Thank you so much; this is fantastic feedback! (And sorry it took me forever to get back to you! I lose at responding to comments in a timely manner, FOR REAL.)

And the summing-up you give Marian is exactly right, imo. She's hurting him in the service of a greater good, in her estimation; shes fully as ruthless, in her way, as he is in his.

I love that you liked that, because I see her character so frequently bashed, along the lines of "She's so mean to Guy! How can she do this to him?" But a large part of the reason I find this relationship so compelling is that she has to. It's not as though she's using her feminine wiles on him for kicks; this is a woman who does what she has to do for her cause, with this incredibly graceful ruthlessness -- she puts it before her own happiness just as much as anyone else's. Marian gets the job done, before anything else. She can't afford to stop and think about what she's doing to this man who is on the opposite side of the war she's been waging for years and years.

And then on the rare occasion that she does, well, then I get the chance to write angsty introspective fanfic. :D A fantastic deal altogether, I say!

Thanks again for the comment!