Mara, just to check, on your pacifist runs, do you get this choice?
Like I said above, you should only be offered this choice if you’ve been consistently nonviolent throughout the game. If you’re not getting that choice, then you’re picking something earlier that the game considers violent.
I can confirm that as a 2 CHA 1 INT character, I was able to finish the game and get the Nonviolence achievement from this point. However, on that runthrough I had also started a religion (kenon) which helped me to survive the game’s final encounter. So to get the achievement, you might need to not only be nonviolent, but more religious (one way or another) than Lady Mara de Jade would usually be.
Even if you’re right about this, I’m afraid it still won’t be 100% clear by the end of Book 2. 
We’ve got 5 books to get through, after all.
It’s possible, down one hard-to-reach line of conversation with Horion and a noble MC’s father, to get some sense of what that business might have been, and to learn that the Keriatou are sympathetic to the Shayardene traditionalist faction that includes the Laconniers.
I’ve been enjoying your discussion far too much for that. 
But sure, here’s some more grist for it.
My current worldbuilding vision (still somewhat subject to change, until I’ve actually written the Grand Shayard chapters of Game 2 and the Aekos chapters of Game 3) is that agricultural helots across the Hegemony are ritually harvested in a way that urban slave populations are not. (So yes, the great plantations of the Westriding and Southriding are some of the Hegemony’s main sources of blood as well as barley). The bought-and-sold drudges for the factories have a higher comparative value than farm hands, as of course do specialized semi-skilled House slaves.
It’s actually a bit better, in a city, to be a slave than to be a tradeless, Houseless, landless freeman. If you’re a freeman with a bit of land to rent, or a trade and a license to carry it out, you can do well. If on the other hand you’re a slave with skills worth buying, then you’re at least worth feeding, clothing, and sheltering. But there are vast urban classes of “masterless folk” who have a social status barely above helot, and who don’t have a trade of their own. The urban elites won’t enslave these classes, because that would entail feeding them; it’s not clear they could afford to enslave them, even if they wanted to.
These “free drudges” do a lot of the worst, most menial work in and around Hegemonic cities on a daily wage basis. When they can’t get enough to live on from that menial work–which is pretty much all the time–they break the law. They steal, or smuggle, or traffick, or carry out illegal petty trades and crafts.
By the same token, every city of the Hegemony has plenty of Harrowers, which operate in some cases on a near-daily basis, providing for a good share of the city’s blood needs. Their fodder is criminals…rioters, seditionists, smugglers, bawds. Or in thirsty times, just vagabonds and practicers of unlicensed trades…the kinds of folk who might be pressed into the lowest ranks of the army and shipped to the Halassur front if they’re lucky (and the war’s on) or sent to the Harrower when they’re (or it’s) not.
This is true of Aekos, whose menial classes are a polyglot blend from every province in the Thaumatarchy, as well as desperate Karagonds.
Their “liberties,” symbolized by freedom from ritual Harrowing, are still something the menial urban classes value immensely. A future government that tried to shift from the current widespread-but-unsystematic culling of criminals to a sacred lottery like the rural Harrowings would trigger massive urban resistance.
This is also, by the way, the class in Shayard that will be the most delighted if you made the decision to kill Horion Leilatou. You’ll get the option to spend a lot of time with them in Shayard City, if you don’t want to hang with the nobles.
Thoughts on the above? As I said, if I end up proposing some massive worldbuilding inconsistencies, it’s not too late to adjust it.
Absolutely. And as a confirmed fan of the saga of Walter White, I approve of the analogy.
@Hazel, @anon96373287, thanks for the bug reports. I’ll get onto fixing them as soon as I can, and apologize for the frustration.