An orphan named Klara grows up in a convent in the mountains of the fictional European country of Sylvania. At twelve, she is sent to the household of a baron to train as a servant. She works in the castle's kitchen with the first maid and the cook. In her small room in the castle, she keeps a book of fairy tales — a gift from a young man who visited the convent, which she hid from the nuns — and she adores the stories within. Soon, the baron's son Vadek becomes engaged to the daughter of a famous general. The baron will hold a ball at his castle to celebrate, and the prince of Sylvania, one of Vadek's friends from school, has come to stay at the baron's. One dark, stormy night a few days before the ball, Klara is in the kitchen alone when she hears thumping on the side door. She opens it to find a beautiful woman with long, black hair covering her naked body. Klara, unsure what to do but certain that the woman is a princess in disguise, brings the woman to her room to get some rest. The day of the ball, the kitchen is frenzied. Once night falls, Klara helps the mystery woman bathe and dress in the ballgown and ruby necklace the woman had with her when she arrived at the castle. The woman heads to the ball, and Klara sneaks to the upstairs gallery to watch the ballroom below. She sees the woman dancing with the prince, but soon they vanish. Klara, tired and distracted, gets lost on her way back to her room, and finds the woman and the prince in a parlor room. Klara watches them talk, and when the prince leans in to kiss her, the woman pulls a white comb from her hair and stabs the prince in his throat, killing him. The woman is imprisoned in the dungeon of the baron's castle. The next day, Klara slips around to the windows of the dungeon and the woman tells Klara a story — that she was a wolf, once, the mate of a black wolf whom the prince had killed while hunting. She visited the magical Old Woman of the Forest, who transformed her into a human in order to avenge the death of her mate. After she finishes her story and Klara prepares to leave the dungeon window, the woman throws Klara the brilliant red necklace that she wore to the ball. Before she is brought to the Capital for trial, the woman hangs herself by her hair in the dungeon. In the years following, Klara leaves the baron's house and works for the Resistance movement, covertly fighting the German occupation of her country. As the end of her life nears, Klara visits the Old Woman of the Forest and proves herself as the one who helped the wolf woman, by showing the old woman the one ruby she's kept from the red necklace. She asks the Old Woman for stories — she wants to be the teller of tales, to keep stories that would otherwise be lost alive. She sits, and the Old Woman begins to tell her a tale.