"Not at all," Marian told him. If Marian had had parents, she didn't remember them. There had been no mother who taught her to sew, and no father to look on her proudly. There had only been, as she grew into womanhood, three men snapping at her heels in open hunger among a court of people who didn't understand her.
"No one knew me until I found the Merry Men." Another turn and their swords clanged together. "Once they saw that I wasn't just some pretty noble girl playing at outlaw. I was the only woman they'd ever allowed among them." And how proud Marian had always been of that fact, how almost sinfully proud of it. She was Maid Marian, special and different and not like the other girls. While they had sewn and married and done whatever whim their father and then husband desired, Marian had slept rough in the trees and held up carriages and skillfully hunted with her bow.