Who is Odessa's mother in Rites of the Starling?

Odessa's mother is Caspia Starling, a shapeshifter from the continent of Nelfinex. Caspia came to Calandra seeking vengeance for her sister's murder, fell in love with Andreas (who became King Cross), and died when she shifted into a crux to protect her newborn daughter from the Voster.

Who are the Kennin in Rites of the Starling?

The Kennin are a faction of Voster priests working to destroy the orbits and end Calandra's curse. The Voster High Priest painted them as dangerous zealots to protect his own power, but they are actually the resistance. Brother Skore is a Kennin.

Rites of the Starling Ending Explained: Full Spoiler Discussion, Theories & Character Guide

Q: Does Rites of the Starling have a happy ending?

Not really. Odessa reunites with Ransom and learns the truth about her mother, but she also discovers her father killed her mother as an act of mercy, and the book ends with Odessa beginning her own Starling transformation. It's a bittersweet, devastating ending that sets up book 3.

⚠️ MAJOR SPOILER WARNING: This post contains full spoilers for Rites of the Starling by Devney Perry, the second book in the Shield of Sparrows trilogy.

Every major reveal, the ending, and what it means for book 3 are all discussed in detail. If you haven't finished the book, read my spoiler-free review instead. Everyone else, come in, sit down, and let me explain what just happened to all of us.

I finished Rites of the Starling last night and I have been thinking about it ever since. This book broke me in ways I wasn't prepared for, and the dual timeline structure is doing work that I don't think most romantasy sequels even attempt.

If you're here because you need someone to scream with about Caspia, or you need the ending explained in plain English, or you Googled "does Ransom die in Rites of the Starling" at 2am...welcome. You're in the right place.

This post is going to walk through everything: the full plot, every major reveal, the ending in detail:

all the new characters
the Starling mythology
the orbits
the theories

... and what we know about book 3.

It's long. It's thorough. Grab a drink and get comfortable.

If you want my spoiler-free take first, read the full Rites of the Starling review here. If you need a refresher on book 1 before diving in, the Shield of Sparrows recap has everything you need.

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The short version: Rites of the Starling quick summary

Odessa flees Ellder with Evie and the voster Brother Dime, eventually joined by Brother Skore. They travel across Calandra toward Quentis, guided by Caspia's journal, which turns out to be more than a journal.

Every person Odessa meets on her journey is connected to the stories written about by her mother twenty years earlier, and the book is actually telling two stories at once: Odessa's present-day flight home and Caspia's original arrival on the continent, which happened roughly two decades before.

Caspia is a Starling from the continent of Nelfinex who came to Calandra seeking vengeance for her sister Emery. She and her cousin Xandra crossed the Marixmore Ocean, triggered the Starling ritus on the wrong continent, and discovered too late that a Starling shift in Calandra turns them into monsters. Xandra shifts into a bariwolf, later bites Ransom, and making him patient zero for Lyssa.

Caspia falls in love with Andreas, a prince who becomes King Cross (yes, Odessa's father). When Caspia and Andreas have a daughter, the Voster come for them both. Caspia shifts into a crux to kill them, and Andreas mercy-kills her before she loses herself completely. That baby is Odessa. The Gold King's cruelty is grief and protection in disguise.

In the present, Odessa learns she's a Starling. Ransom is temporarily saved when Brother Skore siphons his Lyssa. Father and daughter finally share their grief. And in the final scene, Odessa feels the thrum of her own ritus for the first time. The call to shift. She lies to Ransom and hides it.

The cycle is about to repeat.

Character Art by @jacqueillustrates

Major reveals at a glance

If you just want the bullet points:

Odessa's mother is Caspia Starling, a shapeshifter from a different continent who crossed the ocean seeking revenge for the murder of her sister she saw in a vision.
The Gold King is Andreas, Caspia's husband, a king who lost the love of his life and can barely look at the daughter who resembles her so much.
The two timelines are separated by about 20 years, Caspia's arrival happened before Odessa was born, and Odessa reads her mother's journal in real time as the reader does.
Some Crux are Starlings who shifted in Calandra, the magic of the continent corrupts a Starling's transformation, trapping them in beast form forever
Xandra is part of creating Lyssa, Caspia's cousin shifted into a bariwolf and later bit Ransom, creating the disease that's destroying Turah.
The crux in Ellder was Emery, Caspia's sister, who had come to Calandra searching for Caspia and Xandra. Ransom killed her thinking she was a crux scout triggering the migration early.
The Six gods of Calandra were mortal men, magicians who made pacts with demons and stored their power in six orbits, which must be destroyed to end the curse.
The Kennin are a Voster faction, deemed "zealots"by the high priest but who really believe the magic-users have gone too far. They were working with the Gold King and Odessa to find and destroy the orbits.
The High Priest has been using Ransom, siphoning Lyssa from his blood to keep him alive and maintain the balance between Turah and the Voster
Ransom does NOT die, he reunites with Odessa mid-book, is imprisoned by the Gold King, and is temporarily cured by the end
Odessa is becoming a Starling, the final pages reveal the thrum of her ritus has begun, and she hides it from Ransom.

