One child in five is born without magic. A mage can tell with a single glance. The kingdom calls them Filth, and it owns them.
Mika has been circus property since she was small, scrubbing and hauling for mages who will never learn her name. Her one secret is a crime worth a branding. She can read, and she has read everything she could steal an hour with. Every text on strains and forms. Every history of the nine Bishops, the king's living weapons. She knows more about magic than most mages ever will, and she has never produced a single spark of it.
Then one night takes everything she loves, and the ash gives up the truth. Her family was murdered by the man who wears the crown. Her name was scraped out of every record in Seemos, a bloodline erased so thoroughly that almost no one alive remembers it. And the power waking in her blood answers to no rule any mage was ever taught.
Alone on the outlaw road, she walks east to the War Eagles, once the greatest guild in the kingdom, now a ruined family of misfits. Joining them turns out to be the easy part.
A stranger on a dark road leaves her holding a medallion no one can explain. It is her admittance into the Selection of Sixteen, a tournament fought to the death before the whole kingdom, where the prize is a seat among the Nine. No one in Seemos stands closer to the king than his Bishops. If Mika wants the man who ordered her family's deaths, she will have to become one of the weapons he made. And a girl who has never cast a spell has two years to learn what every rival has practiced since they could walk.
The Nine Bishops is a coming-of-age epic fantasy of stolen names, found family, and a power no mage can teach.