Ashes of Man (Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

That brought a smile to my face. “It’s Latin, aryabite.” Jaddian was—in a sense—a Romance language, a bastard descendant of the almost-forgotten Latin, offspring of Spanish mingled with Arabic and the Persian whose speakers crowded together in the mad scramble from Earth. The forefathers of the men who would become the princes of Jadd had retained their ethnic fraternity against all odds, against light-years of distance and millennia of time, and time and blood and toil had declared their independence from the culture of the greater Imperium. The first princes of Jadd had done the impossible. They had cracked the genetic mysteries of the High College, wrested control of their generations back from the Emperor and the Council, so that the eali—their palatines—might give themselves heirs, and not beseech the Solar Throne for progeny. For six thousand years our two cultures had grown apart. While the Empire remained more or less centralized, the palatine houses dependent upon the Emperor and Imperial bureaucrats for heirs, the Jaddian principalities competed with each other, stretching the bounds of human potential. The porphyrogeneticists of Jadd had elevated eugenics to an art form, while we Sollans considered it a mere science.

Interesting lore about Jadd.