The structure: why the dual timeline matters

Before we get into the plot, we have to talk about what Devney Perry did structurally, because it's the entire argument of the book.

Rites of the Starling alternates between Odessa's POV in the present and Caspia's POV in what the reader initially assumes is a parallel storyline. The timelines are introduced side-by-side with no explicit marker that they're separated in time.

You figure it out through context clues. The way Caspia's journal ends up in Odessa's hands, the way Caspia's friends and allies show up in Odessa's present as older versions of themselves, the way the reader realizes certain characters in Odessa's journey are the descendants of people Caspia met twenty years earlier. It's so good.

It's a magic trick. By the time you understand that Caspia's story is the past, not a parallel present, the emotional stakes multiply. You're watching a mother write the story of her own death while her daughter reads it in real time, meeting people who remember the woman who saved their grandfather or their sister.

It's the kind of structural choice that only works if the author commits to it fully. Devney Perry committed.

Map in the Deluxe Limited Edition of Rites of the Starling by Devney Perry

Odessa's timeline: the full journey

Part I: Leaving Ellder

Rites of the Starling opens with two timelines running in parallel. Ransom searches the ruins of Ellder for Odessa and Evie, finding her bloodstained knives abandoned in the street. He learns that the "crux scout" who appeared before the migration was actually a shapeshifter who took the form of a woman. A woman who looks remarkably like Odessa. Ransom orders the body burned. Ransom heads toward Quentis, hoping Odessa fled for home.

Meanwhile, Odessa wakes at a nameless lake with Brother Dime, the voster priest who guided her out of Ellder's dungeon. Evie is traumatized, still processing her father Zavier's apparent death. Brother Dime insists they keep moving. Odessa can physically feel Voster magic as a stinging prickle on her skin. A sensitivity that nobody else shares.

A second voster arrives: Brother Skore. He joins their journey and tells Odessa they're heading to Ozarth, though he won't explain why. Skore is different from Dime. Even if he also won't answer her questions, he's willing to teach Odessa the old language written in her mother's journals, and he warns her explicitly to stay away from the Voster High Priest.

The journey through Ozarth

Skore leads Odessa and Evie into the mountains. They shelter at a cabin belonging to a couple named Damon and Sally. Damon wears a lionwick claw necklace said to grant health and protection. It is from one of the stories in the journal. Odessa begins studying Ransom's leather cuff, the one with the etched map of Turah, and discovers it contains a secret notched map to Allesaria, the hidden Voster capital.

The group is hunted by bariwolves in the woods. Skore uses Voster magic to siphon the blood directly out of the wolves, leaving them as husks. The wolves are infected with Lyssa, which means the disease has spread to Ozarth. This is the first sign that Lyssa is no longer contained to Turah.

The cave and the orbit

Skore leads Odessa into the Orson Canyon, where his magic inexplicably vanishes in the deep gorge. They reach a hidden cave behind a massive waterfall. Odessa's sensitivity to magic is the reason Skore brought her, she can find something in the cave that no one else can reach.

Odessa passes out from the pain of the magic. When she wakes up two days later, Evie tells her Skore took something from the tunnel: a "round, shiny, clear" object. Skore then leaves them with directions to Quentis. His job is done.

This is the first orbit. We don't know it yet, but Skore has just retrieved one of the six sources of Calandra's magic. And he's not really a zealot, he's trying to end the curse.

The road to Quentis

Odessa and Evie set out on their own through Ozarth. They meet a merchant named Wells who gives them a ride in his cart and helps them cross the Harrow River. Wells directs them to a safe cabin owned by Sryker, a man with three scars on his face. Readers who've been paying attention to Caspia's timeline recognize this as a character from the journal.

Next, Odessa meets Thora, a white-haired warrior with stars on her face, who leads a mercenary band called the Mavins.

Thora kills an infected alligask to save Faze's life. She is Cathlin's niece. Her appearance in Odessa's journey isn't coincidence. Thora is the warrior Caspia wrote about twenty years earlier.

Odessa hires the Mavins to escort her to Quentis for twelve thousand zillahs. The negotiation is tense. The Mavin Jodhi is skeptical of her story but Thora accepts the deal because she knows who Odessa is. The Mavins are loyal only to gold, and they're bound to a man named Salem by blood oaths that will kill them if broken.

