Freya Marske on her “prophetic vision” for romantasy Swordcrossed

Freya Marske on how her "prophetic vision" and "reliable sources" shaped her romantasy title, Swordcrossed.

By Tacye On Oct 20, 2024

Freya Marske is known for her The Last Binding trilogy. She’s back with a standalone romantasy — Swordcrossed. Following Mattinesh Jay who needs to hire an experienced swordsman to serve as best man for his arranged marriage, and con artist Luca Piere, the only swordsman Mattinesh can afford, Swordcrossed is charming and cute, and packed with wonderful characters that readers get to explore throughout the book.

To celebrate the release, we are honoured to have Freya here to chat about all things Swordcrossed.

Modern society views “best man” as the best friend of the groom. However, Luca is hired by Matt to be his “best man”, who is mainly there for the sword challenge. Is that really the origin of a best man?

According to the unimpeachable historical primary source that is A Listicle On Buzzfeed Or Maybe Some Similar Website, I Forget….yes.

It was one of those things that you read idly and it pings against a few other ideas in your mind and presto! a book starts to form. According to what I read, the ‘best man’ was meant to be the ‘best’ sword fighter among the groom’s friends, there to protect the wedding party from, I don’t know, armed bandits or determined amorous rivals wishing to make off with the bride?

The idea of hiring someone for this role — and of that being a legitimate profession — was the cornerstone of the book’s worldbuilding, as I wanted to create a society where there would be a solid religious/superstitious reason for sword-challenge to be a real threat to whether or not a wedding would go ahead.

Swordcrossed is a romantasy. How did you decide whether Swordcrossed should be a fantasy book with a dash of romance, a romance set in a fantasy world, or a full romantasy book?

Ah, you see, I awoke one night in 2017 from a prophetic dream in which it was revealed to me that ROMANTASY would be the buzzword in 2024, and so I could really get ahead of the market by —

No, the truth is that I wrote it out of the blissful self-indulgent desire to equally combine my two favourite genres, and then I ran into the brick wall of reality when the time came to pitch it to publishers. Because it wasn’t ‘fantasy with a dash of romance’ and it wasn’t straightforwardly ‘romance set in a fantasy world’ (the lack of explicit magic got in the way, there) and at the time, that made it a very difficult sell.

But I’m glad I didn’t try to rewrite it to make it either one or the other. I sighed, put it away in a drawer, and wrote some other books — and then the concept of romantasy came along and I had Swordcrossed ready to go!

We have LGBTQ+ rep, mental health representation, romance tropes but everything is balanced perfectly. Was it difficult to make everything work in one book?

Every book is a balancing act, and I think as authors we’re torn between wanting to make it look smooth & effortless and wanting some acknowledgment of how challenging getting that balance right can be. So this was a perfect compliment of a question, thank you, no notes.

I never set out to consciously insert things like ‘queer rep’ or ‘mental health rep’ — those simply arose out of who the characters are — but balancing the romance tropes with the mercantile intrigue storyline was an act of careful weaving (…very book-appropriate) which definitely stretched my authorial muscles and taught me some new skills. As someone who tends to write far, far too many words in the first draft, it helped my streamlining process to try and make sure as many scenes as possible served double purpose: a new clue or secret was revealed, and the characters shifted their relationship from point A to point B.

Of course, sometimes you just need to write a sexy scene in which there is zero intrigue but someone accidentally discovers they have an obedience kink while being given lessons in sword fighting. And that’s fun too.

Readers get to learn a lot about wool trade. Why did you pick wool trade as Matt’s family business and what was the research process like? What was something you learned during your research process that you didn’t manage to put in Swordcrossed?

I honestly can’t recall why I chose wool. Let’s put that one down to another prophetic vision, along with the fact that I am always heroically holding myself back from going into great detail about clothing when I write books, so I deeply enjoyed having a protagonist like Matti whose perspective meant he was always noticing and assessing fabric.

I had a lot of fun reading about the history of the wool trade in Europe, learning about how different woollen fabrics differ when it comes to fibres and weaves, and then watching a lot of YouTube videos of carding and dyeing and loom-weaving. A much longer and more tedious version of the novel probably exists where someone goes off on an extensive monologue about twill, and then there’s a fraught scene amongst some dye-vats with a tangent about historical sources of pigment for wool dyes. If I were Victor Hugo I’d be able to get away with things like that.

Finally, we love the side characters – we have some strong women there. Any chance of seeing more books and exploring other merchants set in the universe?

I have several other contracted books in the queue and so no immediate plans to write more with this world. But editing the book for publication has reinvigorated my love for it, and it’d be a pity not to get some further use out of the extensive worldbuilding documents currently lurking in my Scrivener file. And as you point out, Matti’s sister Maya and his betrothed Sofia are definitely deserving of their own stories — plus there’s a minor side character by the name of Dinah whose personality rather snuck up on me; I think she probably has a book in her, somewhere.

So keep on watching this space!