"Suppose," allows Cam. "How big do courts get?"

"It's rumored that the really famous old ones in the Misty Isles reach a thousand but I don't know that I've heard that from anyone who's been to one."

"And around here?"

"No one's above three hundred. And that's rare, and not spectacularly stable."

"Oh, what happens to them when they destabilize?"

"They get bad fortune. Anyone who can cut themself loose does. They sell other people off for favors to try to manage the bad fortune. Eventually they either get a handle on it or collapse."

"About what fraction of people get sold at some point in their lives?"

"At some point? Most things that can happen will happen at some point."

"If I meet a randomly selected faery how likely is it that they have been sold at some point in their life?"

"Probably not very high. One in twenty? Maybe one in ten?"

"That's very high!"

"I guess it depends what you're comparing to. The average person is many winters old!"

"I mean I'm comparing it to 'negligible' but that's still like five or ten times higher than I was naively - being optimistic about."

"I don't know what you're imagining but it's mostly not - horrible, or anything. We trade for people a lot, here, and they mostly live about the same life as I do except they have to run more patrols and they're less likely to get expensive presents like human currency. There's not different rules or different houses or anything."

"I mean, even 'forced relocation' alone is not music to my ears," isn't it lovely how many figures of speech are negations, "but yeah I guess it could pan out to be just 'being a faery only more so'."

"Depends some on where you end up, but having people entangled with you who hate you is a terrible idea and people mostly don't do it."

"That's something."

"Do people in your time and world...never have to move if they don't care to?"

"Their landlord might retire? Their house could burn down? There are reasons they might have to move away but they cut way down on reasons they might have to move to, if that makes sense."

Nod. 

"Also their families are not allowed to sell them. Or their, uh, city councils, or whatever."

"I gathered that. It'd be good if parentdebts were much smaller, assuming that it happened because making people was much less costly, but I think if you had debts work the way they do and couldn't trade people, that'd be worse for people in a lot of debt. They'd be worth less to whoever they owed."

"So one problem I am noticing you guys having is that if you don't have a pretty solidly established trust relationship, or a way of keeping an eye on somebody, you can't let any major debt ride. When that's not the case, you can relax a lot about exactly how and when you get paid back even if you do insist on being paid back, which humans sometimes just write off because it's too annoying but don't always. For humans in the era when I grew up - I know less about how this has evolved since - but around then you can in fact buy and sell debt! If somebody owes you, like, five thousand dollars, and they're not coughing up, you sell the debt to someone whose job is being professionally annoying about wanting to be paid, for somewhat less than five thousand dollars in case that doesn't work either. This still leaves the person who owes the money control over their own life."

" - that sounds amazing."

"I thought you'd like that!" Wag.