Evermore

"Have I not spilled enough at this tourney?" he quipped.

"I need it for the database. It'll only take a minute, and it'll help me calm down." She smiled. "You aren't afraid of needles, are you?"

"You must make haste," he told her as he followed her inside. "Scarlet says we must reach the highway before morning rush hour. He becomes very irate if we do not."

"Men—always trying to beat the gridlock. That's what creates it, you know." She took out a syringe and gestured toward an empty chair. "I meant to ask you something earlier. When you got to Bannockburn, how did you know that Jayr was Marian's daughter? Will told me she doesn't look anything like her mother."

"She wore Marian's ring on a chain around her neck," he said, the amusement fading from his expression. "I left it with the child when I took her to the south of England."

"It's a plain gold ring," Alex pointed out.

"Engraved with the words 'Joy always, your Maryan,'" he replied evenly. "I checked."

"Maryan with a y?"

"'Twas the old way she wrote it." Robin shrugged. "Are we finished now?"

"Scarlet will wait. Let me take one more look at that neck." Alex pushed up his chin and released the first three buttons of his shirt. The ligature wounds left by the copper cable had closed but had not vanished; a thin, raw-looking scar encircled his throat.

"Pretty, isn't it?" he asked the light fixture.

"I've seen better," she told him as she palpated the healing tissues. "Korvel, Richard's seneschal, has a much more macho ring around the collar. He told me he'd been hanged for a couple of weeks."

He grimaced. "I believe I will be satisfied with my scars as they are."

"Good plan." She tilted his head to one side to check beneath his ears. "Yours will eventually harden and turn green as the copper deposits in your skin oxidize, but they shouldn't be too noticeable. Why would Marian have a ring engraved to herself?"

"Perhaps she meant to give it as a parting gift to someone, and never had the chance." He plucked the penlight out of her pocket and played with it. "So where do you and Michael travel next? Chicago, or New Orleans?"

"I think we have to go to Europe for some big seigneur to-do. Should be nonstop laughs." She sighed and patted his chest, then frowned as she felt a depression in the pectoral muscle. "What's this? Someone get you here, too?"

"No." He reached as if to stop her from unfastening more buttons, and then let his hand drop to his thigh. "'Tis nothing, Alexandra. An old scratch."

"A scratch, huh?" She pulled his shirt aside and inspected the faint depression below his left clavicle. "More like a missing chunk of manly chest. Who did this to you?"

"A fool."

"Before you grew fangs, or after?"

"After."

Alex's fingers told her that the unnamed fool had gouged out a plum-size section of skin and most of the underlying tissue, yet there was no evidence of any sort of penetrating wound.

Locksley scowled down at her fingers. "Must you poke like that?"

"Considering that the only weapon that could have caused this wound would have had to been made of copper, and this is right over your heart, yeah, I do." Alex stepped back and tilted her head as she studied his chest. "You know, if I were going to stab you in the chest, I wouldn't do it sideways."

The side of his mouth curled. "Fortunately for me, few assassins have your skill with a blade." He stood and went to work on the buttons.

Alex covered his hand with hers and made him trace the outline of the depression. "Look how it's shaped. Like a heart with a dent in the side. Whaddaya know? Now where have I seen that before?"

"It matters not, I assure you. Now I must be off." With his usual gallantry, he turned her hand over and raised it to his lips. "It has been a delight, my lady."

"Port-wine birthmarks are hereditary," she said bluntly, pulling her hand away before he could kiss it. "Passed from parent to child. They commonly show up in the same area on the body."

"As you say." He walked toward the door.

She beat him to it and braced her arm across the threshold. "And without laser treatments, the only way to get rid of them is by skin graft or excision." She saw his eyes darken. "We already know the Iceman doesn't have one. That's why he left out the part about raping Marian when he wrote up his statement. He didn't do that to her, and he tore open his shirt and flashed Jayr to prove it. No birthmark, no rape."

His lips turned white. "Marian had such a mark. She passed it to Jayr."

"Unless you saw Marian naked to the waist down," she countered, "how would you know that?" She waited, but he said nothing. "You didn't recognize Jayr by the ring she wore, and you didn't turn her from human to Kyn just because she was Marian's daughter. You knew the minute you saw that birthmark whose daughter she was." When Locksley didn't reply, she added, "Fine. But I am right about Guy, aren't I? He told the truth when he said that he never touched Marian, didn't he?"

"What a man covets drives him to do desperate things." Locksley unsheathed his dagger and made it dance across his fingers. "Byrne, Nottingham, even poor Skald, all victims of their secret desires. Wouldn't you agree, Alex?"

"Robin."

"I cannot give you the answers you seek." The blade began to spin faster. "I will wager that if the parent who shares Jayr's birthmark ever had discovered her existence, he would never have claimed her as daughter."

"And why the hell not?"

"Marian went mad, but she remained a maiden. At least she did, it was said, until a fool in love tried to bring her back to sanity." His eyes lost their focus as his vision turned inward. "I cannot defend him, but perhaps he thought that by showing her all of the ways that men and woman love, she would come back to him."

Alex swore under her breath.

"Instead, his act of love only made her retreat into a different sort of madness. A silent stillness so profound that she seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open. The sort of madness from which one never awakes." Robin closed his eyes, took in a quick breath, and then looked at her. "Guisbourne did not kill Marian. Neither did the child. The fool who forced his love upon her did."

She groped for something to say. "So he made up for what he did to Marian by looking out for her kid."

"His child. Marian never wished to be a mother, only a nun." Locksley spun the blade so fast that air whistled around the metal. "If the fool did do as you say, I think he must have done so in secret."

"Secrets catch up with you, if you haven't noticed." Alex shook her head. "I have a feeling this one will come back and bite that fool in the ass someday."

The blade snapped into his fist. "Lucky, then, that we will never know who he was." The charm returned in full force as he slid the dagger back into its sheath. He took her hand and kissed the back of it. "Until we meet again, my lady."

"Robin, you have to tell Jayr."

"Tell Jayr what, Alexandra?" he asked as he straightened. "That her father was an unfeeling, selfish bastard so obsessed with having the one woman he had ever loved that killed her? She already knows that." He ducked under her arm, going out into the corridor, but stopped and turned to give her one last, bleak look. "By God, so does he."