They have noticed and they appreciate it. 

" - so first off, it sounds like there are plenty of relationships between a slave and a free person in which it's not necessarily the case that - the slave could not have refused the relationship. It sounds like it might fix those cases if there was just...much more commonplace manumission. One person thought that there wasn't manumission specifically because it was unAsmodean, which seems like more reason to consider it now."

Nod. "Maybe so. Some lords in Menador do manumit for heroic service or for paying down the cost of a slave; it wasn't banned for orcs, as it was for halflings. This house hasn't done it recently, but it's hardly an unknown practice. A part of me would prefer to think about what method would lose us the least money, especially now that the value of all existing money is dropping like a stone. But we can free them all, if necessary, and some, certainly, would have earned their freedom many times over if anyone had been keeping track of it."

"I don't have any insight into the finances, of course, and if there's a way to structure it that's less expensive that is a reasonable thing to be concerned with. I think that slavery is - generally not very conducive to people relating to each other in Good ways, though I don't have a lot of points of comparison as Lastwall doesn't have it at all except as punishment for a crime, which produces very different circumstances."

"I think it's worth thinking about whether it's acceptable to convert many of them to indentures who can then pay off a set amount of money, and worth thinking about what to do about the household slaves who I don't, in fact, personally own. But it'll take a bit of time, and I'd rather not be quite as hasty about legal solutions. They're a bit more difficult to fix."

"Indeed. Though even just changing rules temporarily - I think it contributed to the nearly-fatal duel this afternoon, if only by giving foolish teenagers something new to fight each other over."

"I heard. I hadn't expected that in particular, but in hindsight I should have considered whether people would misunderstand what we were saying about the status of slaves, especially the visitors who haven't heard anything else you've said.

I'm not trying to sabotage you. I did know it was a bad implementation for what you were trying to accomplish. But it's not very recoverable to let a man rape a woman, if that's what it would be, and I still don't in fact know what an acceptable rule would look like, apart from sidestepping the issue in this specific household by freeing the people for whom the rule makes the least sense."

They had in fact quietly debated whether he was trying to sabotage them. 

"I - appreciate that you are able to, while skeptical of our premises, notice that if they did hold up then allowing a man to rape a woman would be very bad," he says. "It is very helpful, and I'm grateful, even if it caused some immediate headaches. As for what the best long-term rule is - Carles thought that we should just go through every situation and, uh, see where the knives are, and whether there's an alternative to having knives there."

Nod. "Well, it will certainly take longer, but hopefully if we do it right, we'll only have to do it once. At minimum, I'm going to need to hear back from the Queen about the intended scope of the actual law, I still think that's the most important thing to be sure of. Are there other particular situations that you're concerned about here?"

"I have not yet run into a situation other than with the captured orcs that is terrifically concerning. I ...suspect there are some, but the things that make them harmful or even Evil may not be very legible."

"I see. You're concerned about - any situation in which someone is having sleeping with another person they're not at liberty to refuse?"

"- I guess most broadly I am concerned about every situation where someone is having the experience of having something awful happen to them that they are helpless to change in any way, and it is just that being forced to have sex or bear children is a common source of that. The being at liberty to refuse is mostly relevant in that if that's how someone feels about it and they're free to refuse they will...refuse."

"Mmm.

I don't think I know right now what level of awful experience we should be trying strenuously to prevent, and if I did I suspect I'd find that it was often not in people's interests to admit to it."

"That's the other thing. Is it - absolutely necessary to the functioning of this household to sometimes sell its members south?"

"It's not, for the current members. But if we stop keeping new ones, that's in practice where the ones we might have kept will go."

"Yes, I understand that. I think it might be unethical to sell slaves south but - entirely separately from that I think it is corrosive to relationships in this household if people expect that is what will happen to them if they don't navigate the household well enough, so I think there is a kind of harm that would be avoided by not selling anyone in this household south."

"That's not very expensive, we can afford to keep the ones we have. - although, after our last conversation, I did remember another circumstance under which women kill their infants. I had been thinking about the human women. But orcs kill most of the daughters they bear. They do it in the mountains, and they do it here, too."

"Do you know...why?"

"Most of the boys we raise will die as young men, not old ones. It's true among the nobility here, and it's even more true in the mountains. The human noblewomen keep almost all their children, so for every old man, we have two or three old women, sometimes more. The orcs instead kill the surplus girls as infants, and keep the sons. The sons who survive - don't marry, as I've said, but form relationships with human women who don't want to be someone's third mistress. But the girls don't have much future, even when they keep them."

"And they can't - learn to be warriors, or priests, support themselves without marriage?"

"The previous priesthood was not traditionally particularly open to half-orc slaves. Some of them are warriors, yes, I know you've met Ivet. We could require it of all of them, though I expect that if we did so they would die even more often than the men. Some of them serve in the house, especially if a surviving brother is attached. Some of them we eventually sell.

I can agree not to sell any of the ones we have. I can probably stop the orcs from killing any new ones. I suppose the obvious problems with these combined policies are solved neatly enough by forbidding anyone to sleep with the orc slaves in the future, even if not having any half-orc men creates some new ones. But - I also have not been even attempting to enforce the laws against infanticide on orc slaves in my territory, and if it is intended that I do so, I do worry that that will have major consequences."

"I understand. I....do think that killing babies is still Evil if they are orc babies." 

"If people don't rape the slaves it may be less of a problem because they won't be bearing as many children. I suppose they might just have relations with other slaves."

"Right. This household, specifically, does not keep male orcs. But we do sell the male children, and they do grow up, on the farms we sell them to. Possibly people could switch to more widespread use of castration, and prevent unmanageable numbers of children that way."

"That is definitely going to be less Evil than widespread infanticide. Assuming it affects orcs about the ways it affects humans; I don't actually know anything about orc castration." He also doesn't know much about human castration! Lastwall doesn't generally practice it!

"They... often survive it." Even when they had healers, they didn't have enough healers for slaves.