On the Day of Sacrifice, the Elders of the Protectorate lead a procession of villagers into the dangerous woods where they abandon, as a sacrifice to the Witch the people believe lives in the woods, the youngest baby in the village. The village Elders use stories about the Witch, which they believe to be untrue, to make the people afraid and keep them from wanting to leave the Protectorate. They also prevent people from leaving because they own the Road. The Road is the only way through the treacherous forest and into the Free Cities, and the Elders charge a high fee for using it. On the other edge of the Protectorate is the Bog, which is the natural resource many people use to sustain their work in the Protectorate. None of the people in the Protectorate have ever been to the free cities, not even the Elders.
Antain is the nephew of Grand Elder Gherland and himself an Elder-in-Training. At thirteen, he is a hard-working, kind, and thoughtful young man. When he attends his first Day of Sacrifice as an Elder-in-Training, he is anxious as he follows his uncle Gherland to the home of the young couple. When they get there, the mother is hanging from the rafters and holding her baby while screaming and crying. Gherland notes the crescent moon birthmark that both mother and baby have on their forehead.
Antain is full not only of sorrow and guilt as he watches the mother of the youngest baby in the village who refused to give up her daughter for the sacrifice be dragged away to the Tower by the Sisters of the Star but also of questions as the Elders then leave the baby alone in the woods. He is worried that the baby will be eaten by animals in the woods before the Witch arrives to take her; the Elders all assume that the animals of the forest will eat the baby since they believe the Witch is a story they made up.
However, there is a witch in the woods who comes to take the babies left in the woods every year. Her name is Xan, and she calls the Protectorate the City of Sorrows because of the Sorrow that obfuscates everything about the place. She cannot use her magic to see into its walls and understand why people leave their babies out in the woods every year, but she always comes to take the baby and escort it safely through the woods to the Free Cities, where she places it with a loving family. Xan, and the people of the Free Cities, call these children Star Children--always found by Xan in the woods outside the Cities of Sorrows on Star Child Day--because by the time they arrive with Xan to the Free Cities their skin and eyes glow with the Starlight she feeds them by hand during the journey.
For reasons Xan is either unable to remember or unable to understand, she delays her journey through the woods with this child, opting to slow down to show her certain waterfalls or tell her stories or sing her songs. As a result of the delays in the journey, the phases of the moon waxed until eventually Xan was not only feeding the baby fingertips of Starlight but the pure Moonlight of a full moon. Because this baby ate Moonlight, she was not only blessed like the other Star Children but enmagicked. Realizing what she had done, and that no ordinary family in the Free Cities would be able to raise a baby with so much magic infused in her bones, she decided to name the baby Luna and adopt her as a granddaughter.
Over the next several years, Xan raised Luna in her tree house in the forest at the edge of the Bog with her friends Glerk the bog-monster and Fyrian, a very tiny dragon. Luna is adored by her family in the woods, and she loves accompanying Xan on her trips to the Free Cities to visit with people and help them with whatever magic she can. But at the age of five, her magic starts to seep out of her and she is changing the world around her without even noticing. As Xan ages, she is unable to keep up with Luna and her fanciful acts of magic. One day, Luna accidentally turns Glerk into a bunny rabbit. After turning him back, Xan casts a spell to bind away Luna’s magic until she turns thirteen, buying them time to teach her how to harness her power and control herself before her very powerful magic is let loose again.
An understood consequence of the spell is that when Luna regains access to her magic, Xan’s magic will leave her body; since Xan is a human over five-hundred years old, she will die when Luna turns thirteen. However, Xan believes that this is worth the sacrifice, as she remembers her mentor, Zosimos, similarly losing his magic and aging more and more rapidly as he trained her when she was young. She decides that this will be a quicker version of the same and that the benefit to Luna will be worthwhile.
An unknown consequence of the spell is that Luna cannot understand or remember anything she has already learned about magic nor anything anyone tells her about it, not even the word itself. Glerk and Xan worry that they made the wrong decision. They are not sure how to prepare Luna for what will happen when she turns thirteen, but they do their best to raise her as normally as possible.
During this time, Antain has been refusing to attend the Day of Sacrifice processions in the Protectorate, finding a new excuse each year. After the fifth year he evades one, he goes to the Tower where the Sisters of the Star live to see the prisoner they keep there: the woman who was once the mother of the baby he believes he helped sacrifice to the Witch. Antain encounters the Head Sister Ignatia who he knew when he was an apprentice to the Tower, before he became an Elder-in-Training. She correctly guesses that he would prefer to be a carpenter than a Councilmember and shows him the way to the cell where the “madwoman” is.