The skeleton forest and Ransom's return

The journey through Laine is scorching. The Mavins kill a kaverine monster infected with Lyssa. Golding, one of the Mavins, is nearly bitten. Odessa finally tells the Mavins the disease has a name: Lyssa. She also tells Evie the truth, that she's married to Ransom, not Zavier. (Remember: the public marriage was to Dray, Ransom's body double.)

In the skeleton forest, a pack of twenty-one bariwolves attacks. Mathias is killed when a wolf tears out his throat. Odessa's horse Freya is fatally wounded and Odessa has to put her down as the pack closes in. Just when everything is lost, Ransom appears on his stallion Aurinda, slaughtering the remaining wolves.

Their reunion is devastating. Ransom reveals that Zavier is alive in Ellder. Thora and Jodhi meet Ransom and accept him into the group. Ransom publicly claims Odessa as his "queen" in front of the Mavins. They agree to find a ship to sail to Roslo.

During the voyage, Ransom tells Odessa the truth about the crux scout he killed in Ellder: it was a shapeshifter wearing a face that looked like Odessa's. He doesn't know what it means. Neither does Odessa. But the reader is starting to put it together, because Caspia's timeline has been planting the pieces: the family resemblance between Caspia, her sister Emery, and Odessa herself. The crux at Ellder wasn't a stranger. It was Odessa's aunt.

Caspia's timeline: twenty years earlier

This is where the book does its real work. Caspia Starling is from Nelfinex, a continent on the other side of the Marixmore Ocean. In Nelfinex, Starlings are a class of people (all women) who undergo the ritus to become shapeshifters. Most Starlings become swifts, large beautiful birds. Caspia is one of the Quiescent, waiting for her ritus.

She has prophetic visions. In her dreams, she sees her sister Emery murdered by a silver-eyed warrior. When Queen Oleana dismisses her visions as nightmares and forbids her from acting on them, Caspia does the unthinkable. She leaves Nelfinex in secret, determined to find Emery and kill the gray eyed man who hurt her.

The voyage and Xandra

Caspia hires a pirate named Cap to sail her across the Marixmore Ocean on the ship Cirrina. Her cousin Xandra stows away and joins the quest. They pay their passage with elfalter rings. Rare metalwork that's the cultural signature of Nelfinex royalty. Marroweels respond to their Starling blood in the water, proving the cousins have an innate bond with creatures of the world.

The pull of the ritus strengthens as they sail. They reach Calandra and come ashore, where the sickness of the transformation begins.

The first shift and the horror of Calandra

Here is where the book's most devastating reveal lands. Caspia and Xandra shelter in a cave to endure the ritus. Both women are physically wrecked by it. Xandra's transformation comes first, but it's not into a swift. She shifts into something primal and black, a beast she doesn't recognize. She kills one of the creatures attacking them, then turns on Caspia.

Caspia jumps off a cliff into a raging river to escape her own cousin.

This is the moment everything clicks: Starlings cannot shift in Calandra without becoming monsters. The magic of the continent corrupts the transformation. The "swifts" Caspia loved back home become monsters known as Crux here. Xandra has become a monster and lost herself completely in the transformation.

Andreas and the cabin

Caspia is swept downriver and rescued by a man named Andreas, a nobleman living alone in a small stone cabin in Genesis. They don't share a language, but Andreas speaks fragments of the old tongue. Slowly, as Caspia recovers, they teach each other words. They fall in love.

Andreas is the first person Caspia tells the truth to. She confesses she is a Starling, that her body has changed, that the creatures she loved back home become monsters here. He believes her. He's a man who walked away from wealth and status to live in a cabin, because his brother Arick died from an addiction to korakin and Andreas couldn't stomach the life anymore. He understands loss. He understands choosing to live differently.

They travel together. Caspia and Andreas take in a young pickpocket named Kos whose future she saw in a waking vision. The first vision of it's kind.

On a boat called the Snail, Caspia tells Andreas the full truth about the Starling shift. She makes a blood vow to never transform. She would rather die human than become a crux.

The journey to Roslo

Caspia and Andreas arrive in Roslo, in Quentis. They visit the castle library, where they meet the bibliosoph Faxon. Faxon is called on to tutor Kos and eventually adopts him. They meet Hali, an old woman Caspia has dreamed about, the woman who will eventually raise baby Odessa after Caspia's death.

Faxon introduces Caspia to Brother Nold, a voster priest whose magic causes her bone-deep pain. Nold is different from Brother Hain, the voster who later gives Caspia a forbidden gray book titled For the Starling. The book reveals everything:

The Voster are not native to Calandra. They are exiles from Kenn, Caspia's part of the world.
The Six gods of Calandra were mortal men. Magicians who made pacts with demons for power and stored their magic in six glass orbits.
The orbits are the source of every corruption on the continent. The curse that turns Starlings into crux. The migration cycle. The Lyssa infection. All of it.
Destroying the orbits would end the curse.

