Frizdoeen
A slave who runs has almost nowhere to go. The broken circle makes her a slave in every city, the network that can close it is small and slow, and what is left is the Frontier. Most who run are caught within days; most who are not die out there. The survivors are the wild ones — a small number of a small number — and they are not alone. In the deep Frontier, in forest interiors and mountain valleys nobody visits and coastal wilderness far from any settlement, there are bands.
What they are called
The cities call them Frizdoeen, built from the word for an unruly person and the word for taking by stealth. It names them as stolen goods and blames them for having been difficult, which is the whole of what a city thinks about the matter. They do not use the name. A band member asked what they are gives the name of the band, the nearest thing they have to a Famrae. There is no word in the Spraecha for what they are collectively, because the only people who need one are the people they left behind.
Who is in them
Escaped slaves are the largest part and the reason the bands exist. Outlaws next — free people whose crimes meant staying in a city would destroy their Oathbond. Some are the genuinely ill-fitted, the people the philosophy would call Saenydd, who reached the same conclusion by a different road. Very rarely an Aesloes with nowhere to be. What every one has in common is that there is no way back; that is the entry requirement, whether anyone says it or not.
How they survive
Fire, above everything: it deters most of what hunts people, cooks, keeps the cold away, and is never allowed to die. Defensible ground — cliff overhangs, thickets, anywhere with one approach and a wall at its back. Weapons of whatever can be made or found; a good steel knife traded off a Frontier merchant is the most prized object a wild one can own. And knowledge — which ground a Kollgar pack has been working, where the Svaekoil hold water, when the Kammra goes dormant, which moss will put a person to sleep and never let them wake. That knowledge does not travel and cannot be sold.
Contact
Complete isolation is not possible; the forest does not make metal, medicine, salt, or cloth. Frontier traders who do not ask where the furs came from and do not look at anyone's neck. Roedhaven farmers on the outer edge of a ring who leave baskets at the edge of the field and say nothing. Physicians with abolitionist convictions who go out to them. Teamsters and outriders who run the same routes for years and do not necessarily report a camp. And, after long acquaintance, select Waendra groups — the most useful contact available and the most dangerous if misjudged. Two or three times a year, bands from a region meet at places everyone attending already knows, to trade what the country is doing, settle things, and make partnerships that keep the bands from becoming too closely related. The gatherings are short.
What holds them
They have no Oathbond; three of its four aspects are city machinery. What they have instead they call Haeldi — to grip, to sustain against force, to keep a thing from breaking — and used of a band it means what holds them together and what they owe one another. Four obligations, none sworn: share food, keep watch, do not abandon the group, raise the children together. A person who fails at these is not shamed into amendment; the band stops feeding them, which works faster than sanoeva and is considerably more final. A city person would call it a lesser thing than the Oathbond. The bands would say the cities have never had to find out.
The mark
In the cities the broken circle means slave. In the bands it means survivor, and that reading works only while the circle stays broken; closing it would be speaking the cities' language about a thing the cities get to define. Some cut three short lines through the gap — neither slave nor free, a third thing, decided on rather than given. A person wearing it has made a decision about the rest of their life, which is why anyone who intends to go back keeps their circle plain. Many bands mark their own with the same three slashes when they reckon them grown; on a band-born there is no circle underneath, which is the whole distinction. It is the closest thing anyone in the Known World has to a rite of passage cut into the skin, and the cities would find it barbaric if they thought about it. Marked traders work far from home, three or four Roedhavens away, because a marked person in a waystation is proof that a band exists within a few days' walk.
Children
Born in the bands, with no broken circle and legally nothing — no records, no Oathbond, no aeslae. A band-born adult who walked into a city would be assessed as a free person with no history whatsoever, which is a stranger condition than being an Aesloes. Trading falls to them because they are the only ones who can: every escaped slave in a band is recoverable property the moment somebody looks at their neck. It makes them important out of proportion to their years, and gives them a choice nobody else has — a band-born adult in a Roedhaven with goods to sell is one decision from a life somewhere else. Most come back. Some do not, and the band does not go looking.
Being found by them
A person alone in the Frontier who meets a band is in a different kind of trouble than they expect. The bands cannot hold the Fyndrecht — property cannot hold a claim — so a wild one who pulls a man from a river is owed something the world has no way of paying. Mostly they watch, judge whether anyone is coming for him, and leave. Ransom, when he is worth something and his party is close. Taking what he had and leaving him. Killing him if he has seen the camp, because a living witness can bring back men. What decides it is whether he saw where they live. Taking him in almost never happens; the people who get taken in are people already on the outside. Slaving by a band happens, rarely, and a band that puts a collar on someone has become a thing no other band will gather with.
The Coves have none of this
A runaway in The Iron Coves does not become a Frizdoeen because she has no need to; there is no authority that could return her. What she has instead is nothing — no standing, no possessions, and a broken circle that means no one will hire her unless what they want is a new slave. Some manage, usually by finding somebody to close the circle, which in the Coves is easy and indistinguishable from the lawful kind. Which is why closed circles coming out of the Coves are distrusted everywhere else.