Mare Barrow is born and raised in the Kingdom of Norta, which is characterized by a sharp class divide: the Silvers, who have silver blood, live lives of glamor and riches. Reds, who have red blood, live in poverty in villages like the Stilts. Mare, a Red who has grown up in the Stilts, must pick pockets to support her family. She brings stolen goods home every day to her mother, who disapproves of her daughter’s quasi-profession, her younger sister, Gisa, who has an actual job as an apprentice to a seamstress, and her father, who uses a wheelchair and an iron lung because he came home injured from war. Mare’s three older brothers, Bree, Tramy, and Shade, are absent because they, too, have been conscripted to act as faceless bodies in the ongoing war. The war has been raging on the border of Norta for over a hundred years, and Reds have no stake in it—except insofar as they provide the Silvers with the human fuel to keep their war going. Any Red who is not apprenticed or employed by the age of eighteen (which is most Reds, because jobs are few and far between, and the school system does not teach many skills that could win an apprenticeship) is sent to the war front. Most of them either do not come back, or come back severely injured. The Silvers have the resources to treat many of these injuries, but they choose not to invest in doing so, because there is a steady supply of fresh Reds from which to draw.