Brother Hain drains his own magic to tell Caspia the truth and is executed by the High Priest for it.

The queen of Quentis

Andreas and Caspia marry. When Andreas's mother Malynn dies of grief over the death of her son Arick (she's a status-obsessed woman who never forgave Andreas for walking away from his life), Andreas is crowned king. Caspia becomes queen of Quentis though neither of them uses those titles comfortably.

Caspia is pregnant. Pregnancy stops the thrum of the ritus, which is the first peace her body has known since she crossed the ocean. She and Andreas begin a quest to find and destroy the orbits. They retrieve the first one from the Evon Ravine, a chasm of black obsidian where a waterfall hides the orbit in a sacred pool. Andreas reaches into the pool and pulls it out. The magic is so intense Caspia loses consciousness.

They hide the orbit in the family vault. One down, five to go.

The shift and Caspia's death

This is the ending of Caspia's timeline, and it is one of the most brutal scenes I've read in romantasy.

Four Voster arrive at the castle demanding to see the king and queen. They know. They've come for Odessa and the baby.

Caspia knows the truth: a Starling cannot transform in Calandra without losing herself to the monster she will become.

If she transforms to kill the Voster, she loses Odessa and Andreas. If she doesn't transform, the Voster will kill them all.

She chooses to shift. She gives Margot (who is her lady's maid in this timeline, not yet a queen) her journal and her elfalter rings to keep safe for her daughter and asks her to look after Andreas and Odessa.

Margo has been in love with Andreas for a long time and terrible at hiding it. Odessa knows he will need Margo's support. She walks into the throne room where the Voster have Andreas pinned with magic. She transforms.

Her feathers turn black. She slaughters all four priests in a blood-soaked frenzy. And then she begins to lose herself. The human part of her screams to Andreas through her crux eyes: kill me before I lose control. Baby Odessa cries in the next room and Caspia hears it, and the cry grants her a single moment of clarity.

Andreas drives his sword through her heart.

Caspia reverts to her human form in death. Andreas holds her body on the throne room floor for two days and refuses to let his newborn daughter be brought to him. He asks Hali to take the baby away. He cannot bear to look at the child his wife died for.

Andreas eventually takes the name King Cross as a shield for his grief. He spends the next twenty years trying to find the rest of the orbits, marrying his dead wife's lady's maid Margot to hide the truth about Caspia's identity, and raising Odessa at arm's length because every time he looks at her he sees the woman he killed.

The Gold King's cruelty in Shield of Sparrows is grief in disguise. He is not evil. He is the most broken man in the entire series.

Holding the special edition book of Rites of the Starling by Devney Perry

The ending explained

Now let's talk about how book 2 actually ends, because there's a lot happening in the last chapters.

Odessa in Quentis

Odessa and Ransom arrive at the golden castle. Odessa meets her father, now Andreas/King Cross, who is cold and dismissive in a way that makes sense to the reader in a way it doesn't to Odessa. Brother Dime reappears, hinting that she's on the "right path." Ransom publicly claims his status as Odessa's lawful husband, infuriating the King.

Odessa meets her half-sister Mae, who is hostile at first but eventually bonds with her when they fight off an attack from the palace guards together. She reunites with Arthy, the much younger boy she has always believed is her half-brother alive and flying a kite in the gardens. He names a puppy Titus, a scene lifted directly from Caspia's journal, proving Odessa's mother's stories are still echoing through the castle years after her death.

The truth about Mae and Arthy is one of the most quietly devastating reveals in the book. Neither of them is the Gold King's biological child. Both are the product of Margot's long-running affair with General Hawksley, the same general who replaced Banner after Odessa killed him in book 1. The affair has been going on for years, it's still going on now, and Odessa actually stumbles onto it by accident in Quentis. Neither Odessa nor Mae knew the truth about their parentage until late in this book.

The Gold King knew about the affair the entire time. He never slept with Margot. He married her as a distraction and a cover after Caspia's death, because he couldn't bear to be alone with his grief and he couldn't bring himself to love anyone else.

But the biggest reveal, the one that recontextualizes everything Shield of Sparrows did with the Sparrow selection, is that the Gold King was deliberately using Mae as a decoy. He trained Mae as the Sparrow because he was terrified that if Odessa were sent to Turah as the Sparrow, the Voster would find her there. That's where the Voster Brotherhood lives.

Putting Mae forward as the Sparrow candidate was his way of keeping Odessa in Quentis, far from Allesaria, far from the people who would recognize what she was. The entire political setup of book 1, the Chain of Sevens, the Sparrow stipulation, the cruelty toward Odessa wasn't grief alone. It was camouflage.

The Gold King was the only thing standing between his daughter and the Voster, and he was doing it the only way he knew how: by pushing her away so that nobody would realize how much she mattered to him.

