Centuries after the old world perished, people live in small communities at the foot of the mountains. Umai — once the finest hunter of her settlement, now a mother — secretly teaches her nine-year-old daughter Altynai to read the forest and draw a bow. One dawn the Iron People arrive. They kill Umai's husband and take the children away in cages on carts. Umai crawls out of a pit full of the dead, digs up her bow, and finds her daughter's tumar caught on a branch: the girl is alive, and the trail leads west.

The road teaches her to master her rage and turn it in the right direction. Umai crosses paths with keepers of genealogies, a blind underground community, and a shaman woman who gives her back not a new power but the one she long ago refused to claim as her own. Gradually she comes to understand that Temir, the leader of the Iron People, is no raider — he is a builder of a new order. He collects children to raise as the first generation of his state, and he took the blind storyteller Asan as a living map of every clan and camp for miles around.

Breaking into Temir's city, Umai ignites a revolt to save all the children. The price of that revolt is the lost technology of electricity.