“…sed to fight” is OK for colloquialism but not for a narrative in a book, and I don’t think much of “a lot” either.
“EITHER king or queen” is singular.
“king or queen” can be plural, but it sounds clunky.
“each other” is plural. If you plan to end with a plural, you’d better start with one.
I’d probably use, “There was neither king nor queen to reconcile.”
FYI, the actual rule is that, when a sentence contains multiple subjects separated by “or,” the verb agrees in number with the closest subject. With “and”, the verb agrees in number with the all the subjects combined.
Out of curiosity, on what grounds do you claim this is the actual rule?
I think that part was just the OP giving the back story, not an extract from the book.
Has everyone forgotten about the concept of the royal we? It used to the norm for the king or queen to be referred to in the plural.
Only when speaking in the first person. Nobody referred to the monarch as “they”.
It was also used in the second person, as in saying “you” to the king, when “thee” or “thou” would have been used for anyone else. The whole thing about Quakers and “thee” and “thou” started when when “you” was the plural form of “thee”.
From here:
Colophon is correct: I was feeling entirely free to be loose and colloquial and informal and sloppy when jawbonin’ with y’uns, something not to be done in proper literary narration.
Except that now you have king, queen **and **reconciliation, so it would have to be “There were no…”
Nope. “Was.” Again.
That is, I think the OP should have used “was” (and it was fine like tha) and I’m with Colophon over SCAdian on Colophon’s rewrite.