III.6 Do You Love Me?

A Clue: No


A single question is asked over and over again in this story. Aloud by Prince Cain but by others as well, each time more desperately. They should all know better, Vaisey more than the rest of you. They're his words, after all.

A clue: this is not a love story. Tell me you would rather have a woman, Gisborne, than all this.

But that's why this next set of stories is so hard to tell, because we've been trained to see your adventures as love stories. We've enjoyed them. And even when they were convoluted and terrible, they were love stories. Conflicting love stories that went to war within every heart and fought over every soul. And they burned, but they were good. What has replaced them is the cold, flat legends of Tuck and the petty personal vendettas of Kate, and they ring so hollow after the glories of the Romps of the Merry Men and the fantastic triangles of Lady Marian. But she is dead, as Davita before her. We chose Richard and England. This is not a love story.

This is the story of how Hell came to Nottingham. This is the story of how the Gatekeeper, who was so good at letting out the forces of Evil in maniacal little bursts, was removed from his post. The Prince of Lies sends his minions in the dead of night to awaken the Devil's Accolite and coo about love as everyone knows to do with Guy of Gisborne, who wears his strings out where everyone can see them. Yet they still get him wrong, in the end. The Prince of Lies speaks of love Gisborne has always wanted and power he needs to protect his sister, whom once he failed so terribly. If only he will kill Sheriff Vaisey.

We never talk about Vaisey anymore. In a way, we have never really needed to, as talking about you is talking about him in reverse. But that's just what we should be watching: you and he have been perfectly balanced in this interminable game – back when this was a love story and you could maintain any kind of balance. Before Davita fell, then Marian. Before we chose Richard. Before Tuck took you under his wing and turned you into a Myth just when the Sheriff's power over the Hearts and Minds of the nobility of England was stripped away in shame and the great Pact of Nottingham for which so much love was sacrificed became only so much useless paper. Your ascent is balanced by his inevitable descent. And nothing scares me more than Vaisey, alone and wild and rampagingly helpless in the castle – not to mention browbeating merchants then ranging out to pay for cows and goats in the markeplace or all but begging Gisborne to stick with him. He is so alone and he is so small and suddenly he looks so very old, just as you are growing larger and greater and more connected and more immortal every day. Until there's so very little left that's human. You could kill him now. The sight of Vaisey alone and vulnerable frightens me because desperate men do terrible things that even the most sociopathic schemers would not imagine, because the Conduit of Evil for England breaking down means that it will come from everywhere at once, because he is still your Dark Mirror. And since you never show us your inner demons, we must see them through Vaisey.

You came to Locksley to collect the men you once rescued from a war in Ireland and asked them to fight the war of England. And your elegant marriage of Locksley and England – you know us, and we fight for King Richard – should have been enough. Instead the secret of the love story was covered with Tuck, all holy imperative as prophets always are – we must, we must thwart Prince John – and Kate's down-to-earth rationalizations – he's a pretender, this is not treason, help us.

And this story does try to be a love story, that's what makes it so hard. Kate fell, having to watch the men she cajoled to this fight falling around her, a penance for bringing them here. She stares around, horrified that no one sees, because the idea of dying alone with no one to notice is heartbreaking now that she's traded family for the company of legends. The men of Robin Hood lore in which she is not a famous name, because her stories are always so small. A knife in her side, like Marian who died in the Holy Land. And Tuck looks, for a moment, just as flummoxed as Djaq did then. There is another physician onhand (because the Prince of Lies used a decoy) to "will the blood back into her." And that must have been hard to watch, Robin, because the comparison is as inescapable as the thought that if this man had been in Acre…well, it's no wonder you needed a Rebound.

Hell of a choice. The Prince of Lies thought so too, because Ophelia twisted, like Proteus, into whatever shape he'd prefer. Offered to do so openly, and showed us all that she is a shape-shifter of surpassing skill and shocking instability. She knew how to collect a new protector – even distract him from his Caligula games with Guy and Vaisey – because this is not really a love story. It is the story of how well Proteus can play everyone: helping the villagers with the burning Church, giving money to the cheeky thief who smiled at her suggestively in your desperate need to escape the retelling of Marian's tale, saying that the Prince of Lies begged her defiance, crying "King John!" in triumph to that very man, offering her own name up for his pleasure. She changes so fast no man can hold her, so no man will ever catch her again. It would take a legend to stay with her now. Her life has never been a love story, the first thing she ever told you.

