So this girl was a human. And she had been sold to the borman.
And now he was taking her to the Barnstreams?
Yu’s feathers rose in an involuntary wave.
That could not be true.
Yes, there were still habitats that sold excess humans into private ownership. But even if she was his legal property, the borman would not be allowed to bring her into the Barnstream settlements —not if Tria and the tairan had their say. So what was he playing at? What did he expect? Was this an attempt at secret trafficking?
There were still a few settlement bormen who owned humans, simply because they got them before the selling ban. Their ownership remained legal under the oldest Reparation Rights. But the issue was the cause for great tension, with the potential for another civil war. The bormen refused to give up their humans. The tairan lacked the manpower to take them by force. From that stalemate grew the unspoken consensus to simply wait it out, to let the problem resolve itself when the last privately owned humans finally died out.
In the meantime, those rare cases of non-habitat humans were hidden from sight. That was a rule not confined to the Barnstreams but upheld across the continent. Humans did not walk unbound. They were not taken travelling — certainly not for weeks, and never on treks this open and dangerous. They were meant to be locked away. Whatever their owners did to them was supposed to stay behind closed doors.
But of course, a borman would break that rule. A borman would drag his human across the wilds, even if it meant shattering her legs.
The thought sickened Yu. It sickened him to imagine why.
Tria had told him what the bormen did to their humans. What they did to those given as restitution for the old wars, under their repulsive Reparation Rights. Yu had never wanted to know any of it, but Tria had insisted. She had told him in great detail, because these atrocities do not deserve to be forgotten. And oh yes, it was brutal. It was disgusting. It was monstrous. They were only humans, but still, what the bormen did with them were things not permitted even with animals.
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