Two years on the road have settled into something that looks, from the outside, like a life. Ben and Cody travel their circuit, help where they can, move on. Cody is sixteen now, casting at a level that should have taken a decade to reach. Ben has been writing to the Academy at Trestfall about formal enrollment, and putting off sending the letter, and writing it again.

Then a stranger asks questions in the wrong town, and the letter becomes urgent.

Someone in Caldrath has been looking for a boy matching Cody’s description for four years. The search has been patient and thorough and is now, suddenly, very close. Ben doesn’t know who he is, not with certainty. But he has been assembling the evidence — the boy’s unusual talent, his gray eyes, his affinity for a tradition associated with the established kingdoms — and the picture forming is one he doesn’t want to be right about.

Into this arrives Sera Voss: tall, sharp-featured, a wizard on the cusp of mage, traveling the frontier with a marshal’s badge she pins on situationally and uses strategically. She and Ben have a history — eleven years of occasional correspondence and one significant professional disagreement — and she has come with a warning. Caldrath’s agents are looking for someone. She doesn’t know why. She knows the description.

THE WEIGHT OF WATER takes Ben and Cody across the Greywater — the wide inland sea that separates the frontier from the older, settled world — and into Trestfall, the frontier’s gateway city, where the meritocratic Academy of Magical Arts may be the only institution capable of protecting what Cody is becoming. It is also the novel where the question is first asked aloud, by the people who should not be asking it:

Who is this boy, really? And what does Caldrath want with him?