Today's the final day for The Prince's Vow (Starian Cycle #3) blog tour! Join authors Iris Foxglove and IndiGo Marketing as they visit and share an exclusive excerpt of the dark fantasy novel! Plus they host an audiobook giveaway for Traitor's Mercy!
Title: The Prince's Vow
Series: Starian Cycle #3
Author: Iris Foxglove
Publisher: Belladonna Press
Release Date: 6/22/21
Heat Level: 4 - Lots of Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 64,000
Genre: Romance, Fantasy, BDSM, AU
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Synopsis
Adrien de Guillory may be the heir to the throne of Staria, but no one in court believes that the submissive, meek-minded prince will ever be king. What they don’t know is that Adrien is hardly the meek, shy creature he pretends to be and that he has his own plans for the future. To see those plans through, Adrien embarks on a journey to Mislia, the land of his mother’s ancestors, to seek an answer to controlling his magic of foresight.
The one thing Adrien’s visions don’t predict is Isiodore de Mortain, his father’s confidante and the subject of Adrien’s long-standing, deeply embarrassing infatuation. Isiodore intercepts Adrien on his way to Mislia. But it’s too late to turn back—the two of them are now stranded on foreign soil, forced to rely on each other in order to get home in one piece. With Isiodore set on keeping Adrien safe and Adrien determined to become the most troublesome prince in Starian history, a storm is brewing over Mislia...one that will surely sweep both of them out into uncharted waters.
(The Prince's Vow is an m/m dark fantasy novel, set in a fictional world where everyone is biologically either a dominant or a submissive and compelled to satisfy those urges. As such, the biological imperative kink in this story is pure fantasy, and not intended as a representation of real-life BDSM practices or dynamics.)
Exclusive Excerpt
Adrien had never hated the rain more in his life.He’d been so close. Isiodore had been practically on top of him, beautiful and radiating dominance, his eyes full of misplaced concern for the delicate innocent Adrien certainly wasn’t in his heart of hearts.
He knew it was probably a bad idea. When they got back to Staria, Adrien would go back to being the prince half the court pitied. The other half was waiting to disappear into the country, doomed to make way for a dominant child Emile was supposed to weave out of thin air. Isiodore would go back to making sure the king didn’t do something like, oh, put Adrien’s best friend’s life in danger a second time, or set the palace on fire, and they’d never mention what almost happened in Mislia again.
It didn’t mean Adrien wasn’t allowed to want things.
He wanted plenty. He wanted…so much more than he was supposed to want, and now that the constraints binding him were loosed, he had to get out of bed and trudge through the sand to a barn in the rain.
“Why does she even have a barn?” Adrien snarled, shoving on his boots, which were still damp from the sea. He caught Isiodore’s sidelong look and narrowed his eyes. “Yes, I know who I sound like.”
“Note how I’ve said nothing,” Isiodore said. Adrien grumbled to himself. His cock was still half-hard, painfully noticeable through the long tunic the Mislians favored, and all he wanted was for the damn barn to sink into the ocean so Isiodore could push him up against the wall. Instead, he laced up his boots—or one of them, the other lace was gone with their miserable lean-to on the beach—and hobbled out into the rain.
It was like walking into a kaleidoscope. It wasn’t nearly so bad as when they were captured, and he had more pressing things to focus on. But with the storm at its zenith, Adrien was left facing sheet after sheet of fragmented visions, flickering and flashing with every gust of wind. He ground his teeth and pushed through and nearly fell down the stairs.
Isiodore grabbed his arm. “Careful with that boot.”
“It’s fine,” Adrien said. “I just can’t see.”
“It’s always like this?” Isiodore whispered as Adrien forced himself to lumber down the steps. “Depends.” Adrien trudged through the wet sand, stopped, and shielded his eyes from the rain with both hands. “Where’s this barn supposed to be?”
“Behind the house,” Summer said in his ear. He whirled. No one was there.
“I’ll lead,” Isiodore said. Adrien would have walked on without him, but the rain was getting worse, so he kept his gaze lowered and held onto Isiodore’s shoulder as they rounded the beach house.
To call the glorified shed behind the house a barn was pushing it, in Adrien’s opinion. It did have a large pair of doors on one side. It was shaped roughly like a barn, but the whole thing was made of a coarse, pale stone with a blue tin roof, peeled up on one side and buckling dangerously. Summer stood just outside the doors, a string of bells wrapped around her hand, hair pinned firmly under a cap, with Tanis leaning over her to guard her from the rain. Water dripped off Tanis’ wings, sparkling with visions too broken to understand, and she bared her teeth in what Adrien hoped was a smile.
“I’m going to call down ropes,” Summer said, and her voice rang out clear despite the roar of the wind and the low thunder of the roof shaking. “You two will secure them while I keep the rest of the roof from blowing off.”
“You’re so competent, baby,” Tanis said.
