Slavery and Service

A Sigring. The sigil faces front; the clockwork release is at the back and opens under two hands.

Slavery is lawful in every city of Teraell. A slave is property — not a person with reduced rights, not a servant under a hard contract, but property in the same legal category as a Dorath or a house. A slave holds no Oathbond and wears her owner's at her throat. These pages describe the institution as the world practices it; they name and summarize, and do not depict. For the argument over whether any of it should exist, see The Contested Ground.

The Bible, and these pages, say "she" of slaves and "he" of owners because that is the common case; neither is a rule. Men are enslaved, women own slaves, and anyone with the money can buy one.

The institution

• Slavery — what a slave is; what she owns, cannot do, and can do
• Sigring · Koeler — the collar and the mark
• Becoming a Slave — submission, debt, sentence, Frontier claiming, war, piracy, the arriving stranger; the first hour; when it was a mistake
• Manumission — the completion of the circle, why an owner frees her, why she may refuse, what she gets back

Service

• Address and Titles — Jor, Moejor, Jan, Daes; names, gender, and the formal register; speech and refusal
• Commands and Forms — the words of a household, and the shapes a body holds
• A Slave's Day — waking, hair, work, rest, errands, eating, bathing, sleep; the two rules of her body
• Kinds of Service — domestic, attendant, skilled, supervisory, sexual, heavy labor, the mines
• Household Rank — the senpei
• What Each Owes the Other — provision and judgment against obedience, attention, honesty, and trust; the asymmetry and the weight

Keeping

• Health, Injury, and Correction — telling him, who treats her, the physician's eye; correction, its instruments, and where it becomes abuse
• Travel and Restraint — alone, the named binds, at a Roedhaven, by sea, shipped
• Nyvra and Children — birth control, the reversal, and why every child is born free

Protection and its failures

• Protection and Its Failures — how it works by being seen, what each city has, where it fails
• Hearth Keeper's Guild
• Frizdoeen — the wild ones: the bands of the deep Frontier
• The Network — the scatter of people who help someone reach a city

Men and the market

• Male Slaves — the four kinds, the bar, the war captive, the sentenced man, the voluntary slave
• The Slave Market — the houses and the guild, reading the ribbons, the candle, the auctioneer, the premium auction, the Bill of Chattel, the collar, private sales, the transfer