Shield of Sparrows

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

**What This Story Explores:** A woman sent into a foreign kingdom as a spy discovers that the monster-hunting warrior she was ordered to kill is the husband she never knew she had, and that the infection destroying his homeland began with his own blood.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love fantasy romance built on secrets, slow-burning tension, and the ache of two people discovering they are far more alike than they ever imagined.

Odessa Cross has spent her entire life being the wrong princess. She is the eldest daughter of the Gold King of Quentis, but her half-sister Mae is the one who matters. Mae is the Sparrow, the bride trained from childhood to marry the crown prince of Turah and seal the treaty that keeps both kingdoms from war. Odessa is the spare, the overlooked one, the girl with the red hair she dyes brown and the sketchbook she carries to cliff edges where she can dive into the sea and feel, for a few seconds, like no one is watching. Then the Turans arrive early, and everything changes. A warrior with silver eyes walks into her father's throne room and points at Odessa instead of Mae. He declares that Prince Zavier will marry her tonight, as the bride prize for slaying seven female monsters under an ancient law called the Chain of Sevens. In a single moment, Odessa is pulled from the margins of her own life and thrust into the center of a story she never asked to join. What follows is a journey through a kingdom that is not what it pretends to be. Turah is a land of towering forests, fire-ringed camps, and monsters whose blood runs green with a strange infection called Lyssa. It is a kingdom ruled by a king who strangles queens, protected by a prince who cannot speak in public, and haunted by a warrior who carries a secret that could destroy everything. This novel is Devney Perry's first venture into fantasy romance, and it shows a writer who understands that the best fantasy worlds are built on the same foundations as the best love stories: longing, secrecy, and the terrifying courage it takes to let another person see who you really are. The atmosphere is lush and dangerous, full of rope bridges swaying between evergreens, bonfires pushing back the dark, and the constant awareness that something with green blood is hunting in the shadows. The central question of Shield of Sparrows is not whether Odessa will survive Turah. It is whether she can survive becoming the person Turah demands she be, and whether the man she was sent to kill…