Marian believes in heaven, but that is not why she asks him to say the words. It is just that she has waited so long to hear them.

And if she does not get to choose her death - if, indeed, she is going to die today, out here on the sand under the steaming sun - then she will at least choose the last words she hears and speaks, and she will make them the best ones she can imagine.

And if those words happen to ensure that she and Robin are married in the eyes of the Lord before they enter His kingdom, well - so much the better.

"What words?" he asks, his voice already dry and gravelly, and she wonders if it's the heat or the fear of death. In that moment, Marian feels neither.

"'I, Robin, take you, Marian,'" she prompts. She will not feel pain or thirst. She will focus on the warm pressure of his body; she will lean her head back against his shoulder and be grateful that she will die here beside him. Especially when they've both had so many opportunities to die alone.

"Now?"

"Now is a good time, I think." She smiles at Much. "We are in the company of the best witnesses England has to offer."

And Robin says the words, and though she knows, she knows that this moment will be fleeting, and that these might well be the last words they say to each other, and that in a few hours she might find that the body she leans against no longer contains the man she loves - though she knows all of this, Marian cannot help but be happy. His voice washes over her, familiar and beloved as the home she grew up in. When he stumbles she picks him up - "in sickness," she says, and he follows - and in a better world their lives would go on that way forever.

"Until death do us part," he says, and she thinks: Far longer than that, my love.

"Master of the bow, champion of the poor, and lord of my heart," she calls him, and Much cries, and she feels Robin's body shudder against hers. She has waited so long. Marian has imagined her marriage to this man since she was fourteen years old, and though this is not how she pictured it - in the chapel at Locksley, with flowers in her hair and her father looking on - the most important things are here. She and Robin are here. After everything, it is still the two of them, brought together across thousands of miles to marry and die on the sands of Jerusalem, and that is what matters. Marian will not feel pain or thirst, and at that moment her only regret is that he will not get to kiss his bride-

But there will be time enough, she knows. After all, Marian believes in heaven.

Though that is not why she asked him to say the words.