Odessa also meets with the castle healer during this time, Healer Alore, who recreats Luella's protective elixir and is trying to develop a cure for Lyssa. Alore needs samples of Ransom's blood and saliva to study the infection further.

The Kennin reveal

Odessa spots a voster in blue robes at the castle window: Brother Skore. Ransom recognizes him as a Kennin, a faction of Voster zealots who believe those with magic should rule. The High Priest has painted the Kennin as dangerous extremists.

Here's the twist: the Kennin are the good guys. The High Priest painted them as zealots to protect his own power, which is built on the orbits. Brother Skore extracting the orbit from the Orson Canyon cave was not a betrayal, it was the resistance retrieving one of the six cursed objects they need to destroy.

Ransom's loyalty flips when he understands this. The High Priest has been using him all along, siphoning his Lyssa to keep him alive for his own reasons.

The Gold King's confession

Odessa reads Caspia's journal and learns the truth: her father killed her mother. She confronts him on the balcony. He finally tells her everything.

Yes, he killed Caspia. It was mercy. She asked him to. She was about to lose herself to the crux form and he kept his promise. He has spent twenty years hunting the orbits because finishing what Caspia started is the only way he knows how to grieve her. The quest for Allesaria wasn't about invading Turah, it was about finding the vosters who guard the orbits.

He gives Odessa Caspia's elfalter rings and the key to Ransom's prison cell. Father and daughter finally share a real moment of mutual understanding. It's the first real scene they've had together as anything other than enemies.

Ransom's arrest and release

Earlier in Quentis, Odessa was ambushed by six drunk palace guards while going to take Faze out. Mae helps her fight them off until Ransom arrives. One of many attempts by the King to set off Ransom so he can send him away.

Ransom's Lyssa drove him into a protective frenzy and he slaughtered the guards. The Gold King used the deaths as a pretext to arrest Ransom and imprison him in the barracks, planning to exile him and keep Odessa in Quentis.

Odessa visits Ransom in his cell. His Lyssa is at its peak. Brother Skore arrives and siphons the infection from Ransom's blood, the same move the High Priest has been doing in secret, but Skore is doing it openly and not for leverage. Ransom's eyes turn from silver back to green for the first time in weeks. He's temporarily healed.

With the King's permission, Odessa frees Ransom from his cell. Zavier, Cathlin, and Jonas arrive from Ellder. Evie gets her father back. The group is reunited at last.

The cliffside and the thrum

The book ends on a cliffside, where Odessa stands with Ransom, Zavier, and Evie. They agree to return to Turah to find the next orbits. Caspia's quest will become Odessa's. They have the journal, they have the map, they have the Kennin as allies.

And then Odessa feels it.

The thrum of the ritus. The same pull Caspia felt on the other side of the ocean twenty years earlier. The same call that draws a Starling toward transformation. It has just begun inside Odessa's chest, and she understands exactly what it means because she's read her mother's journal and she knows what happens to Starlings who shift in Calandra.

She hides it from Ransom. When he asks if she's okay, she lies and says everything is fine.

That's the ending. Odessa is becoming what killed her mother. And the cycle is about to repeat.

Does Ransom die in Rites of the Starling?

No. Ransom does not die. Let me say it clearly because it's the question everyone is asking right now.

Ransom survives the entire book. He is searching for Odessa from the opening chapter. He reunites with her mid-book when he rescues her from the bariwolf pack in the skeleton forest. He travels with her to Quentis, publicly claims her as his queen, is imprisoned by the Gold King after a Lyssa-induced slaughter of palace guards, and is temporarily cured when Brother Skore siphons the Lyssa from his blood at the end.

But, and this is important, the book's final pages include a vision Odessa has where she sees herself killing Ransom. In the vision, Ransom is bleeding dark green blood while bowing to a crux and calling it "my queen." The implication is that either Odessa's own transformation will force her to kill him, or Ransom himself is becoming something that is no longer Ransom. The vision is ambiguous on purpose. Book 3 will resolve it.

So: Ransom is alive at the end of book 2. Book 3 is where the question of his survival becomes urgent.

The orbits explained

The orbits are the central mystery of the series heading into book 3. Here's what we know:

Six magicians in Calandra's ancient past made pacts with demons from the Infernal in exchange for power. These six men became the Six gods that Calandra now worships. Their power, stolen not earned, was stored in six glass spheres called orbits. The orbits are fireproof, unbreakable by normal means, and each one holds a "storm" of magic.

The orbits are the source of every curse on the continent. The migration cycles. The corruption of Starlings into crux. The Lyssa infection. The Voster's hold on the kings. All of it traces back to the orbits.