Adrien gave Isiodore a look. He shook his head slightly.
Summer rang two bells, almost inaudible in the storm. But Adrien nearly fell back as a rope slithered out from the curtain of colors and light to land heavily in the sand. He grabbed it and saw the same vision he’d caught while shaving earlier—a hand on someone’s throat, the mark they made glowing faintly, a pale face only just visible through the grinning, yellowed skull of a dragon.
“Boy?”
Adrien jumped. Tanis had drifted toward him through the rain, her wings barely moving. Adrien wrapped the rope around his hand and squinted up at the barn. It was almost invisible through the rain.
“Don’t touch him,” Isiodore said.
“So possessive,” said the demon. She hovered at Adrien’s side, watching him. “You need to step back.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
Tanis stayed close while they hauled on the roof, which shuddered as bells rang out, followed by the soft droning of Summer’s voice, low and steady. Adrien’s arms felt like they were going to give out by the time whatever magic she was working secured the roof. When the rope disappeared in his hands, he went staggering backward.
“Not yet,” Tanis said as Isiodore reached for Adrien. “We have to check on the records.” The barn was a welcome relief from the rain, even though there was quite a bit of water on the floor. Adrien backed away from the door as Summer whistled wall sconces to come to life, illuminating row after row of metal shelves. Each shelf held a box labeled in a fine, precise hand, and each row was marked with symbols in black ink.
“This way,” Summer said. “I just hope none of the records were damaged.”
“I remember them,” said Tanis. “They can always be rewritten.”
“I’d prefer to keep my hands if at all possible,” Summer said. She walked through a puddle of water, and Adrien saw a man there, dressed in furs, drawing his bow. He forced his gaze away.
Oh, no, it isn’t going to work like that.
Adrien jumped. Tanis was with Summer, helping her pull down a box from the corner where the roof had buckled. She looked at Adrien with her cold, glassy eyes, but her mouth didn’t move.
“What?”
“I said help me here, boy,” Summer said. Isiodore was already pulling a box down, sliding the lid open just a fraction to see what was inside. Adrien stepped into the puddle.
So you’re like my Summer, then, said Tanis’ voice, as Adrien sank under the weight of a box. Hungry. You want to know things, know the truth of them, how they work. I wondered when you fell into my embrace. At first, I thought it was ambition, and oh, you are ambitious, aren’t you?
I don’t know what you mean, Adrien thought.
You crave a crown almost as much as you crave knowledge, Tanis’ voice said. A shame you have the wrong kind of magic. Any demon you would summon would be formidable indeed.
Adrien pointedly turned away and set the box down on a dry patch of floor. There were just trinkets inside, damp with the rain but seemingly useless—necklaces made with clay beads, bracelets, a ball with a hole in the center. He laid them out so that they looked like a magpie’s hoard and glanced at Isiodore’s, which was much the same.
“What are these?” he asked.
“Heirlooms,” Summer said. She started digging through a bag that had been soaked through. “Some demons, they become attached to a thing their mage wore or loved. We keep them here so that when the demon is summoned by a new mage, that mage can carry this heirloom with them.”
“Demons can be summoned more than once?” Adrien touched the ball. It looked new, polished to a shine, but the necklace next to it was drab and cracked, with only a fleck of paint on the largest pendant. “How do you know which one is which?”
“I’m the Archivist,” Summer said dryly. “I have kept the records of every mage and demon to have been bound in Mislia’s history, their names, their ages, their skills. When humans die, their demons will sometimes come to me with their heirloom before they return to the dark. Some demons come to me first, before the mage’s family, because we were there at the start of their bond, and we will be there for them at the end.”
“That’s a little sad,” Adrien said.
“It’s important that we remember who they were,” Summer said. She touched the necklace. “Artemis, I believe.”
“Her partner was Han,” said Tanis. “It’s been sixty-two years since he returned to the dark. He must be resisting.”
“Do you have one?” Adrien asked. “An heirloom?”
Tanis smiled. “Of course.”
Summer didn’t speak. She just kept drying out the heirlooms in the bag, laying them carefully in order.
“Is it rude to ask?”
“It’s a memory,” Summer said after a moment. “We carry a memory for her, every Archivist since the first.”
“Since Tanis,” Tanis said, and there was something like fondness in her smile as she gazed down at Summer.
The storm was finally dying down when the corner of the barn was done being rescued from the rain, and Adrien and Isiodore stood before the collected hoard of over a hundred demons spread out on the floor. There were toys, letters, a book so worn the cover was rubbed off, even a bag of coins from Arktos. All belonging to dead mages and their demons, keepsakes of humans long gone.
It was hard to step out into the rain again, but Isiodore lay a hand on the small of Adrien’s back, keeping him steady.
“If I close my eyes,” Adrien whispered. “I can just make it.”
“I’ll get you there,” Isiodore whispered back into his ear.
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