In the “madwoman”’s cell, there are thousands of folded paper birds. The Sisters of the Star tell Antain that each day they sweep the paper out of the room, but each day somehow she is able to conjure paper and create these folded birds. The woman in the cell awakens and tells Antain that the Witch is real and that “she is here.” Despite remembering Antain from the day her daughter was taken for the Day of Sacrifice, the woman is nice to him, However, Antain is attacked by a flurry of the paper birds, scarring his face permanently, and when he beats the door to be let out of the cell by the Sisters, nobody on the other side hears his calls. During the attack, the madwoman falls asleep, drained from whatever tortures she endures in the Tower. The Head Sister has no explanation for these seemingly magical events.
Over the next several years, Antain resigns from his position as Elder-in-Training and becomes an excellent carpenter renowned all over the Protectorate and the Free Cities. His overbearing mother, who once pressured him to participate in the council, claims that it was always her idea for him to be a carpenter. The very odd scar pattern on his face makes people avoid him, so he leads a solitary but industrious life in the Protectorate.
Meanwhile, the madwoman realizes that although she has suffered so much Sorrow while in the Tower that she has forgotten her own name, she starts to have dreams of her daughter growing up safe and happy somewhere in the woods. These dreams, and her growing magical power to make paper and quill and ink out of nothing, encourage her, and she locks away her Sorrow behind a big wall of Hope. As her Hope increases, she realizes that the Witch is not in the woods: the real Witch is the Head Sister Ignatia who eats the Sorrow of those around her. By walling up her Sorrow behind Hope, the madwoman is able to weaken Ignatia bit by bit, starving her of the Sorrow she was eating from the madwoman’s soul.
As Luna grows up, Glerk, Xan, and Fyrian do their best to raise her. She is a smart, kind, and beloved young girl. Shortly before Luna turns thirteen, she realizes that over the years the lies told between her and her family members have grown and grown. Increasingly, she realizes that there are words people use that she cannot remember or understand and that some of the books in the study have words that she should be able to read but is not. This sense of disconnect bothers her, but she is unable to solve it. Meanwhile, Xan realizes that she herself is forgetting more and more about the events of 500 years ago, when the volcano under the forest last erupted and the Protectorate formed. She has trouble recalling even the events of her own upbringing.
One night, when Luna and Fyrian are sleeping, he singes her skin with his firey snoring. She wakes up and tells him to go away, and he briefly disappears. He dreams that he is in the tower all of the witches and wizards lived in before the volcano erupted, and he remembers that he knew Xan when she was a young girl. He remembers that she was very Sorrowful all of the time as a young girl living in the Tower. He also remembers that Zosimos and Fyrian’s own mother interceeded and flew into the erupting volcano to stop it from killing everyone. He sees a pair of black boots in the tower, and he is increasingly afraid until thinking hard of Luna and Xan forms a magical rope that pulls him back to his current family. When he wakes up back in Luna’s bed, Luna tells him he must have dreamed it all because she has no burns on her skin. In the morning, Luna finds boots at the foot of her bed and puts them away in a trunk. Before she can ask Glerk or her grandmother Xan about them, she forgets she saw them.
Luna’s sense of frustration with her memory, as well as her increasing certainty that she had a mother before she joined Xan’s family, grows. Then, an egg in her hand hatches into a crow who speaks with her. She worries constantly about her grandmother’s increasingly poor health, which Xan refuses to talk about. She realizes that strange things are happening increasingly around her, and she returns to the books in the house, trying to read them.
In the Protectorate, Antain returns to the tower to tell Head Sister Ignatia that he is unable to complete a carpentry project for her for at least one year. When he is there, he meets with Ethyne, who he knew as a child, as she leaves the service of the Sisters of the Star. According to Head Sister Ignatia, Ethyne is the first person to ever do such a thing. Antain is amazed that Ethyne looks directly at his face despite his scars. The madwoman throws a bird out of the window toward Antain, and he steps on it. But he picks up the paper, on which is drawn a map of the forest with a house in the middle marked “she is here.” Within a month, Antain and Ethyne are married.