Caspia and Andreas retrieved the first orbit from the Evon Ravine. Brother Skore retrieved the second from the cave in the Orson Canyon that required Odessa's sensitivity to find. That's two orbits in possession of the Kennin resistance.

The Gold King has two more hidden in Quentis, which he tells Odessa about in their rooftop confrontation.

That leaves two orbits unaccounted for heading into book 3. Destroying all six would end the curse, break the Voster's power, and potentially cure Lyssa at its source. But destroying them is not easy, they can't be broken by normal means, and the Voster High Priest will kill anyone who threatens them.

The Starling mythology explained

Here's the worldbuilding in one clean summary:

Starlings are from Kenn, a region or world on the continent of Nelfinex, across the Marixmore Ocean from Calandra. In Nelfinex, Starlings undergo a rite called the ritus to become shapeshifters. Most become swifts. The ritus is called by an internal "thrum" a physical pull that intensifies until the Starling must transform or die.

Starlings cannot safely shift in Calandra. The magic of the continent, the magic that the Six gods created with their orbits, corrupts the Starling transformation. Instead of becoming a swift, a Starling in Calandra becomes a crux: the massive, dangerous monsters that terrorize the kingdoms during migrations.

The crux are not animals. They are Starlings trapped in a corrupted form. The crux migration cycle is actually the mating drive of creatures who were once human, trying to reproduce within a broken biology.

Green blood is the sign of a Starling whose body has begun to change. Caspia's blood turns green halfway through her timeline. Ransom's veins turn dark because of Lyssa, which is effectively the same corruption, transmitted through Xandra's bite when she was in bariwolf form.

The Voster are also not native to Calandra. They are exiles from Kenn who fled centuries ago and built their power on the back of the Six gods' curse. This is why Brother Nold told Caspia the original Starlings who came to Calandra were "claimed by the land" the vosters knew what would happen and let it happen.

Odessa is a Starling who was born in Calandra. This makes her different. Her blood is a mix, half Starling, half the continent itself. Brother Skore reveals she is the prophesied warrior the Kennin have been waiting for. She is the only one who can find and destroy all six orbits, because her body can survive the magic that would kill anyone else.

Rites of the Starling by Devney Perry Book cover

Where to buy Rites of the Starling

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New characters introduced in Rites of the Starling

Caspia Starling

Odessa's mother. A Starling from Nelfinex who crossed the Marixmore Ocean seeking vengeance for her sister Emery, found love instead, and ultimately sacrificed herself to save her infant daughter. Caspia is the emotional center of the entire book, her journal is the structural device, and her death is the gravitational weight every other storyline orbits around. She is one of the best-written mother characters I've ever read in romantasy.

Andreas (King Cross)

Odessa's father. A Genesis nobleman who walked away from his family's wealth after his brother Arick died, lived in a cabin in the woods, and fell in love with the strange woman the river brought him. Became king of Quentis after Caspia's death and adopted "Cross" as a grief shield. Every cruelty he shows Odessa in book 1 is recontextualized here he has spent twenty years unable to look at his daughter because she has his dead wife's face.

Xandra

Caspia's cousin who stowed away on the voyage to Calandra. First Starling to shift on the continent. First to become a crux. Later, in bariwolf form, she bit Ransom which turns him into patient zero for Lyssa.

Emery

Caspia's sister, whose murder Caspia sees in a prophetic vision. Her death is the inciting incident for Caspia's entire journey. The silver-eyed warrior Caspia sees in the vision is Ransom. Emery came looking for Caspia years later and Ransom kills her thinking she is a crux scout.

Brother Skore

The voster who joins Odessa's journey out of Ozarth and teaches her the old language. Revealed to be a member of the Kennin, the voster faction working to destroy the orbits. He's the one who retrieves the second orbit from the Orson Canyon cave using Odessa's magical sensitivity. At the end of the book, he siphons the Lyssa from Ransom's blood to temporarily cure him. Brother Dime is also a Kennin, both vosters guiding Odessa are part of the same resistance operation, just playing different roles in different stages of her journey.

Brother Nold and Brother Hain

Two vosters in Caspia's timeline who help her understand her heritage. Nold reveals that the Voster are exiles from Kenn. Hain gives Caspia the forbidden gray book that reveals the truth about the Six gods and the orbits, and is executed by the High Priest for it.

Thora

The white-haired warrior with stars tattooed on her face who leads the Mavins mercenary band. Niece of Cathlin. Her grandfather or great-grandfather was a character in Caspia's journal, one of the people Caspia saved or befriended during her original journey. Thora escorts Odessa across Laine.

The Mavins

Thora's mercenary band, bound by blood oaths to a man named Salem. Key members include Jodhi (skeptical of Odessa at first), Mathias (killed by bariwolves in the skeleton forest), and Golding (nearly bitten by an infected kaverine). The Mavins are loyal only to gold, but they develop a real bond with Odessa through the journey.

