One by one the kings of Braetan kneel before King Arthur under a banner of peace.

Hwyfar, eldest daughter of King Leodegraunce and famed libertine of Carelon, has returned to Avillion to find her father ruined by madness and a usurper poised to take the throne. Reluctantly she takes the mantle of Queen Regent to protect her kingdom, but she’ll need an army—which King Arthur pledges to send her, providing she marries one of his knights and surrenders the crown.

Arthur’s forces arrive under the command of Gawain of Orkney, who Hwyfar remembers as a brute; but she comes to realise he is not the man she thought he was, and finds herself irresistibly drawn to him. But Arthur has plans for her, and has commanded Gawain to keep well away—and in Arthur’s court, without the King’s blessing, love is treason.

Hwyfar and Gawain must navigate both a world of ancient forests and corrupt magic, and the political machinations of two courts, if they have any hope of escaping Arthur’s ever-tightening grasp.

This is the second in Barron’s Arthurian Legend inspired ‘Queens of Fate’ series, but – in focusing on different characters to the first novel – Queen of None – it works effectively as a standalone novel. The worldbuilding is eased by some familiar Arthurian references –  Lancelot-du-Lac, Gareth and Gawaine, Guinevere and Leodegraunce. However, Barron toys with the tropes much as Bernard Cornwell did in his Warlord trilogy such that the supposed good guys are not entirely as myth and legend have painted them.

Barron also takes the legend in a somewhat different direction to Cornwell with her focus on an Arthurian fringe of female characters.

Queen of None focused on Anna – sister to Arthur, widow of Lot and mother to Gawaine and Gareth, summoned from Orkney back to Carelon to serve her brother’s scheming intentions.

Queen of Fury follows Hwyfar, sister to Gweynevere, sent away from a long sojourn in Carelon back home to Avillion where her father King Leodegraunce is sick and his realm is in peril. Again, Arthur remains a shadowy presence for whom Hwyfar is a pawn in a game of strategic real-politik.

The narrative is split between two protagonists with (mostly) alternating chapters as Hwyfar shares the story with Gareth, Anna’s son and Arthur’s emissary to Avillion in their hour of need.

There is lots to like in this son of Lot and daughter of Leodegraunce. They are both eking past the prime of what have been colourful lives. Gawain the mighty knight and war lord, his creaky knee no longer fit to support him in the front line of battle. Hwyfar – once Arthur’s intended bride, but supplanted by her younger sister – and occupying herself in a quest to complete the Carelon equivalent of knightly Tinder – intimidating the menfolk as easily as she beds them.  Both of them are still in mourning for Gweynevere who – survived neither Arthur nor childbirth – for whom they felt an intense connection and equally intense loss. In Barron’s hands, Arthur feels more like a dark ages version of King Henry VIII than an icon of chivalry, with Hwyfar cast as ‘the other Boleyn Girl.’

Barron eschews giving the reader a map of her world, not least I guess because Avillion (Avalon?!) was always a hidden land whose air of mystery might be dispelled by something so mundane as being fixed in cartography. Also, there is a sense through the plot of distances as being very mutable, either by magic or by ordinary travel. With Avillion under threat of imminent invasion from Hwyfar’s nearby cousin there is still time to send word and receive assistance from Arthur’s court. Barron creates some atmospheric locations, towering castles, wooded groves, and lofty cliffs though the connections between them are somewhat foggy.

Avillion is a world of magic and this perhaps, is where a reading of Queen of None might help understand something more of the interlocking systems of different magics that Barron uses and from which Hwyfar has been cruelly sundered.  But Barron’s immersive approach to worldbuilding sweeps the reader along through mists of magic and geography, eager to find out how the fates (and bodies!) of her two protagonists may become entangled.

While the story centres on a heterosexual couple (and some heterosexual coupling), the protagonists’ pasts espouse wider experiences – both mourning lost same sex lovers

For Hwyfar there was Nimue,

“Upon waking, the chasm of loneliness inside of me opened up again, and I remembered Nimue’s face from my dreams: her deep eyes, her curving lips, the traces of dark hair at her brow and temples, the smell of her musk, and the way she kissed me as if she would drink me dry.”

