A
Bite Of... Kiss of the Goblin Prince
This week I'm happy to introduce a the incredible Shona Husk, with a snippet from her new release!
Can
you, in less than five words describe your book Kiss of the Goblin Prince?
Virgin hero, magic, heartache,
redemption.What inspired you to write it?
When I wrote The Goblin King, Dai (the Goblin Prince) was a minor character but when he spoke to his brother it became clear they weren’t close and they had very different personalities, and upbringings. While Dai was taken as a good behaviour hostage his brother was King. Dai kept secrets to himself to protect his brother and their tribe which also put distance between them. He was also more than a little bookish J. By the time I’d written Goblin King I wanted to jump straight into Dai’s story and find out how he healed the old wounds caused by the goblin curse and see if he was capable of love…turns out he was he just needed the right woman.
Dai flexed his back as if he
could dislodge the persistent weight lodged between his shoulders. Once he got
his books back from Birch, he’d need a whole house to put them in. Texts in
every language ever written and lore on more systems of magic than people knew
about from cultures that had passed without recognition. He hadn’t been able to
stomach the thought of all that knowledge being lost in the Shadowlands
forever, so he’d deposited his life’s work in the vaults of Birch Trustees. Now
they were taking their sweet time returning his books.
He
shivered, as if just the thought of the Shadowlands could chill him to the
core, and turned on the heater even though it wasn’t that cold. Not like when
he’d been forced to break the ice before washing when he was younger. The
shower water warmed while he stripped. All his shirts had long sleeves to hide
the marks on his body he showed no one. The mirror kept his secrets.
Across
his skin inked in black were sigils, symbols, and texts in a hundred different
languages. All of them now dead. They were the marks of holy men and voodoo
priests, witches and wise women that had marked his progression through the
various studies of lore. They didn’t just mark his skin; they marked his very
being, pulsing with power, and couldn’t be removed. Not that he would. It had
taken too much to earn them.
Cuneiform
wedges fell from his hip down his leg, a protection against evil. Sanskrit
wrapped his wrist and forearm in a proverb he’d failed to live by. A mark of
initiation burned into his thigh; on the surface it was nothing more than a
crescent moon. On his chest, over his heart, lay a spider at the center of her
web. Today she was upright. She’d never moved in the Shadowlands, but in the
Fixed Realm she did. And it was unnerving. He touched the spider but felt only his
skin. A spider weaves the web, makes it suit her purpose, but never spins
without reason. Pity he didn’t know what the movement meant.
Beneath
the magic that had failed to break the druid’s curse were the scars that
rippled across him like he was a badly woven cloth riddled with uneven weft and
knobbled threads. There were knots and thickenings where he knew his skin
showed the thin white lines of wounds healed long ago.
He
huffed out a breath and looked at his skin as Amanda would. In that moment he
knew he could never let her see. He’d never shown anyone, not even Roan. He
would erase the scars, if not the memories. He ran his fingers over the bumps
in a rib that had been broken too many times. The urge to use magic burned his
fingers, but he hesitated.
If you liked that snippet, there's more from where it came from!
Buy links;
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Thank you for sharing Shona
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