Chapter 6:

Fireside Chats

The water was cold, thick, and murky. Tawny shuddered to think what was in it and prayed that there were no Wonderland versions of sea serpents or squid monsters to suck her under.

The moat wasn't a moat, per se. It was more like a tributary stream that had been redirected to circle around the castle and then had been reconnected to the mother river. She was swimming/floating-like-jetsam towards that junction. Killian was on the other side, hopefully waiting in his commandeered fishing boat.

As soon as she neared it, she took a deep breath and sunk below visual range of the checkpoint guards and swam for all she was worth for the net, which was, of course, there for people just like her.

But none of them had lovers, who had acquired on a previous adventure, a magical knife that can cut through anything. Using said knife, she cut herself a hole in the netting to slip through, and then she returned to her swimming/floating-like-jetsam thing, scanning for a boat with a white X and circle painted on its side.

Just when her muscles were beginning to go numb from the cold, she spotted the very crudely painted Jolly Roger on a dingy-like vessel twenty feet away. She swam for it, surfacing on the opposite side, out of view of the guardhouse.

Grabbing the side of the boat, she greeted the scruffy-looking, but still absurdly handsome 'fisherman' with a low, flirtatious, "Hello, sailor. Lookin' to have a good time?"

Killian's blue eyes brightened, either at her quip or at the sight of her drowned-rat self, and a slow smile spread across his face, as he rejoined, "Hello, siren. Only if you care to join me upon my vessel."

"I'll join you, but the 'upon your vessel' will have to wait," she replied with a tired smile, while extending her hand to him to be helped into the boat.

He hauled her in and then wrapped a blanket around her chilled and shivering form, asking, "Did you get it?"

"The bottle? Yes, but I didn't make the Wishes."

Killian did a double-take, asking incredulously, "You didn't?"

"No, your three days won't be happening any time soon."

As soon as she said that she wanted to cry. She was tired of playing avenging angel. She wished that she had more of her I-don't-give-a-damn-Gwen side in her than her crusading Tanwen, at least then she could just walk away.

"I shall collect with interest then," he replied suggestively, his voice husky with teasing promise, but then his smirk faded and he asked concernedly, "If you didn't make the Wishes, how are the others…?"

Tawny sighed, "I'm counting on their resourcefulness." She glanced away, trying to hide and stuff down all of her raging tumultuous emotions – guilt, anxiety, anger, grief. Once she felt centered, she made her next move.

"I need you to collect them instead of Lancelot."

Nearly faltering in his rowing, Killian asked, "Why?"

"Because I need to tell him that the Black Queen is not Guinevere, that Guinevere is dead."

"How –?"

"I'll explain when everyone is together," she replied, hoping that these would be one of those times that he was uncannily perceptive and understand her needs.

It wasn't.

Jaw-clenching, knuckles whitening on the oars, nostrils flaring, he stiffly inquired, "But you'll be explaining this to the knight? Alone?"

She shot him an annoyed look, also noticing that his irate concern was affecting his rowing – his strokes were still smooth, just less languid. She almost asked him what had crawled up his fine arse, but decided to answer his question instead.

"Because," she replied tersely, "would you want to be told in front of strangers and people who have strong disliking of you that the love of your life was killed? Or would you want a few minutes in private after that bombshell is dropped?"

After a moment of glowering, he grudgingly conceded, "Point taken, lass."

They rowed in silence until they could ditch the boat behind a conveniently thick copse of bushes and trees, and then they made their way to the hollowed out log where Lancelot was waiting.

Tawny had no idea how she was going to drop that bombshell. She spent that whole time trying to figure it out, and still came up with nothing by the time they were in hailing distance.

Killian called out, "There's been a change in plans, mate! The lass will explain while I get the others," and then with a good-luck squeeze to the shoulder, he left her to it, as requested.

Lancelot looked at her expectantly as she fumbled for words, prodding her with a deep rumbled, "Yes, milady?"

"Our fair queen is dead."

~0~

She told him everything.

She told him of the mirrored rooms, the mandolin, the cabinet of heads, of the book, and of her use of it, and she showed him the recording she made of that fateful 'Crimsominal' day.

The first scene showed a couple making camp on the side of the road that led from the Fringes to the Heartlands. The dark-haired man wore black armor. The blond woman wore an amber necklace.

The second scene had the woman with golden curls taking a private moment in some dark shrubbery, being snuck up on by a hooded figure. The next, tied to a tree and gagged, and then beheaded, which was followed by a brunette head being placed into a bag and the golden one being sealed onto its new home, sealed by the choker.

This was followed by Imposter Guinevere walking up to the Black Knight, kissing him and then stabbing him in the neck, and then finally chopping off his head.

The last scene was of the 'Black Widow' carrying the knight's head into the Exiles' midst and calling for vengeance.

It was a good thing she was holding on to the phone, or else the Leviathan would have crushed it in his ginormous hands. As it was, he had to take a momentary respite and attack a tree or two.

