Robin continued tracking Marian's abductor through the lonely, desolate paths the man had taken, until the rainstorm ended his progress. The pounding, driving rain obliterated all signs her attacker inadvertently left.

"Now what?" Robin desperately wondered, then closed his eyes and pictured his beloved. "I will find you," he vowed.

He did not know that Will, urging Marian to leave Nottingham before Prince John's army destroyed it by fire, had told her, "Wherever you go...wherever you go, Robin will move Heaven and Earth to find you." Robin only knew he must get help, and where he needed to go to secure it.

Steering his horse eastward, he galloped through the rainstorm toward King Richard's army camp.

...

Gisbourne, tortured by Marian's rejection, stood watching as she raised herself to a sitting position on the floor of his cottage, where he had thrown her.

His aunt watched them both, her face blank and unfeeling.

Marian was the first to break the silence. "Is this how you treat me?" she asked. "Throw me around like a sack of turnips, with no regard for the safety of your unborn child? You are cruel, Guy of Gisbourne."

"It was you!" Guy lashed out, pointing his finger at her. "You forced me to do it!" His anger appeased by his physical victory over her, he turned sorry and defeated, asking, "Why must you always be so willful and resist me, when I want to love and care for you?"

"You don't love me," Marian said. "You never did."

"All I've ever done is love you!"

"How can you, when you don't know me?"

"I do know you! I want to know you even better, Marian, but you always shut me out!"

"Is it any wonder? If I truly let you in...if you knew the real me, Guy of Gisbourne, you would despise me."

"I wouldn't."

"You stabbed me when I showed you who I really am!"

"No! That snide, mocking creature who claimed to love Hood was not you!"

Marian looked at the pain in his eyes and was sorry. Rising slowly to her feet, she admitted, "I am sorry I was snide. I should not have mocked you. But that was me! How can you claim to love me, Guy, when you hate Robin? His dreams were my dreams...what he valued and treasured most, I treasure! He and I are alike, were alike, in ways too numerous to count. Someone once even called us 'birds of a feather,' and she was right."

"No," Guy insisted. "I will not believe it. You are kind and misguided, he is a...was a fiend, a nobody, a nothing!"

"He was my husband."

Even in his emotional state, Guy realized he needed to shift the discussion away from Hood before Marian began remembering any part of her life as Hood's wife, not just as his dying bride in Acre. "I am your husband now," his lie reminded her, "your husband who cares more deeply for you than you know."

"Yet you hurl me about, with no regret to harming me."

"You jabbed me with a pin!" he shouted, and then, tentatively asked, "Are you harmed?"

"No. I am tougher, apparently, than I look." She caught her breath as an image of Robin flashed through her consciousness...Robin proudly and cockily speaking those words about her to Queen Eleanor, then tossing her a wink with his irrepressible, irresistible grin.

"Robin," she whispered longingly.

But how could it be, Marian asked herself. She believed she had never met the queen mother, yet she knew the somewhat foggy, unclear image in her mind was none other than Eleanor of Aquitaine. Marian thought hard, but could remember nothing further.

Luckily, Guy had not heard her whisper Robin's name. Recovering his dignity, he told her, "I must go now, Marian. I leave you here with Ghislaine, to keep you company."

"To keep me prisoner, more accurately."

"No!" Doubting she would venture out into a rainstorm, not knowing where she was or where to go, in territory he had described as a "war zone," he told her, "I will not lock you in. You are free to go, if that is what you want."

"What I want is to go home, to Locksley."

"In time. First I must complete my mission, for the king."

"The king?"

Guy was pleased she was showing an interest at last in his doings. "It is dangerous," he told her truthfully. "There is a chance I may not return." His voice turned breathy, his mood passionate. "Marian, do not send me away without first kissing me goodbye."

Marian remembered Robin, disguised as a castle guard right under Gisbourne's nose, saying to her once Guy had gone, "Please don't send me away. We really should be spending more time together." And later, in the same conversation, after she had sadly told him it was too late for some, meaning of course for them, he had told her, "I never give up."

But she knew she had to give up now, though it broke her heart. Robin was dead, and Guy was her husband.

Reluctantly, thinking it her duty, she lifted her face to comply with Guy's request. Guy seized her and pulled her against him, kissing her the way she remembered when distracting him from seeing Robin with Carter one day in Nottingham, when she was part of Robin's gang.

Just as she had been before, she was unmoved by his kiss, wanting it to end. So, she believed, her marriage was passionate on his part but empty on hers. Guy had proven himself today to be a rough, taking lover, probably always the same, so different from the love she'd shared with Robin. Having tasted the sweetest of loves, how could she bear living as Guy's wife? She couldn't endure his marriage bed, she realized. If he returned from tonight's mission, she would claim her loss of memory as an excuse to put him off, and her condition. She remembered having abstained later in her pregnancies, being content with kisses and cuddling, feeling treasured and beautiful when she felt enormous, and ...!

What other pregnancies? Could she mean Robin's child she had planned to pass off as Guy's? She assumed her unborn baby must have died from Guy's stab wound, but perhaps it hadn't. She had somehow survived, after all. Guy said she had lost it, and the child she carried now was his. She must have miscarried later. That must be the pregnancy she remembered, but she couldn't picture Guy being so patient and loving with her. She definitely couldn't picture him making her laugh, the way she remembered...Guy, a man with no sense of humor. Only one man in all the world had made her feel that way, happy and beautiful and truly loved, but he was already dead.

Guy ended his kiss, gave her a smoldering look, then left her alone with the stranger. Marian wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and asked the woman in French, "Tell me, are we friends? There is so much I have forgotten. Your name is Ghislaine? How do you know Guy?"

"I am his Aunt Gisele," she answered, speaking the French used by the lower classes, not the elegant tongue Marian had been taught. "Ghislaine is my sister, Guy's and Isabella's mother. He tells me you are his wife. Congratulations. Knowing my nephew, you will not always have to live in such a God forsaken village. He'll find a way to rise again, the way he did when he sold Isabella. You know, you look a bit like her."

Marian, stunned by what she was hearing, could not help saying, " Sold her? That is...that is uncomfortable to hear."

"Uncomfortable that you look like his sister? Don't worry, there wasn't any incest."

Marian wasn't sure she had head correctly, but Gisele was undeterred by her embarrassment. "They hate each other," Gisele continued, "always did. Isabella was younger, you see, but smart as a whip. Cleverer than Guy, and nasty, both of them. Beautiful to look at, you understand, but vicious, worse even than their father, the English lord, and he was a brute. Take my advice, I wouldn't cross Guy if I were you. Do like my sister did, and run away with the first man who comes along, passing through the village."

Marian did not hesitate. All the woman said was horrible, but it told Marian Guy had not changed. "I want to escape," she said. "Can you help me?"

Gisele was surprised. "Me? No. Wait for a man to take you away. That's the only way you're going to get out of here."

Marian rolled her eyes. "You underestimate me, if you think I'd wait for some man," she said.