Ben Croft has been a hedge wizard for twenty years. He moves from town to town across the frontier, fixing what he can — a drought here, a fever there, the occasional haunting that turns out to be a frightened girl with emerging talent and nowhere to go. He is good at this work. He has arranged his life carefully around staying good at it, and nothing else.

Then a prairie town called Harrow’s Ford presents him with a fourteen-year-old orphan named Cody, who has just set a water trough on fire by being bored. Ben’s professional assessment is swift and private: the boy’s talent is not hedge wizard territory. It may not have a ceiling he can see. He takes Cody on as an apprentice anyway, because the code says he must, and because something in the quality of the boy’s attention stops him cold.

What follows is a road story — two people, two horses, a vast frontier, and the slow accumulation of trust between a man who has always moved on and a boy who has always been left behind. Ben teaches Cody the basics of the draíocht: how to read a wound, how to set a perimeter ward, how to listen to land. Cody learns fast. Faster than Ben is comfortable with.

Meanwhile, on the edge of the newspapers and the trader gossip, something is beginning. A corporation with Caldrath backing is filing water rights claims across the frontier territories. A land agent named Morrow arrives in town after town, pleasant and legally unassailable. And in a city far to the east, a man at a desk reads a report about a hedge wizard traveling the frontier with an unusually gifted apprentice.

He makes a note.