Rites of the Starling

**Author:** Devney Perry **Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A woman raised as a pawn in a political game discovers she carries the blood of a shapeshifting lineage, and that the monsters terrorizing her continent were once something sacred. It is a story about inheritance, sacrifice, and the terrible cost of love in a world built on secrets.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who want their fantasy romance to carry real weight: cursed magic, impossible choices, mothers who die for their daughters, and men who would burn kingdoms for the women they love.

The story begins in an underground cellar, where five kings slice open their palms and sign a treaty in blood. A young woman named Sparrow Wolfe signs last, her quill moving quick as an arrow through her heart. She is the price of peace, betrothed to a king who despises her family. The magic seals every vow, making them unbreakable on pain of death. This is the world of Calandra: a continent bound by blood oaths, ruled by kings who trade daughters like currency, and haunted by monsters called crux that descend in cyclical migrations to devastate the population. But Sparrow Wolfe is only the prologue. The true story belongs to her descendant, Odessa, a princess who has spent her life being told she is not enough. When the novel opens, Odessa is already in flight, separated from the man she loves, carrying a child who is not hers by blood but is hers by every other measure. She is being escorted across a hostile continent by priests whose motives she cannot trust, toward a father who has never shown her warmth. She does not yet know that her mother was a shapeshifter from another continent, that the monsters called crux were once gentle birds, or that she carries the only blood in Calandra capable of finding the source of the corruption that has cursed the land for centuries. Devney Perry has built a romantasy that does not flinch from darkness. The world of Calandra is beautiful and brutal in equal measure: skeleton forests and glass orbits containing trapped storms, mercenary warriors with tattooed stars, priests who siphon poison from blood, and a love story that survives separation, infection, and the revelation of impossible truths. The tone is lush and atmospheric, but the stakes are visceral. People die. Horses are mercy-killed. A mother transforms into a monster and begs her husband to drive a sword through her heart. The central tension of the novel is not simply whether Odessa and Ransom will find their way back to each other. It is whether Odessa can accept what she is: the heir to a legacy…