To give him some space, she went off and changed out of her wet clothes, rekindled the camp fire to dry them out and warm herself up, and deleted the blurry recordings of the Oraculum.

It was at this point that the others arrived, so she let Will out of his bottle.

"What the hell, Gwen?!" He blasted as soon as he solidified.

She hastily stood up to face the charging bull that was Will, but before she could formulate a response to his outraged query, he was on to his next one.

"Do you hate her so much for what she did to her stepsister all those years ago that you are going to leave her, condemn her to be the next Marie Antoinette? Because I don't think Ash would thank you for it."

Normally, she would have gone toe-to-toe with him, poked him in the chest as she made each point, and made some several scathing retorts, as she did not take crap from anybody and that was their usual M.O. of foreplay. However, for several reasons – she was with Killian, they were talking about the non-rescue of his love, and she was just plain too exhausted for this shit – she did not do her 'normal' thing. She instead collapsed back down on her log and sighed tiredly.

It was a sign of submission, rolling over and exposing her vulnerable underbelly, as it were, and as a result, the fight went out of everyone, and they sat down around the fire as well.

When everyone was seated (except for Killian who leaned against a tree just milliseconds away from an en garde stance), she finally began her defense, "No, I bloody well don't hate her. I don't want her to lose her head either. Look, I'm sorry that you had to leave her there. But I had my reasons."

"Which were?" Alice gently prodded.

And so she caught them up with what she told Lancelot. Towards the end of her explanation, the knight silently joined them, and to her amazement and pleasure, Killian offered him his flask. He accepted and took a sip, (much smaller than she would have had she been in his shoes), and then returned it.

At the end of Part One of her explanation, Alice inquired, "Who is this Langwidere woman?"

Drawing upon what she had read of Oz canon literature during her long recuperation, Tawny replied, "She is the deposed queen regent of a country called Ev." To Will, she added with significance, "It neighbors Oz."

He scowled and muttered something along the lines of 'Of course it does', before more clearly replying, "I'm sorry for your loss, for your sister. But that still does not explain why you didn't make your Wishes. Why you still haven't made your Wishes."

"The Oraculum showed you not just the past but the future as well, didn't it?" Cyrus sagely observed.

"Yes," she admitted with a grimace. "And I refuse to choose which path to follow all by myself."

To Will, she stated, "Behind Door #1 is the path in which I make my Wish, set Ana free, and the two of you leave Wonderland immediately. I do not know what happens to the two of you after that because the book is only concerned with Wonderland."

"I don't really care. Anywhere but here is sounds bloody good to me," he quipped.

Ignoring his comment, she continued, "However, the down side is this," and she passed Killian's phone over to the knave.

He accepted it with an impatient but quizzical expression and hit play. Alice and Cyrus looked over his shoulder in marveled amazement at the tiny moving picture that quickly morphed into horror as they began to comprehend the video's contents.

Tawny could picture it in all its grisly detail. The golden-haired woman in black with the distinctive choker and crown making a speech to a crowd of increasingly angry commoners depicted in drab brown ink. The faceless Black Clubs ominously closing the gates. The crowd demanding justice, demanding blood. The Queen giving it to them, ordering her Clubs to shove the crying, pleading nobles in red into the mob below, like a pirate throwing captives to frenzied sharks.

For Killian who had raised his eyebrows questioningly at her and Lancelot who had finally rejoined them, she explained, "On the Ides of Ianus, there will be a bloodbath. Langwidere will incite the commoners into a mob riot against the Red nobles, I suppose, for standing by and allowing the Red Queen to neglect them."

Killian's eyes gleamed with sudden understanding, but he kept silent.

Will passed the phone back to her and asked resignedly, "What's behind Door #2?"

Without taking her eyes off of him, she asserted boldly, "I make my Wish, Ana and you stay long enough for her to either learn of what will happen or for it to come to pass, and she will either seek to stop it or to avenge it. The Red Queen seems to have grown quite the conscience since your return to Wonderland. But, the consequences of staying are that you both die in whatever attempts you make or while on the run."

"Frak," he cursed, and then rubbing his face, he disgruntledly asked, "Three? There's always three…And please, let it be the charmer."

She gave a little smile, hoping it looked reassuring but not really feeling it. "Option three does have the greatest chance for saving the damsel-in-distress, stopping a bloodbath, and avenging the death of my sister and Arthur."

Before she could explain how this could all be accomplished, Lancelot let out a bark of scoffing laughter, before bitingly accusing her, "You don't care for avenging Guinevere. In fact, not three days ago, you were eager to exact your own revenge upon her."

'Why must everyone question my motives? Is it my face? Do I have an untrustworthy sort of face?' Resisting the urge to point out that her reasons were rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things – bloodbath? decapitation, anyone? – she resigned herself to another round of self-justification.

Fixing the knight with a stony glare, she declared, "Three days ago, she was alive and she had already avenged Arthur's killers. Three days ago, I would have taken the simple satisfaction of simply foiling her plan of beheading a friend's former lover and another friend's estranged step-sister. More importantly, Guinevere was my sister – granted my half-sister whom I have had little fondness for and much resentment towards – but I didn't want her dead."

