Manumission
Manumission is the completion of the circle. The broken circle at the nape of her neck is closed, and from that moment she is free in every city under the Pact. It can be done only by her owner; nobody else has the authority to free another man's property, and there is no petition, no court, and no route around him.
Why an owner frees her
Reward — long service, exceptional work, a life given to a household that wants to acknowledge it; the most common reason and the one everyone assumes first. Ill fit — he has concluded she is Saenydd, that no correction will make her what he needs, or that her nature is not suited to slavery at all; the Hearth Keeper's Guild counts a willingness to do this among the marks of a member worth having. Deathbed provision — rare, since a freed slave with no household is worse off than a slave in a house that will keep her, and a man who does it has usually arranged something else as well.
She cannot ask
She has no standing to make demands and no mechanism to make one. A long household is more complicated than that sounds — a man who has kept a woman twenty years knows what she wants without her saying it, and she knows how to be known — and none of that is asking, and both would say so.
She can refuse
The part outsiders find strange and the philosophy finds obvious. Manumission takes everything: her place, her work, her household, the person she belonged to, the structure her life was built on. A woman freed at fifty with no family and no civic identity has been put out of doors wearing a closed circle. For a slave whose nature is to serve, being freed against her will is being placed against her nature, which the Natural Order says is the most unnecessary suffering there is. So her refusal binds him; freeing her over it is a violation in the same category as forcing her, and for the same reason. It does not save her from anything else — he can still sell her. What refusal buys is not safety but the right to remain what she is. A freed person who later wants the collar back can present herself for it; nothing about having been freed closes the door.
What the abolitionists notice
Manumission requires witnesses, so a refusal is heard by free people who can testify — one of the few violations against a slave that leaves evidence. Her refusal of sex has no such protection: it happens where no one is, she cannot testify, and the only account is hers, which is worth nothing. The world has built its best-witnessed rule around the harm least likely to happen and left its worst to occur in rooms nobody is standing in. Nobody has answered this.
The process
She kneels. Her collar is opened and removed. A practitioner fills the gap in the circle and closes the ring — ordinary tattoo work whose skill is in the matching, since the new ink must sit against ink that may be thirty years old and read as one continuous circle rather than a repair. Witnesses attest that it happened and was lawful; the practitioner is one, and the owner usually brings others. What happens to the collar varies, and everyone reads the choice. Where a city keeps records the manumission is registered — Shining Reach thoroughly, Clearhold exhaustively, Forgegate as a transfer of property, Eldershore in the lineage hall, Stormharbor sworn before a Gothi with sacred weight and no paperwork. The Iron Coves has nothing: an owner stops claiming her, somebody closes the circle, and she wears a mark indistinguishable from a forgery because there is no difference between the two.
What she gets back
Her personal Oathbond, and the ability to hold the other three. That is all. She has no Famrae, because her family did not free her; no station, because her work was his; no city, because a city is the community that counts you as one of its own and it is not owed to anyone. Often she already has it — a woman known in her street for years was part of that community long before the collar came off. Where she was not known, or came from elsewhere, she starts with nothing, and a good many freed people leave for a city where nobody watched them wear a collar. What she has is herself, and its first decision is her name. Building the rest is what anyone starting from nothing must do: marriage into a Famrae, adoption by a house, or standing through work.
Life afterward
She carries the closed circle for life; it does not erase the history, it records it accurately. She owns nothing — no property, no credentials, no civic identity that does not begin on the day she was freed. The freed-person community is real and is what gets most of them through: informal, unnamed, in every city. Her children are born free and unmarked; a freed woman's daughter has no visible history at all.
Re-enslavement
The circle can be reopened. A dissolution compound, calibrated to take the newer ink and leave the older, clears the completion over weeks and the original broken circle surfaces exactly as it was. Within the cities it is rare and runs through the ordinary routes into slavery. On the Frontier it fails: a claimer puts a collar on her and nobody on a road asks to see her neck. What he cannot do is sell her — a buyer, an auction house, and a magistrate all look, and a closed circle stops the transaction — so the completion makes selling her difficult, which is not the same as keeping her free.
Forged marks
A forged freedom mark is just a tattoo, and any competent artist can close a circle. What makes it a forgery is the absence of authority: no owner released her, no witnesses attested, no record exists. It holds until somebody checks, and in most of a life no one bothers. The more impassioned abolitionists do this — a serious crime, and theft of another man's property, which they consider an accurate charge and proceed anyway, on grounds the philosophy itself provided: a person who has examined the question and cannot endorse the thing must act on that conviction regardless of the cost. See The Network.