Published in 2026, Rites of the Starling is an epic romantasy novel by New York Times bestselling author Devney Perry. It is the second installment in the Shield of Sparrows series, continuing a narrative that began with Perry’s successful entry into the popular subgenre after a long career writing contemporary romance. Following a devastating monster attack that separates her from her husband, Princess Odessa Wolfe is forced on a perilous journey across the continent of Calandra, her path guided by mysterious priests. In a parallel timeline, another princess, Caspia, leaves her homeland to answer a mystical call, uncovering ancient secrets about her family’s shapeshifting lineage. The novel explores The Burden of Inheritance by examining how royal bloodlines function as both a source of great power and a restrictive cage.

The narrative employs many conventions of the romantasy genre, blending high-stakes fantasy world-building with a character-driven focus on romance, and is often compared to the works of Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros. Set against a backdrop of sweeping political intrigue, the story delves into themes of Romantic Love as a Catalyst for Change as characters navigate competing duties to family, kingdom, and their own hearts. The plot also engages with Manipulating Historical Narratives to Gain Power, systematically deconstructing the foundational myths of its world to reveal that accepted history is often a deliberately manipulated narrative designed to obscure dark origins. The Shield of Sparrows series has achieved significant commercial success, with the first book debuting at number one on the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. A film adaptation of the first book is in development with Amazon MGM Studios.

This guide refers to the 2026 Red Tower Books First Edition.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain depictions of graphic violence, illness, death, animal death, sexual content, cursing, rape, and substance use.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a prologue revealing the origins of the Shield of Sparrows ritual, in which princesses from each of the five kingdoms of Calandra are forced into arranged marriages with the princes of other kingdoms in order to secure peace. Sparrow Wolfe is the first princess married in this way, and the tradition is named for her, with future princesses designated as “Sparrows.”

Many decades later, Odessa Wolfe, princess of Quentis, flees through the wilderness with her young charge, Evie, under the supervision of Voster priests. They are fleeing the aftermath of a devastating crux attack on the Turan fortress of Ellder. The crux are monstrous, boat-sized swifts that migrate across the continent of Calandra approximately every 30 years, bringing death and devastation. In a parallel storyline set decades earlier on the continent of Kenn, Caspia, a princess of the Starling royal family, leaves her homeland of Nelfinex to answer the call of the ritus, the mystical pull that precedes a Starling’s first shapeshift.

Ransom, Odessa’s husband and the crown prince of Turah, arrives at the deserted encampment of Treow to find her gone. Brother Dime, a Voster priest, took Odessa and Evie from Ellder and is leading them overland across Calandra rather than letting them sail to Quentis, where Odessa’s father, King Cross, rules. Dime insists the journey is necessary for Odessa to discover her “dynasty,” confusing Odessa, who does not believe she has a dynasty to inherit. He leaves them with another priest, Brother Skore, who wears pale blue robes instead of the brotherhood’s customary burgundy. When bariwolves, black jackal-like beasts, attack the group, Skore drains the monsters’ blood through sheer magical will, revealing that their blood runs green with Lyssa, the infection spreading across Calandra. He later takes Odessa to a hidden waterfall in Orson Canyon, where luminescent tunnels conceal something he cannot find without her. Odessa’s unique ability to sense Voster magic guides them through the maze, but the magic causes her great pain, and touching a pool at the tunnel’s end causes her to lose consciousness for two days. Skore retrieves a round, shining object and then abruptly abandons Odessa and Evie to find their own way south.

On Kenn, Caspia is a Quiescent, a Starling princess who has not yet undergone the shift. She has been haunted six times by the same vision: her older sister Emery killed by a warrior with silver eyes. Queen Oleana, Caspia’s aunt, dismisses these visions as dreams. When Caspia feels the ritus drawing her toward the Marixmore Ocean, she secretly hires a pirate ship and leaves Nelfinex. Her cousin Xandra stows away and joins her. After weeks at sea, they reach an unknown continent, where both women grow violently ill. When bariwolves stalk them through a forest, Xandra undergoes her ritus and shifts into one of the beasts, turning on Caspia with feral rage. Caspia escapes by leaping off a cliff into a river.

Odessa travels with Evie, aided by strangers along the way. She joins a band of mercenaries called the Mavins, led by a white-haired warrior named Thora, in exchange for the promise of payment from her father upon reaching Quentis. The Mavins are indebted to a man named Salem and essentially enslaved; each star tattooed on their faces represents a debt. In the skeleton forest of Genesis, a massive pack of Lyssa-infected bariwolves attacks. One of the Mavins is killed. Odessa’s horse is mortally wounded. Odessa sends Evie away with the Mavin Jodhi and prepares to die. Then Ransom appears, having tracked her across Calandra. He kills the bariwolves and sweeps her into his arms. Ransom calls her his queen and declares that there will be no more hiding their marriage.