That's why she believes it would save her. That's why she believes love makes things easier and more beautiful, thinks that it doesn't burn the way Hell does. She should ask you, you could tell her. Little John could tell her. Her brother could. But she has never met Marian, so she can believe that this is the story of a man like Robin Hood, the Legend over all of England: that he caught Proteus and stood with her at the Crossroads at Midnight, held her through all of her lightning fast changes, loving her and protecting her as she burned and froze and pierced and melted in his arms until the Break of Dawn, when she was reborn like Eurydice into the Light of a new day. A light she has not seen for seventeen years.

But you were not equipped to save her. You were too broken yourself. You started well, of course. While the Prince of Lies could not even see the cognitive dissonance between asking people to love him then gleefully burning down their church, you listened to her plan and put it into action. But all you ever claimed to share with her was hatred. And the camp. She obligingly took the new shape you offered, like the part you gave to Allen once. But he was only a simple conman. She is a shape-shifter, there is only so long she can stay one shape. Even one so beautiful.

So your parallels between those two have to end at this: Isabella can get you into the Castle and Allen can get you out. Should you have asked why Isabella can throw open the gates of Hell which Allen knows so well how to escape? Did you notice how quickly Kate who half-died threw her health even further into the ring, placed herself as the victim of the King's Evil, the Citizen of Locksley the false King of England cannot heal. Will Scarlett would have thought of the plan himself, but Kate Potter is not equipped to extinguish the fury in her heart by making something beautiful in the Forest. So she must fight with you and sacrifice to cut that part of her heart away. But her story, her small tale, "He burned down our church," is such a small thing to make her embarrass a future king, but it's also the best reason for doing it. Because Prince John the Tyrant is a collection of tiny stories that must have their comeuppance in one of Tuck's humiliating Legends, even if all either version offers is a shared hate.

So while this Farce was acted out, your gang stole the bribes the Prince of Lies gave to the nobles of the land to win their loyalty – hoping that this would cancel the Faustian deals to which they had agreed. And as the Prince of Lies called on the Might of God to recognize his Divine Right, the Devil's Accolite attacked Hell's Gatekeeper, who always liked him, who jokes as he dodges his apprentice's sword. Who tries to explain that this is just Caligula's mad game (and who wants to die over that? Almost as bad as over a complete non-entity), but Guy of Gisborne just rolls his eyes and swings his sword and explains succinctly that what he has done in Hell has never been about Prince John or Sheriff Vaisey. It was always about Marian. Now Vaisey cannot even help him protect Isabella, whom he loves much less than Marian and Allen. That is the only thing that ever stood between the Sheriff of Nottingham and Guy of Gisborne's blade.

But what Vaisey said when Guy dangled him off the Battlements on which you love so to appear may be just as true. Especially since he lost Davita, perhaps Vaisey always loved Guy as a son. He certainly would have been an awful father, but like Rufus he tried to make him strong and able to survive the dark world he saw, and he stroked his hair to wake him when he had to tell him that everything he loved had abandoned him. And when the dream of love Guy had once twisted into the waking nightmare of Vaisey, Sir Guy chose him over Marian in the Holy Land.

But this is not a love story. So Guy of Gisborne killed his Dark Father, the man who raised him instead of the wonderful soldier who returned broken from the wars. And Vaisey, who always speaks truer than the rest of us, whispered in parting a warning to his son – in Hell, nothing is as it seems.

The Dark Parables of the Sheriff and the Ovidian Legends of Isabella are no more comforting replacement than Tuck's Necessary Myths or Kate's Comfortingly Small Stories. This tale is no replacement for a love story. Nothing makes us feel this as much as the only hand Sheriff Vaisey has outstretched for love from anyone but Davita is swatted away impatiently by the outbreak of Hell.

But their victory is not complete. Because in the same wild story in which your heart twitched in its chest, Vaisey's finger did the same on the cart that came to take him away. A man denied his fledgling attempt at love becomes a Shadow that falls over the land, waiting to strike. Harder to kill every day.