Wells

The merchant who helps Odessa and Evie cross the Harrow River. A descendant of a character Caspia met in her timeline, or the same man aged. He represents the quiet kindness that persists in Calandra despite everything.

Sryker and Edda

A couple with a safe cabin in Ozarth. Sryker is the man with three scars on his face mentioned in Caspia's journal. Another echo of the past in the present.

Faxon and Kos

Faxon is the castle bibliosoph in Quentis who helps Caspia research her heritage and later adopts Kos, the young pickpocket Caspia rescued. In Odessa's timeline, Kos is grown, and he gives Odessa a second journal her mother left specifically for her.

Hali

The old woman Caspia saw in her visions, the one with green blood washed from her hands. Hali eventually raises baby Odessa after Caspia's death when Andreas is too broken to care for her. A quiet, devastating character whose presence links both timelines.

Healer Alore

The Quentis healer who has been working on a cure for Lyssa and has already recreated Luella's protective elixir. She needs Ransom's blood and saliva to study the disease. She's clearly going to play a bigger role in book 3.

General Hawksley

The new Quentis general, replacing Banner after Odessa killed him in book 1. Margot has been having a long-running affair with Hawksley that predates Banner's death by years and is still ongoing in book 2. Odessa stumbles onto evidence of it by accident while in Quentis. Both Mae and Arthy are the biological children of this affair. The Gold King knows, he has always known, and never cared enough to stop it because he never loved Margot in the first place. Hawksley's role in Quentis and whether he'll play a larger part in book 3 is an open question, but his ties to Margot and the children are a significant thread to watch out for.

Gable

The Quentis weapons master who knew Caspia personally and hints to Odessa that her mother was a skilled fighter. He's one of the people who was forbidden from speaking about Caspia but clearly loved her.

Arthy

The much younger boy Odessa has always believed is her half-brother. Alive in Quentis, flying a kite in the gardens, naming his puppy Titus exactly like a scene from Caspia's journal. The twist: Arthy is actually the son of Margot and General Hawksley, the product of Margot's long-running and ongoing affair. The Gold King is not his biological father, just as he is not Mae's. Arthy and Mae are full siblings to each other through Margot and Hawksley, and neither is blood-related to Odessa at all. Odessa doesn't learn any of this until late in the book.

Theories heading into book 3

Caspia's visions, and the one vision that broke the pattern

Throughout Caspia's timeline, her visions always showed events from the past. That was the rule. Every prophetic dream she had was her subconscious reaching backward through time, surfacing something that had already happened — which is why she trusted them so implicitly. If she saw something in a vision, it was real and it was done.

Which is why the vision of her sister Emery being killed by a silver-eyed warrior shattered her. Caspia assumed it had already happened, that Emery was already dead, and that the silver-eyed warrior was someone she had to find and avenge. That's the entire reason she crossed the Marixmore Ocean. She left Nelfinex to get revenge for a death she thought had already occurred.

But that one specific vision was the future, not the past. Caspia didn't know it. She couldn't have known it. Her visions had always worked one way, and this one broke the rule without warning. Emery wasn't dead when Caspia left. Emery was still alive, and she eventually followed her sister and cousin across the same ocean to find them.

The crux Ransom killed at Ellder was Emery. Emery had arrived in Calandra, triggered her own ritus, shifted into a crux like every Starling who transforms on this continent, and gone searching for Caspia and Xandra. She was scouting the migration — or what Ransom and the Turans assumed was the migration — when Ransom drove his sword through her heart.

The silver-eyed warrior in Caspia's vision was Ransom. Her prophecy was real. It just showed her a death that was still 20+ years away, and she died long before she could see the prophecy close.

This is the kind of devastating narrative trick Devney Perry keeps pulling in this book. Caspia crossed an ocean to save a sister who wasn't in danger yet. She triggered her own ritus on the wrong continent, became a crux, and died in her husband's arms, all because of a vision whose tense she misread. The entire Caspia timeline was set in motion by a woman grieving something that hadn't happened, and by the time it did happen, Caspia had been dead for two decades and the silver-eyed warrior was married to her own daughter.

Ransom might be becoming a crux

The final vision Odessa has shows Ransom bowing to a crux and calling it "my queen." We assume this is Odessa in her future crux form. But what if it's the other way around? What if Ransom's Lyssa is slowly turning him into something crux-adjacent, and the "my queen" is him recognizing Odessa because she's also shifting?

The visuals of Ransom's eyes turning silver during his Lyssa rages, his dark veins, and his predatory protective instincts all point toward transformation rather than just disease. Lyssa might not be a disease at all. It might be a slower, more twisted version of the Starling shift.

