The novel opens with an unnamed narrator explaining that she is an old woman, a queen with no immediate family, whose crown will pass to her nephew. She no longer fears the gods. In fact, she intends, in this book, to make a complaint against them and to leave it to her reader to pass judgment.

She then tells us that her name is Orual and she is the eldest daughter of Trom, King of Glome. The people of Glome worship a goddess called Ungit—whom the Greeks call Aphrodite—who takes the form of a black stone. It is primarily against Ungit’s son, the god of the Grey Mountain, that Orual’s charge is laid.

She begins her story with the day her mother died, when she and her sister Redival were taken into the garden and had their heads shaved in a traditional ritual of mourning. While their nurse, Batta, scares them with tales of evil stepmothers, the girls first acquire a tutor, a Greek slave known as the Fox because of his red hair. The King tells the Fox to practice teaching his daughters until he has a son and to try to make Orual wise, as “it’s about all she’ll ever be good for” (2).