The town of Halfway was named after an old refugee saying about always being only halfway to the destination. It was an odd cross of culture. It had once been a small Barridian village that had fled at news of the Fade’s beginning, despite the Fade’s great distance. In that first week, the Fade spread like wildfire through a hay bale in baskerwol, before slowing down to the crawl at which it now traveled. After the Barridians had fled, refugees nearer to the Fade found it and settled it. They filled the Barridian buildings with Centralian color, crafting, and eventually, art and music. The signs proclaiming the place's Barridian name couldn't be read by the refugees, so they were ignored. Now, those signs were all gone, replaced by the expanding buildings of Halfway.

  Derek Dextovis patted his horse's neck affectionately. They stood at the point between two hillocks where the road turned toward Halfway, and the small town became visible. It had no walls, just a few farms and a wide market square for traveling merchants and farm owners like Derek to try to cheat each other. There they were now, mostly relaxed during the lull between opening and noon.

  The sun, Yu'um, shared the sky with half a dozen moons, most of which were only visible to someone who had lived in the same area for long enough to notice them. One of them, the silvery one, seemed to stick out more than before somehow, like a bottle that's been facing backward in the pantry for years which now faces toward the door for some reason.

  Derek didn't notice. His mind was on the incident last night, and the unconscious girl slung across the back of his horse.

  Derek wasn't bad at market, no matter what his late mother and father said. In fact, that was proof enough to him that he surpassed both of them. He just didn't enjoy it, because at one point or another, he always had to deal with the damned runewright.

  "Well, Clopper," he said, gently kicking the beast's sides. "Let's trot into the thieves' den."

  Derek hated runewrights. Everyone did. They always charged too much, did shoddy work when they could get away with it, and always acted like they had people by the balls. And in a way, they did. At least they did in Barrid, where the damn crown kept making it harder for new ones to be trained and restricting access to moon shards. If a fogcrawler village was lucky enough to have a runewright set up shop, they had to act right if he was going to stay. And if a runewright stayed in the same place long enough, he got settled in all the wrong ways. Hired guards, scaring off others of his kind. A runewright was practically a baron, if he played his cards right, and runomancy was an excellent hand all by itself.

  And the Crown's a whole desert away, Derek thought bitterly as he slid off his horse. Close enough to tax us, but not close enough to deal with these damned mages. Whole chain of parasites, and I'm at the bottom.

  Derek strode down the "thoroughfare" of Halfway, his slave bouncing gently behind the saddle as the horse clopped along. She wouldn't awaken for several hours; that was one of the many uses of a quality slave rune. The purple thing sizzled occasionally on her cheek whenever it appeared she might awaken, and she went right back to slumber. The thing was like a cattle brand with extra utilities. It controlled her memories so she didn't know where to run back to, it could be used to sedate her, and it could even be used to inflict pain when necessary.

  Derek arrived in front of the runewright's shop. Unlike most of the merchants here, he didn't stand outside and call out his wares for attention. He didn't need to. Arrogant prick. All he needed was the sign above the door, which proclaimed, in perfect spelling, "Runewright: Runes, Engrams, Written Magics for Sale at Reasonable Price". It even had a decorative slave rune, and a contraceptive rune. The two most popular runes in a place like Halfway. One of these days, Derek was going to rewrite the sign, once Derek figured out how to spell the swear words his father brought home from the legion. And if he could ever sneak past the pair of guards the mage employed, eyeing him as he approached.

  Having tied Clopper to the hitching post, Derek reached up and slid Phoebe off the back. She stirred momentarily before the rune kicked in. Derek held her in his hands like he'd seen his father hold his mother. Whatever he thought of them, the chicken farmers' son had to admit they must have loved each other. It felt good to hold Phoebe the same way. He loved her too, after all. He just so happened to need a slave at the same time, with his father and mother gone.

  Derek gazed at Phoebe's beautiful features. She did indeed have that distinctive yellow-brown tint to her skin, marking her as a narubati woman. While most narubati did live in and around Adalaant, along with the yaglids, that was the opposite side of the Fade from here. The previous owner told Derek she was just a kid from a failing orphanage in Aleb. He highly doubted she was actually all the way from Adalaant, but after last night, it was difficult to know anything about her for certain.

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  Derek's eyes kept coming back to the rune on her cheek, especially the imperfections he was here to have addressed. When he purchased her several miles north, in Aleb, his father was angry. He accused Derek of purchasing her because she was pretty, not because she could work hard. As it turned out, she could indeed work hard, but Derek was without shame in admitting his father was correct. That's what he got for sending a boy he gave no time to meet a girl "properly", as mother would put it.