And for Gawain it had been Drian,

“Lovers had come and gone, but few had lived long enough or connected deeply enough to leave a lasting impression, save Drian, and he had been a love on the field, fleeting and fast-then dead.”

Barron’s prose, delivering both protagonists’ stories in first person, gives the reader a strong sense of their characters with Hwyfar’s snarky humour and Gawain’s ponderous sense of duty.

Hywfar, on being attired for a first official meeting in Avillion

“Dressed in velvet from neck to ankle…I looked like a giant black candlestick.”

Gawain discussing parley arrangements with Sir Palomydes.

“We received confirmation Prince Ryence will meet under the code. Gareth will stay here, but Ryence will need to see someone-“

“If you say impressive, I will expire here and now.”

“Someone close to Arthur.” I paused, running over his last words. ”And I am impressive.”

“You are tall. And wide. That is not the same thing.”

The plot, wreathed in tendrils of misty and mystic magic, builds on the simple frame of ‘kingdom under threat seeks external aid.’ There are mysteries surrounding Leodegraunce’s illness, the long-ago disappearance of Hwyfar’s mother, a strange suit of armour tailored for Hwyfar, the varied nature of the magic indigenous to the different lands of Barron’s Bretayn, the curse of an invulnerable Green Knight, and a twisting trail of betrayal that means almost no-one is entirely as they seem.

The reader is sustained through that weave of complexity by the relationship between the central characters – romance feels too frilly a term for the deep earthy passion in which they become embroiled. Theirs is a case of lust – rather than ‘love’ – at first sight, as seen in Hwyfar’s reaction at their first meeting

When Gawain stood again, our eyes met a second time. For a brief, breath-taking moment, I saw myself entwined with the eldest prince of Orkney, our bodies flushed with arousal, my lips trembling like some newly deflowered maiden.

Or in Gawain’s bawdy preoccupations in a discussion about taking care in the unfamiliar terrain.

“Understood,” I said, already curious but cautious. Withiel and Avillion were full of crevasses I had no intention of delving…well, at least not those made of stone.

As various panels at conferences have discussed, writing sex into a book is fraught with difficulty – after all, no-one wants to win the Literary Review’s ‘bad sex in fiction award’. Barron’s writing manages to feel gritty and true and the touches of lewdness can be light and subtle, such as when they embark on another intimate embrace.

“I gave him no resistance, feeling him smile against my cheek, proud he had prepared me with naught but words.”

Barron’s expression of their affection through desperate physical passion is neither gratuitous nor extraneous to the story. As Hwyfar observes

I had never experienced a connection like this. Such comfort. Such Ease. It was more of a continuation of friendship, somehow, rather than the pinnacle of tension. I had joined with more skillful lovers, those who had studied the practice and made it an art, but our lovemaking had been beyond skill. It was addictive, painfully sweet and, I suppose, true.

It is the truth in the lovers’ relationship which makes their travails all the more compelling as we – and they – follow Barron’s tangled plot.

I will confess a slight frustration with military details – those who thirst for details of siege mechanics, battle tactics, or even campaign strategy will be disappointed. Aside from a reference to numerical disadvantage, surprise attacks and dire straits, the large scale warfare feels a bit timey-wimey-army-warmy. However, at the level of the individual combat, particularly with the massive Green Knight in play, things are certainly more visceral and engagingly threatening.

There are as ever moments that caught my eye for the way personal contemporary political resonance – whether or not Barron intended them that way.

“We had fallen for his deceit. In an age of chivalry, the churl is a mastermind.”

And

“I was blinded by his kindness, his understanding of me. Even kindness can be a tool of the wicked.”

But overall this is a compelling tale that takes one Arthurian legend – that of Gawain and the Green Knight – as inspiration for a far fuller and richer story of two deeply textured and entwined characters.

Queen of Fury is due for release 3rd December. You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org