A Queen's Hart

My goodness, Betty Rage at it again! So smouldering, so romantic, and so beautiful it quickly rises to become a favorite <3

I have a complaint!

Much troubled am I!!

Your story is far too short!!!

So sweet ❤

Here from the Winter Holiday contest. This wasn't what I expected in an entry, but it turns out that I'm glad of that. I loved the setting you created and your story as a whole. It was well written and beautifully presented, with a great twist at the end for a happily ever after. Thanks for writing and for sharing this. 5*

I just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who voted, commented or sent feedback over the run of the contest. I'm a very sentimental person at the best of times, but the positive reception of this story has honestly had me blinking back a few tears of joy. This year has been awful - even against the benchmarks set by a few other recent ones! It's just been so nice to have had this little place of escapist reprieve while I was writing, and to have had pleasant things to look forward to in my inbox once it was published. I don't want to go overboard, but I'm also really very sincerely grateful for all of it.

There are always improvements to make - for example, I didn't anticipate the differing ways people would feel about the ending of this story at all! As @ChasPHX put it very well - the ending was always a foregone conclusion for me. It's been so fun and interesting to think about all the alternative ways I could have shaped things - but I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought without all the feedback.

The next chapter of Summoning the Incubus has been submitted now (yes I know, but I promise I'm still working on it!) so expect that to materialise in a few days or so.

Much love, Betty xxx

It was a beautiful love story, and your desccriptions of the sex scenes were among the best I've seen!

Being from Cumberland, ignoring political updates to counties, I still had to sidetrack into Google a few times for definitions and would agree that a couple of Scottish words might have got in but as you say many words cross boundaries and fairly universal, or are at least decipherable.

I loved the premise and it's execution. Not sure if the ending was realistic but this is fiction and it's well written throughout. A beautiful story. Well done.

Ms. Rage,

I NEVER read fantasy/romance stories, and almost hit the back arrow as soon as I realized yours was. I am so glad I did not.

It was a thoughtfully crafted story and though other might made different writing choices, it would be difficult to argue that yours were wrong. The end was a complete surprise to me. He queen’s choice unconventional, audacious choice seem very much in line her self-possessed character.

You obviously enjoyed the write.

Thank you.

A very romantic tale and I loved every bit of it.

A lovely romantic fairy tale, most enjoyable read.

I loved it!

I’m a romantic at heart so this story was wonderful to read. Though I do agree with ChasPHX that the alternative ending could have worked as well.

The only other complaint is that this could have been longer. Seriously! I wanted so much more. But, I guess that’s a good sign that your writing is appreciated.

Thank you again for your story.

This story is amazing. So glad this is part of the contest.

I think you have a wonderful touch. The sex was erotic AND romantic, which I find rare. The scene where he proposed without actually saying the words brought a tear. The metaphor of the arrow through the heart was obvious but I thought you treated it very well. I really liked the variation in sentence length and structure. It all seemed appropriate to the story and was well timed.

This is a "romance," so IMO the ending was foregone, not a twist as some have commented. That said, I did feel a tiny bit let down by the ending. You were doing such a great job with the impossible love that I didn't want the emotional intensity of that to be "spoiled" by a happy ending! I think you could do a tremendous job with a bittersweet ending. Sad, yet hopeful.

5 stars, favorite story, and good luck in the contest!

@Anon So I didn't knowingly use any Scots in writing this because I don't have any familiarity with it. What I think you might mean is some of the use of Cumbrian and Northumbrian words that are in here are probably the same/similar to Scots on account of the geography? ("nowt" and "bairn" come to mind as ones that I've heard a lot in modern Northern England and Scotland.)

In any case, I appreciate that many people don't like to see languages/dialects mixed up this way - but I did give fair warning! The only defence I can really give is that having lived in both England and Wales, this is in some ways the bastardised accent that I have myself just not as 'ye olden timey' and it's quite fun to imagine a world where that's the norm.

@PhotoMeister Great comment! So I did give this a little consideration when writing and decided that since Owain is probably about a decade or more older than Harold, (and a man who values practicality and humility) he would still perceive him as pretty childish and in fact probably gets his age a little wrong when estimating it as a result.

I've read some conflicting opinions on whether in fact the average lifespans of people in the middle ages would have been much shorter than ours - if we excluded the effects of the high infant mortality. (i.e. the idea that if you made it into young adulthood, you were likely to live into your old age) This made sense to me, but looks like may not be borne out by the data since all the wars, childbirth, witch burnings and other death penalties and plagues would have been pretty hazardous!

All this said, I do think taking a modern audience into account is important when writing (in my case very approximate) historical fiction that's intended to be erotic in nature. Like it's important to me that 13 year old Teegan be understood to the other characters as very defiantly a child and not 'on the cusp of womanhood' or what have you.

Our modern cultural ideas about age are very variable, but I think illustrating a character with a scepticism of 25 being old enough to rule a country (it's legally too young to be POTUS in modern times for example) helps to reenforce where I'm choosing to take the fictional liberties.

(See also that Seren is a Queen who hands power to her sister, who will hand it to her daughter. Lineage matters in this version of the world but it functions in a way that's less overtly concerned with patriarchy, even if there are still other oppressive aspects to the setting.)

Thank you for bearing with all of that - that's definitely a separate thing to what you were bringing up, but I realised that I wanted to talk about it!

Anyway, thanks to your comment I found a great article (by Sarah Woodbury if anyone wants to find it) that lists the lifespans of the whole Welsh royal family so if I revisit a similar setting I'll defiantly have it in mind.

Love, Betty x

Clever title!