Protection and Its Failures
A slave has no rights. She holds no Oathbond, cannot testify, cannot bring a case, and nothing is owed her. Everything her owner is obliged to do, she cannot enforce. What protects her is others.
How it works
By being seen. A household is watched continuously and without anyone intending it: neighbors see her at the door, guests see how she is spoken to, a physician sees her body, the market sees what she wears and whether she is thin. None of them is looking for abuse and all of them would notice it. What follows is escalation — a remark to him, a remark about him, invitations that stop, his guild or elders or neighbors applying pressure that is never formally applied, sanoeva at the end of it, which cannot be appealed because no ruling was ever made. The whole apparatus rests on one thing: that his standing matters to him, and that the people withdrawing it are roughly his equals.
Every city has something
Shining Reach has written law, of the sort a city has for its animals, and a magistrate who can act on it. Clearhold records and regulates it. Forgegate handles it through the guilds, binding on members and reaching nobody else. Eldershore has the oldest customary protections in the world, enforced in the lineage halls. Stormharbor takes it to the Thing, which has heard cases about slaves. None of these is available to her; every one requires a free person to raise it. The Iron Coves has nothing at all.
Taking her away
In Shining Reach a magistrate can order it — the only route in the world that runs through a court and ends with a document. In the Coves men take her; a crew that has decided a man has gone too far simply acts, and she belongs to whoever took her, who keeps or sells her. Better odds than she had and not a rescue. The other four have their own machinery and it works slowly, the same pressure applied by everyone whose regard he needs until selling her becomes the only tolerable thing left; he is not usually forced, he is made to want it. The fastest way out of a bad house is the city with the most laws or the place with none at all, and a stubborn man elsewhere can be despised by everyone he knows and keep her through it. The abolitionists make this argument and no one has an answer to it. Who buys her afterward is whoever will — a neighbor who watched, a household that needs the work, or by default a slaver, which is why a rescue can end with her further from anyone who knows her than she started.
Where it fails
The mechanism needs roughly equal standing, and that produces three predictable failures. Where power concentrates: a senator, a guild master, an elder, a man whose money holds up half a street — his neighbors cannot withdraw anything he needs. Where community thins: a Roedhaven of twenty, an isolated holding, a ship, where nobody is watching. Where there is no community at all: the Coves and the Frontier. The pattern is consistent and the wrong way around: the system protects best where a slave is least likely to need it and fails exactly where she is most likely to.
The religions
The faiths of the Known World are the faiths the arrivals brought, settled over nine centuries into a world built on the Oathbond; what survived is what fitted. There is no single doctrine on slavery. What there is instead is a broad practical agreement, reached separately by dozens of traditions that agree on little else: that she is a person whatever her station, and that abusing her is wrong. Almost none takes the further step of saying the institution itself is wrong, and the ones that do are small. Stormharbor's Gothi are the most active — counseling owners and slaves, standing witness at manumission, raising abuse in spiritual terms a Stormharbor man cannot easily dismiss, and some quietly providing refuge. Eldershore works through the lineage halls and the ancestral keepers, on the position that the ancestors are watching. Shining Reach's Academy hosts the argument rather than taking a side. See Faith.
When she is in danger
A free person who means her harm is contradicting her owner's standing wish that she be kept safe, which makes refusing him lawful. She leaves, and it escalates in steps: politely, then a firm no, then a raised voice and a call for help. If he puts hands on her she fights — she is her owner's property and protecting his property is what she was told to do, and it happens to be herself. A man who has come that far has already shown he holds no Oathbond worth respecting. Afterward it is her owner's to settle with the man, and a magistrate's if they cannot agree, because an injury is a debt like any other. She does not appear in any of it.
What cannot be fixed
None of this is a right. All of it depends on somebody else caring enough to act and having standing the offender needs. The defenders say that is the point: a law that compels a man to treat her well tells you nothing about the man. The abolitionists say a protection that works only where it is least needed is not a protection, and a system depending on the goodness of everyone in it will fail everywhere that goodness runs out — which the Natural Order itself says will be somewhere. Both are correct. Neither has moved the other in nine hundred years. See The Contested Ground.