Book Title: The Prince and the Ice King
Author: Amanda Meuwissen
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Cover Artist: Kris Norris
Release Date: August 3, 2021
Genre: Fantasy M/M Romance
Tropes: Fated love, enemies to lovers, cursed, slow burn
Themes: Destiny, fate, redemption, legend, overcoming prejudice
Length: 300 pages
It can be read alone but is the first book in a series.
This is book 1 of Tales from the Gemstone Kingdoms.
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Only true love can melt a frozen heart.
Blurb
Every Winter Solstice, the Emerald Kingdom sends the dreaded Ice King a sacrifice—a corrupt soul, a criminal, a deviant, or someone touched by magic. Prince Reardon has always loathed this tradition, partly because he dreams of love with another man instead of a future queen.
Then Reardon’s best friend is discovered as a witch and sent to the Frozen Kingdom as tribute.
Reardon sets out to rescue him, willing to battle and kill the Ice King if that’s what it takes. But nothing could prepare him for what he finds in the Frozen Kingdom—a cursed land filled with magic… and a camaraderie Reardon has never known. Over this strange, warm community presides the enigmatic Ice King himself, a man his subjects call Jack. A man with skin made of ice, whose very touch can stop a beating heart.
A man Reardon finds himself inexplicably drawn to.
Jack doesn’t trust Reardon. But when Reardon begins spending long days with him, vowing to prove himself and break the curse, Jack begins to hope. Can love and forgiveness melt the ice around Jack’s heart?
“You may leave the path,” Jack said. “It was made for me, since this is one of few rooms I was not willing to give up, even if I do leave an unfortunate wake.”
Only then did Reardon look down to see that he stood in a hollowed-out groove in the floor like a forest path, leading many different directions throughout the library. It kept Jack’s ice and subsequent melting from getting near the books.
Reardon turned to look at him with a boyish smile. “How clever. But how do you read if you can’t touch the books?”
Jack gestured ahead, and Reardon stepped gingerly out of the path to walk along the main floor. A few rows down was a pedestal with an open book, surrounded by one of Wynn’s clever contraptions. It connected to a pair of pedals on the floor, and with a simple step on one of them, the connecting mechanism gripped a page and turned it.
He showed Reardon by turning to the next page, and then stepped on the opposing pedal to turn it back. “I need assistance when the time comes for a new book, but this serves its purpose.”
“What is this one?” Reardon stepped up to the pedestal to investigate. “The River Princess? That’s a romance!”
“A king can’t enjoy some sordid fun? I thought we discussed that already. Admittedly, I prefer to reimagine most damsels as—”
“Stable boys?” Reardon teased. “Though I suppose in this case it would be a prince.” What he’d said seemed to catch up to him, and his sweet smile dropped. “I-I mean… uhhh….”
“I never had a prince,” Jack said. The words slipped free as easily as any confession to Reardon so far, because the bashful way he lowered his head and fluttered his emerald eyes, only to flick them back up and center on Jack, seemed to say his wants focused there too.
Not on Jack. It couldn’t possibly be that. But on a prince of his own.
Jack sat in an extra groove built like a bench, and Reardon pulled a chair over to sit close at the edge of the path. There was barely the length of a man separating them, and yet, in his trough to protect the world from his frozen form, Jack felt leagues away from Reardon beside that pedestal.
“How might a prince have changed things?” Reardon asked.
“Maybe not at all,” Jack said. He needed Reardon to understand that there was no changing anything—not here. “I wasn’t prepared for my father’s death. I thought I could put off the inevitable forever. I was young, like you, and felt invincible, constantly thwarting my father’s plans for me.
“When he died, I had a wicked and terrible idea. Thrust into my role as monarch and expected to marry, I vowed instead to change everything, to make a mockery of what my father thought a kingdom should be and create a land free for everyone to live as they pleased.”
“Wasn’t that a good thing?”
“Have you ever heard what the road to damnation is built with, little prince?”
Reardon’s twitch of a smile said he had.
“My intentions weren’t good. I was really only thinking of myself and the freedoms I wanted. I dismissed my father’s advisors, even the most well-respected ones, and chose my friends as my court. We did whatever we wanted, telling our subjects to do the same.
“Not to say my court isn’t each capable in their position, but back then, we had no plan or sense of gravity to all that fell under our rule. And let me assure you, there is nothing quite as dangerous as giving people exactly what they think they want.
“What happened wasn’t on them, however. They soon saw the folly of it all, that yes, everyone should be able to love and exist and pursue their heart’s desires—or at least most did—but there must be order and responsibility too. A kingdom should not rule every part of a subject’s lives, but freedom shouldn’t be a guise for apathy. There must be a balance between control and personal liberty or everything crumbles.”
“I understand,” Reardon said. “I wish to change the laws of the Emerald Kingdom, to not condemn anyone without a true crime against them, but not to abolish all law and tradition entirely.”
“Then you are far better than I was. A tyrant in power isn’t the answer, but giving everyone everything eventually collapses. Bandits arose, unrest, famine, and the people looked to me to fix it. But all I cared about was… my stable boys,” Jack finished wryly. “A system is only as good as its worst person in power, no matter how well-intentioned.”
Amanda Meuwissen is a bisexual author, with a primary focus on M/M romance. As author of the paranormal romance trilogy The Incubus Saga and several other titles with various publishers, Amanda regularly attends local comic conventions for fun and to meet with fans, where she will often be seen in costume as one of her favorite fictional characters. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband, John, and their cat, Helga.
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