The Queen's Strike BackA story by Melisa WaruiI wrote this story because I wanted a queen who doesn't wait to be rescued. We see plenty of crowned women in fiction who are beautiful and noble and then left standing in the corner while the men sort out the war. Amara is not that kind of queen. She is pretty, yes, and she is kind, but the thing I love most about her is that when she is knocked down, she gets up angry and she gets up smart.The story is set in the present day, in a small, wealthy kingdom called Lindoria. There are airports and television broadcasts, phones that lose their signal at the worst moment, and press offices that will happily spin a lie. It is a modern world, but the old things still matter in it: loyalty, honour, and the question of who you can trust when everything is falling apart.Amara Valeska is a young widow. Four years ago her husband, King Aldric, died suddenly of a heart condition no one knew he had, and she took the crown while she was still grieving. She learned to rule the hard way, in long meetings, with ministers who thought she would fail. She didn't. By the time the story opens she has built a good reputation and is flying home from Geneva with a treaty that will bring clean water to the poorest villages in the north.She lands and finds that someone has taken her kingdom while she was in the air.That someone is Lucian Voss, the Chancellor, her late husband's uncle. He held her hand at the funeral and told her she was not alone, and the whole time he was planning this. He goes on national television, in a gentle voice full of fake concern, and announces that the Queen has "collapsed from grief" and must be relieved of her duties for her own good. He names himself Regent. He doesn't have to shoot her or lock her in a tower. He only has to make everyone believe she is too fragile to rule. I thought that was a very modern kind of villainy, and a very believable one.Amara would have been taken that first night if not for Rafe Calder, the head of her royal protection. Rafe has guarded her since she was a princess, and he is the kind of man who notices what other people miss. He saw the wrong uniforms on the tarmac, the empty welcome, the men with no insignia. He gets her, her secretary Tessa, and the old pilot Okafor out through a drainage culvert and into his own beaten-up car, and takes them to a safe house that no one else knows exists.Rafe is the heart of the "modern loyalty" in the story. He is not the type who bows and says "yes, Majesty." His loyalty is quiet and stubborn and sometimes irritating, and it asks a lot of him. He told her months ago that Voss was dangerous. She didn't listen, because she wanted to believe in family. He doesn't throw that back at her when it all goes wrong. He tells her, very plainly, that Voss stole the kingdom and she did not hand it over, and that she must remember the difference.Over the first part of the story, the fall, we follow Amara through the worst days of her life. She is hiding in a small house by the sea, wearing borrowed clothes, watching the news call her sick and unstable. Her friends in the government go silent. People she trusted turn out to have been bought or frightened. She doesn't take it well at first. She is angry and hurt and ashamed, and I wanted to show that honestly, because a heroine who never cracks isn't believable. But grief and shame are not where she stays. By the end of this part she has made a decision. She is not going to run for long. She is going to take her crown back.Part two is the hidden queen. Here Amara lives under borrowed names and learns what it is like to be an ordinary woman in her own country. She goes into markets and listens to what people whisper about her. She finds out that many of them do not believe Voss's story, but they are afraid to say so. She finds out how much the northern villages were counting on her treaty, and how quickly Voss is undoing it. Tessa turns out to be brilliant with codes and messages and begins to rebuild a secret network of people still loyal to the Queen. Old friends come back, slowly and carefully, one at a time.This is also where the love story starts to grow, and I wanted it to be sweet and slow. Amara and Rafe have been close for years, but there was always a wall between them: her crown, his duty, her grief for Aldric. Now the wall is gone, because she is no longer a queen on a throne and he is no longer a guard on a rota. They are two people hiding in a small house, sharing bad coffee at dawn, and learning how it feels to be seen without any titles on. She finds a letter her husband left behind, one that tells her to live and to be loved again, and it frees her in a way she did not expect. There is an almost-kiss that gets interrupted, a night when they cannot stop talking, and a point where Rafe finally admits how long he has felt the way he does. It is a love between adults, with real heat in it, but at the centre it is tender.
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