternative is a quiet, slow death. This sets up Saeris’s ongoing determination to do what she feels is right, even when the consequences prove to be dire, which shapes her actions in Yvelia.

“They despised him for his suns-bleached clothes, his dirty skin, and the hollows beneath his eyes. But mostly, they despised him because any one of them could have been him. Luck dictated where you ended up in this city.”

The social politics of Zilvaren, Saeris here notes, are strictly hierarchical. But because the citizens of the upper wards cannot rebel against Madra and do not want to countenance the idea that they are privileged due to luck rather than inherent value, they perpetuate Madra’s cruelties in disenfranchising the lower ward residents even further.