In the parallel storyline, a man named Andreas rescues Caspia from the riverbank in Genesis and nurses her back to health. Over days of shared language lessons and growing affection, they fall in love and set off together toward Turah, where Caspia believes the silver-eyed warrior lives. Along the way, she begins having a recurring vision of Andreas dying in a fortress overrun by bariwolves commanded by Xandra. In the city of Skanshon, Caspia has a vision of a pickpocket boy named Kos and realizes she can change the future. She and Andreas take in the orphan. Caspia abandons her quest for vengeance, believing this will prevent Andreas’s death, and the visions stop. She asks him to take her to Quentis instead.

In Quentis, Caspia visits a castle art gallery and discovers that the crux, the winged monsters that devastate Calandra during periodic migrations, are the swift, gentle birds beloved in Nelfinex. She throws herself into research at the castle library, aided by Andreas’s former tutor, Faxon, the head librarian. She meets Brother Nold, a Voster priest, and identifies the Voster as one of the Velvi’os-telfer, a persecuted race from Kenn she believed nearly extinct. A second Voster named Hain visits her secretly and reveals that the Six, worshiped as gods in Calandra, were mortal magicians who bargained with demons for power. The Starling defeated them long ago and sealed their remains in glass orbits whose magic seeped into Calandra’s water and land, cursing the continent, transforming animals into monsters, and giving the Voster their abilities. Destroying the orbits could end it all, but the Voster brotherhood will kill to protect their power. Caspia later has a vision of Hain’s execution, confirming this threat.

Odessa and Ransom arrive at the Quentin castle to a hostile reception. Her father, King Cross, barely acknowledges her and houses them in the castle’s remote west wing. Odessa entrusts Healer Alore, a brilliant healer from Laine, with samples of Ransom’s blood and her late mother-in-law Luella’s alchemy journals, hoping to find a cure for the Lyssa spreading through Ransom’s body. Dark veins creep from his heart toward his throat, and violent nightmares reveal his deteriorating control.

Andreas’s betrothal is nullified, and he marries Caspia in a secret ceremony. They organize an expedition to the Evon Ravine to search for an orbit. Several soldiers are killed at the bottom of the chasm when the group is attacked by chiropti, giant blood-drinking bats. Caspia follows the pull of magic to a waterfall pool and locates the first glass orbit. Faxon and his husband Gable, the castle’s weapons master, later adopt Kos, giving the boy a new family.

One night, guards ambush Odessa and her half-sister, Mae, in the castle gardens. One holds a knife to Odessa’s throat while another chokes Mae and attempts to assault her. Odessa kills a guard in self-defense, and Ransom arrives and slaughters the rest of the guards in a Lyssa-fueled rage that horrifies him. He disappears into the night.

Caspia gives birth to a daughter she names Odessa, the protagonist of the book’s other narrative thread. Andreas becomes king after his mother’s death and his father’s abdication. The thrum of the ritus returns, and Caspia has a vision of four Voster priests coming to the throne room, a vision she recognizes as her own death. When the priests arrive, Caspia says goodbye to her daughter, extracts a vow from Margot, her lady-in-waiting, to protect the baby, and entrusts her with a journal of the family’s history. She tells Andreas to drive his sword through her heart once she has killed the priests. She shifts into a crux, kills all four priests, and fights the monster’s bloodlust long enough for Andreas to do what she asked. He holds her body on the marble floor for two days before letting go.

King Cross arrests Ransom after the garden killings. In Ransom’s cell, Brother Skore appears and siphons the Lyssa from Ransom’s blood, completely clearing the dark veins. Ransom then reveals what he has been hiding: The crux in Ellder shifted into the body of a woman with red hair like Odessa’s after it died, suggesting that it was not a migration scout. Margot delivers Caspia’s journal to Odessa, and together she and Ransom read the full story of her mother’s life. Odessa confronts her father, now understanding that King Cross is Andreas. He confesses to killing Caspia at her own request, reveals his covert alliance with the Kennin, the radical Voster faction, and tells Odessa that two orbits are hidden beneath the castle while a third may lie in Allesaria, the secret Turan capital, which he believes was built to protect a Voster sanctuary.

Allies arrive safely from Turah, and Thora and Jodhi return, rehired by King Cross to protect Odessa. In the castle library, Odessa meets Faxon and his adopted son, Kos, and receives a second journal of Caspia’s visions. Brother Skore tells Odessa that she herself is the warrior he always meant for her to find. Standing on her cliffside with Ransom, Odessa feels the thrum of the ritus pulse through her chest, the same call that led her mother to Calandra and eventually to her death. She hides this truth from Ransom. The novel closes with a final vision: a silver-eyed warrior kneeling before a crux, green blood dripping from his fingers, whispering, “My queen.”