  Derek's eyes wandered downward on Phoebe's sleeping form.

  Perhaps I oughta have the … other rune checked, too, he thought. Certainly don't need any kids yet. Not before she's ready for the slave rune to come off.

  Derek walked up the step to the mage's house, and kicked at the door with his foot. Some people knocked with their knuckles, but not Barridians. It implied their hands didn't have anything better to do, and Derek's definitely did.

  But of course, the runewright couldn't be bothered to open the door himself.

  "Come in," he called through the wood. Derek closed his eyes and counted to three. It wasn't smart to deal with someone when angry. It just made Derek more likely to make mistakes.

  After an annoying sequence of gently laying Phoebe against the wall, opening the door, and lifting her up again, Derek sidled into the cramped space of the runewright's shop.

  Everything about the way Mr. Kebbik the Runewright looked made Derek angry. He had not two, but three chins. His wardrobe took Derek's neighbor, the cotton farmer, a year's harvest to make. His fingers had enough rings to impress a Jel-Hangan polygamist. His hands and skin revealed to any honest man that this was not someone who knew which end of a plow to hold. Derek had only met three runewrights in his life, and the only one that hadn't gone to fat was the youngest. He'd looked well on his way there. Derek was pretty sure Kebbik never went out the door.

  But perhaps the thing that made Derek seethe the most was his hair, which had the audacity to stretch past his shoulders. Even at the Fade edge of Barrid, hair length was an important symbol of status. Slaves like Phoebe were bald, while monarchs' dragged on the ground behind them in a protective sheathe akin to a crown. A free farmer like Derek's hair was short and respectable. A runewright who knew his place only let it go past his ears at best.

  The inside of the shop matched its owner. Replicas, models, and drawings of various runes for sale cluttered the desk and the walls. Trinkets and the like were scattered in the display. Most of those, Derek knew, had once been heirlooms that farmers around here gave up to pay Kebbik's service fees. One of them was a hair sheathe his father once wore. If the building caught fire and nothing was rescued, Halfway and the surrounding farmland would lose more property than Aleb would if its bank collapsed. It gave the impression of an Ecliptican vampire's blood hoard. A parasite's collection. Derek wasn't sure whether to rank Kebbik one step below or above one of those creatures.

  "Ah, Mr. Dextovis," the mage greeted from behind his counter, offering his hand to shake but not standing up. His voice sounded like it washed in the fat of his chin before exiting his lips.

  My hands, Derek barely kept himself from snarling, are still. Fucking. Full. You dolt.

  Derek didn't shake the proffered hand, just stared at it until the merchant got the message and leaned back with much more grace than should've been possible. The huge, cushioned chair probably helped.

  "So," Kebbik said, in his expensive voice. "What do you need me for today, man? Slave rune need maintenance? Perhaps there's a young lady who's finally interested in you, and you need a rune on you for some … mechanical assistance?"

  Derek knew Kebbik was trying to make him uncomfortable. Uncomfortable people are easier for a merchant to squeeze. But Derek was a farmer, and it would take more than sex advice to get under his skin.

  Derek pulled up a chair for sitting rune recipients in, and gently laid Phoebe in it. Her head lolled to one side, and he corrected it so the purple rune on her cheek faced Kebbik.

  "I had this touched up at the beginning of this caskerwol season," Derek said. "It was supposed to last the rest of the Yu'um year and into the next. But last night, it started giving me issues. See this?" Derek tapped gently on the place where the circle border of the symbol broke. "What gives, mage? Losin' your edge?"

  Kebbik frowned. He leaned forward, selecting a pair of glasses so he wouldn't have to stand up. His chair creaked beneath him, and then so did his desk.

  "Hm," he said after a moment. "You seem to have weakened it somehow."

  "I did nothing of the sort," Derek replied. "Do I look like a splendomancer?"

  Kebbik sat back, setting down his glasses. "No, but you do look like a farmer."

  "And?"

  "And farmers often break things they don't understand."

  Derek rolled his eyes. "The best swordsman in the world is still at the mercy of his blacksmith's competence. Just fix the rune and I'll get out of your hair. My account says I get unlimited touch-ups during caskerwol."

  Kebbik considered, which was annoying because the only thing he could be considering was how to extract money from somebody who'd already paid him in advance.

  "And don't fuck up her skin this time," Derek added. "Last time, you – "

  "Yes, yes," Kebbik waved him aside. "I know her beauty matters a lot to you, young man. I remember the other rune you've purchased for her. Now then, let me check your account and we can get to work."