If what grabbed you in The Spirit Ring was Fiametta stepping into Prospero Beneforte’s craft after tragedy—and those tense, exacting lessons that shape her into a true maker—you’ll click with Agnieszka’s harrowing training under the “Dragon.” Like Fiametta, she’s pushed from apprentice to practitioner in a crisis, learning to wield perilous magic not just by rote, but with intuition and grit as real stakes close in.

You enjoyed the way Prospero’s art could bind spirits into metal—and how Lord Ferrante’s usurpation leaned on grim sorcery. Sabriel puts that front and center: bells and charter marks to command the dead, a heroine trained to cross into Death itself, and constant choices about when it’s right to bind, release, or destroy a soul. If the spirit-bound ring and other crafted bindings fascinated you, Sabriel’s duel with necromancers will hit the same nerve.

If you loved the hammer-and-furnace feel of The Spirit Ring—the molds, metals, guild politics, and the way craft itself becomes magic—you’ll appreciate how Sedia builds a city where alchemists, mechanists, and rival factions shape every street. Like Fiametta’s foundry-born workings from Prospero’s shop, the magic here is tactile and procedural, married to tools, recipes, and the social web that empowers or imperils makers.

If Thur and Fiametta’s partnership drew you in—the quiet trust that grows as they survive plots, outrun soldiers, and rely on a dangerous magical object—Swordheart offers that same warm, wry cadence. Halla and the swordsman bound to an enchanted blade learn to lean on each other through ambushes and legal snares, with the kind of gentle humor and gradual affection that made Thur and Fiametta’s rapport so satisfying.

If Lord Ferrante’s coup, court maneuvering, and the resistance behind the scenes were your catnip in The Spirit Ring, Tigana amplifies that—rebels scheming against tyrants who use magic to hold power, covert missions through courts and festivals, and the moral costs of striking back. Where Fiametta and Thur navigate nobles and soldiers to unseat a sorcerous usurper, Kay delivers a whole peninsula’s worth of risk, disguise, and difficult choices.