"I like you too!" Hug. "I guess I should say "I won't be mad if you say no" instead of "you can say no"."

"I also don't want to, I dunno, make you insecure about your Cathei-holding abilities, or whatever, you can't just decide it doesn't mean anything if I just randomly say stuff and don't even have a reason."

" - okay. But if, like, I want to have sex and you feel really unwell then that'd be a reason. And you could say it."

"Yes, Malare, I promise if I am ever feeling liable to puke on you I will warn you before you get near me."

He seems satisfied enough with that. They go home. He explains the situation to Amait.

She sends someone to check whether any of the rest of her slaves are on a do-not-manumit list.

A handful of the more recent purchases. Not Aya, although manumitting her will apparently be colossally expensive for unrelated reasons; she'd be an immigrant and those are a different thing from imports.

Obnoxious. Well, hopefully Aya doesn't mind sticking around until abolition obviates it. 

(How does she seem to be doing -)

She draws, one to four animals a day unless she's asked for extras. She reads. She studies the language and fills in Esevi vocabulary for Faenar. She is not simmering with resentment but she is - to Amait, anyway, - rather conspicuously judgmental.

Exactly what she needs in life. She works on closed sewers. She pretends to entertain some marriage proposals. Someday she'll probably notice a man who has no interest and then she can marry him and they can do it twice to get two children. (She's not entirely sure that's how it works but she's optimistic.)

When it's been six months she schedules a meeting with Ayabel.

Ayabel is reasonably competent in Andeme after six months. She shows up to her meeting.

"Hi. I want to tell you what I'm doing and talk about what you're good at and what you're interested in so we can find something that suits you, okay? I strongly expect that there'll be some options you don't hate and if I'm wrong about that you can stick with the current arrangement for a while. Make sense?"

"...I think so."

"What part might not make sense."

"I think I understand all the words. I am not sure I understand why you said them now."

"I want you to have some context for these questions so that you can answer them more usefully, and I want you not to be worried that wrong answers mean something horrible happens, and I'm not very worried you'll find some options tolerable but claim to hate them all so you can enjoy extended unemployment because I find people very legible and will notice if you're doing that."

"Okay."

"I don't know how well you know our governance system. We have a Civic Council, where any property-owning adult can vote. - loosely one vote per twenty slaves, there are some historical contingencies and a few votes awarded for meritorious service and so on but the vast majority are slaveowners. There aren't that many people who own as many slaves as that, there are three hundred sixteen votes total and I have eight of them. I think I'm doing important things with them. In particular, uh, I'm trying to get a governance system that doesn't run on how many slaves you own, and I'm trying to lay the framework for abolition - making slavery for regulatory reasons not competitive with paid work, making manumission easier, taking advantage of how nervous everyone is about all those mysterious acts of terrorism out east... I've looked a lot at how Tsopix did it and I don't think it's impossible here, just - really hard. 

Questions -"

"...no, I think I understood all of that."

"So, loosely - we have an estate up north, I'm trying to figure out how to make it more livable for the people there while still paying the bills, if you'd like to - observe and notice where we're trading decent conditions for money at a particularly bad exchange rate, propose changes, figure out a good system to educate everybody. There's work here in politics, if you want to write letters and take messages and listen to speeches I can't make it to and take notes on them for me. If you want to just get a job that's fine. I hear translation work pays reasonably well."

"The people there being more slaves?"

"Yes."

"Why are you hoping to educate them?"

"Well, if we're going to abolish slavery, then it'll be good if they have something to transition to afterwards. Doesn't do much if they're still stuck because they can't afford to leave."

"Any of these things sound tolerable."