They stared at each other for a few more minutes; Tawny attempting to communicate her sincerity, and Lancelot, his unhappiness. Finally, some of the tension left him, and his shoulders slumped just a smidge, as he accepted the veracity of her words.

The uneasy silence was broken by Alice's wary inquiry, "And how is 'option three' to be accomplished?" Alice asked warily.

"By letting the Black Queen think she wins, by letting her behead Anastasia."

~0~

Killian was extremely grateful for the fact that they had set there rendezvous point far from any semblance of civilization, for the clamorous uproar that resulted after Tawny's announcement would have certainly brought down all of the Queen's men upon their heads if they had not.

As it was, he was standing on alert, hand on sword, and vigilantly scanning the woods for any sort of attack, while the rest were voicing their protests.

The jealous Hook-part of him wanted rage along with the rest of them. It wanted to know if her grand plan of beheading the Red Queen was her way of getting rid of the competition for her ex-lover's heart.

But the more sensible Killian-part of him realized that she had said that this plan, which involved letting the beheading take place, would also allow them to rescue the Red Queen, this Ana. He was quite intrigued.

Eventually, they all quieted down and let Tawny say her piece.

"I didn't say 'let her die'. I said 'let her behead' her. I believe that in this land of impossibilities, there is such a thing as 'reversible beheadings', if the right blade is used?" She glanced at each of them with amused triumph, as her audience gazed at with slowly growing understanding.

His lass did so enjoy being clever, and she had developed a flair for the dramatic. He supposed that he should not begrudge her this moment. She probably had little chance for humor in the past three days and would probably have little in the next few weeks to come. But really, the more she dragged this out, the more he knew that he would not like this plan any more than he had of the others – and most likely, a lot less.

"The right blade? You mean, the Queen of Heart's blade, the one she used on Hatter?" Alice asked.

Tawny nodded, "Yes, that one. If we get it and replace the executioner with one of us, we can assure that Anastasia's decapitation is reversible. As long as she can play dead, we can fool everyone into thinking that they have received justice, and we can sneak off with her body and head and reattach them later."

"How will this stop the massacre?" the former genie inquired.

His lass tucked a frizzy strand of hair behind her ear, as she explained, "Well, it won't. In fact, the excited crowd will be just as malleable to her riot-inciting speech, as a justice-gypped one."

"But?" the Alice-lass queried with a hint of a smile, obviously cottoning on to his and Tawny's favorite rhetorical device.

"But, if the Black Queen's speech was to be interrupted, by say… a certain someone who looks remarkably like her and claiming to be her…" a slow waggish grin spread across her face, as she spelled out her plan, "Then the crowd will be too confused to be agitated into a mad mob."

"So let me sum up," Will declared. "You haven't made your Wishes because you do not want to arbitrarily decide on Door #3, which involves somehow finding and obtaining the reversible-beheading blade, so that we can replace the executioner and his blade to fake a permanent beheading, after which we abscond with Ana's head and body, while you pretend to be the real Black Queen to stop her from having the Red nobles be bludgeoned to death."

"Yes."

"And the revenge part of this quest is what, darling?" Killian finally broke his silent observation to interject.

She smirked, and then said, "The poetic justice of it all – her plans foiled and her lies exposed by her own pretty stolen face."

~0~

Later, after they had made and eaten dinner, discussed and debated how to implement this grand plan, and had prepared for bed, Tawny asked him quietly, "What do you think?"

He rolled over to face her. The fire, which had previously done such a marvelous job of showcasing her fierce expressions as she defended her decisions, was now so low that he could barely see her. He could just make out that she was lying on her side in her bedroll that was next to his own and nervously nibbling her lip, as she anxiously awaited his reply.

"I think that although I'm glad you are here, lying beside me, I wish we were sharing the same bedroll," he jocularly leered at her.

With the hand that was not propping her head up, she slugged him in the shoulder, but still snorted a giggle, "You know what I mean."

"I don't like the plan," he quietly admitted, ignoring the roll of her eyes. "It puts you at too much risk. Too much can go wrong."

She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off with a "Nevertheless…I know that I cannot dissuade you from your quest."

She sagged in relief, before leaning over to give him a quick peck on the lips in gratitude.

He resisted the urge to deepen the kiss and let her roll back over to gaze contemplatively at the stars. But after a few minutes, he couldn't help but teasingly add, "Especially when this scheme of yours satisfies both your inner noble-crusader and – dare I say it? – your more recently acquired inner vengeful-pirate."

His Tawny-lass chuckled appreciatively but tiredly in reply, seeming to be too exhausted to make a sassy retort as was her wont. She did, however, reach over to squeeze his hand with her small one, as she drifted off to sleep.

Killian held on to her hand and counted how many days were left until the Red Queen's trial, trying to figure how many ways he could 'collect his interest' when this was all over, as he too gave into his exhaustion.


A/N: Next chapter - Opening Gambit