The Gold King might have more than two orbits

He told Odessa he has two orbits hidden in Quentis. The Gold King is a man who has spent twenty years lying about everything. It would be very like him to downplay how much he's actually collected. I suspect he has three, maybe all four, of the remaining orbits.

Evie's Ozarth blood matters more than we think

Evie has Ozarth blue starbursts in her eyes. Book 2 doesn't do much with her specifically, but the fact that she was saved by Brother Dime alongside Odessa and protected throughout the journey suggests she has a role to play. I think Evie's Ozarth bloodline will matter in book 3, possibly as the key to something involving the Ozarth kingdom that we haven't met yet. Especially because her blue starbursts are mentioned multiple times.

The fifth and sixth orbits are in Laine and Turah

Three orbits are accounted for by the end of book 2: one from the Evon Ravine (Caspia/Andreas), one from the Orson Canyon cave (Skore), and two that the Gold King has in Quentis. The remaining two orbits are somewhere in the five kingdoms. My guess: one in Laine (the fifth kingdom, which has been mysteriously underdeveloped in both books) and one in Turah itself, which would explain why Lyssa concentrated there.

What we know about book 3

Devney Perry has confirmed Shield of Sparrows is a trilogy, which means book 3 is the finale. There's no title and no release date yet as of April 2026, but based on the ending of Rites of the Starling, here's what book 3 has to resolve:

Odessa's transformation and whether she can survive the shift
The remaining orbits and whether they can actually be destroyed
Ransom's fate and the meaning of the "my queen" vision
The silver-eyed warrior from Caspia's vision (assuming it's still unresolved)
The Gold King's full hand, how many orbits, what he knows, what he's still hiding
The Kennin resistance vs. the Voster High Priest
The fate of Calandra itself, does destroying the orbits cure the curse or tear the continent apart?

Book 3 cannot come fast enough.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ransom die in Rites of the Starling?

No. Ransom survives the entire book. He reunites with Odessa in the skeleton forest, travels with her to Quentis, is imprisoned by the Gold King, and is temporarily cured by Brother Skore at the end. However, a final vision suggests his fate in book 3 is uncertain.

Who is Odessa's mother?

Odessa's mother is Caspia Starling, a shapeshifter from the continent of Nelfinex. Caspia came to Calandra believing her sister Emery had been killed by a silver-eyed warrior, fell in love with Andreas (who became King Cross — Odessa's father), and died when she shifted into a crux to protect her newborn daughter from the Voster. The tragic twist: her vision of Emery's death was not the past but the future, and Emery was still alive when Caspia left Nelfinex.

Is the Gold King really Odessa's father?

Yes. The Gold King is Andreas, Caspia's husband, who took the name "Cross" after her death as a shield for his grief. His cruelty toward Odessa in Shield of Sparrows is recontextualized in book 2 as the unbearable grief of a man who cannot look at his daughter without seeing the wife he killed as a mercy.

What is a Starling in Rites of the Starling?

Starlings are a class of shapeshifters from the continent of Nelfinex. Normally they transform into swifts (small birds), but the magic of Calandra corrupts the transformation and turns them into crux — the monsters of the continent. Odessa is a Starling, and her ritus (the call to transform) begins in the final chapter.

What are the orbits in Rites of the Starling?

The orbits are six glass spheres containing the magical power of six ancient magicians who became Calandra's gods. The orbits are the source of the continent's curse, the crux migrations, and Lyssa. Destroying all six would end the curse. Two have been retrieved by the end of book 2.

Who are the Kennin?

The Kennin are a faction of Voster priests who believe the orbits must be destroyed and the curse lifted. The Voster High Priest has painted them as zealots, but they are actually the resistance. Brother Skore, the voster who guided Odessa to Quentis, is a Kennin.

Is Rites of the Starling a cliffhanger?

Yes. The book ends with Odessa feeling the thrum of her own Starling ritus for the first time — the call to shift into a crux, which killed her mother. She hides this from Ransom and lies that everything is fine. The cycle is about to repeat, and book 3 will pick up from there.

How do the two timelines in Rites of the Starling work?

The book alternates between Odessa's present-day journey and Caspia's story from roughly twenty years earlier. They are not parallel timelines — Caspia's story is the past, and the reader figures this out through context clues as characters from Caspia's journal appear as older versions of themselves in Odessa's present.

Does Rites of the Starling have a happy ending?

Not really. Odessa reunites with Ransom and her family, and she learns the truth about her mother. But she also learns her father killed her mother as an act of mercy, and the book ends with Odessa beginning her own Starling transformation — the same process that killed Caspia. It's a bittersweet, devastating ending that sets up book 3.

When does book 3 of Shield of Sparrows come out?

Devney Perry has confirmed Shield of Sparrows is a trilogy, but no title or release date has been announced for book 3 as of April 2026. I'll update this post when we know more.