Chapter 1 opens with the protagonist, Kira, saying her final goodbye to her mother’s departing spirit. Kira is in “the Field,” where the people of her village leave their dead to be scavenged by animals from the surrounding woods. Kira has sat with her mother’s body for the four days it takes her spirit to depart, and now she is returning to her village to figure out what to do. Her home has been burned so that the disease her mother died from will not spread. We learn that Kira herself was supposed to be left in the Field as a baby, having been born with a twisted leg, but that her mother, recently widowed, fought to keep her only child.

On her way back from the Field, Kira meets her friend Matt, a boy from the “swampy, disagreeable Fen” who is “probably the child of a dragger or digger” (9). She asks him for his help in building her new cott and offers to pay him by telling stories to him and his friends. Matt agrees but tells her that the women of the village, led by a woman named Vandara, intend to force Kira out, to fend for herself in the Field and the woods beyond.