Soon, Ethyne is pregnant, and Antain reveals to the Council of Elders that he plans to go into the forest to hunt the Witch because he knows that their child will be the youngest in the village on the Day of Sacrifice and he knows that Ethyne would go mad just like the woman in the tower if their baby was taken from her. His love for his family fills him with Hope, and he decides to set off into the woods the day after their son, Luken, is born. He plans to use the map drawn by the prisoner in the tower to find the Witch. Gherland sends Ignatia into the woods to kill Antain, so that the villagers believe that he was killed by the Witch and do not question the authority of the Council or the Sisters.
Xan, on her way to pick up the next Star Child outside the City of Sorrows and deliver it to the Free Cities, transforms into a sparrow for the journey. She is very old and her magic is quite weak. She and Antain meet in the forest, and he accidentally injures her in her sparrow form. He cries, having never before hurt anyone or anything. He carries her in a pouch around his neck, talking to her, feeding her, and promising that once he kills the Witch and saves his son Luken in the forest, he’ll bring her to his lovely wife who will nurse her back to health. As Antain tells the sparrow of his plans, Xan realizes with horror that though she was saving the Star Children every year from the Day of Sacrifice, she never considered that their families assumed they were dead and that was the reason so much Sorrow clings over the Protectorate.
Luna realizes that her grandmother has gone off on a journey through the woods despite her weakened state and sets off after her, with her magical crow in tow. Glerk and Fyrian realize Luna and Xan have left and set off after them, but they are slowed down by Fyrian’s sudden growth spurts--he is finally turning into a Simply Enormous Dragon. A swarm of paper birds carries the madwoman out of the Tower in the Protectorate through the woods and to the house where Luna has lived all these years.
In the Protectorate, the usual clouds part to reveal the sun and the mothers of babies who have been Sacrificed start to have dreams about their children, grown and happy in a faraway place. Gherland visits Ethyne at her home with baby Luken, and when she realizes Ignatia is out of town on business, she confronts the Sisters of the Star, asking them if a tiger prowls in the Tower at night. They tell her that they have slept well, for the first time ever. This causes Ethyne to realize that Ignatia is the Witch, as she always feared. She goes to the tower and tells the other Sisters of what she has learned, locking up those who choose to still follow Sorrow rather than Hope. Ethyne, who has some latent magical ability, is able to understand this because of stories told to her by her mother when she was a child, just as the madwoman in the tower was able to understand it by reaching into the ether and pulling out knowledge and paper.
The madwoman makes it to Xan’s house and finds the Seven League Boots in Luna’s trunk. She puts them on, after which Ignatia discovers her and tries to get them back. It is revealed that Ignatia was once supposed to save the wizards and witches and villagers all throughout the forest using the magical boots, but she left many of them to die and carried others to the Protectorate where she has fed off their Sorrow for 500 years.
Antain and Luna meet in the forest, and she uses magic to transform her grandmother out of her sparrow form. Antain wants to kill them at first, thinking they are the Witch, but then Ignatia and the madwoman, Luna’s mother, appear. Antain recognizes Luna and her mother, and they all explain that Ignatia is the Sorrow Eater. Glerk and Fyrian catch up, and Fyrian attacks Ignatia because his mother had to die to prevent the volcano from erupting and she abandoned their people. Luna looks into Ignatia’s heart and realizes that inside of her there is a pearl of Sorrow full of memories and human emotion for the family she once lost, and she uses her magic to crack it open, just as she cracked open the magic that was hidden inside herself, defeating Ignatia.
The increasing changes of the forest become more obvious and everyone realizes that there is a very real danger of the volcano erupting again, right now. They all rush back to the Protectorate, where Luna, Xan, and Luna’s mother team up to place protective bubbles around everyone and everything the volcano could destroy.
In the following weeks, Luna and her mother, who is revealed to be named Adara, move in with Antain, Ethyne and Luken. Xan and Ignatia both lie in the hospital wing of the Tower, nearing their deaths after such prolonged lives. The Council is imprisoned, the Road opens up, the Star Children reunite with their birth families, and the library in the Tower is opened up for everyone to share knowledge. When Xan finally dies, Glerk is revealed to be more than a monster: he is the Bog, the Poet, a creator who sang the world into being. He and Xan leave to wander the world, and Glerk leaves behind a poem for Luna.
The novel, which has alternated between the current events and stories told by mothers to their children, ends with a mother, likely Ethyne, telling Luken about the good magic of Witches and Bogs. She says that Stories are the same as Witches or Beasts or Bogs or Poems or the World.
