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“–and you can use your mirror to call me or Papa if you have a nightmare and you can’t wake up Auntie Margo, okay? Or if you’re just feeling homesick, or need to talk – it’ll be a different time at home, but that’s fine, you can call no matter what–”
“For fuck’s sake, Coldwater,” Margo says, “get your ass through the portal. She’s stayed with me before. She’ll be fine.”
Quentin glares back over his shoulder at her. “El and I have always been down the hall–”
“And she’s never once come to bother you in the middle of the night, has she? She’s a junior king.” Margo raises her eyebrows at Lily, who has maintained an impressively patient expression throughout her dad’s ten minute anxiety shitstorm. At Margo’s eye contact, though, she breaks, giggling and grinning wide – a miniature version of Eliot’s smile, just with fewer front teeth.
Quentin sighs and pulls his daughter into a hug. “Gonna miss you, lilypad.” From the hitch in his voice, his big puppy-dog eyes are probably full of tears. Gross.
“It’s a sleepover,” Lily points out. “I had a sleepover with Sophia last weekend.”
“Yeah, well, I missed you then too.” Quentin pushes up out of his crouched position with a groan. “Okay.” He takes a single step towards the portal, then steps back. “But also, if you–”
“Oh my fucking god,” Margo says, simultaneously with Lily’s “Oh my god, dad, you can go!”
Quentin looks appropriately cowed by this display of solidarity. “Okay, okay–” Margo watches with amusement. One leg through the portal, one leg and an arm– “Just one last–”
“I love you,” Lily says sweetly, waving enthusiastically. “See you tomorrow.”
“Oh– okay,” Quentin says, finally defeated by sickly-sweet affection, and crosses back over to Earth.
“Finally,” Margo sighs melodramatically, gesturing for a manservant to take Lily’s backpack. “Now we can get on with the rest of our day.” Lily skips forward to take her hand. Her stubby little nails are done in glittery purple. “Nice mani. Your papa take you somewhere?”
“He did them himself.” Lily barely has any trouble keeping pace with Margo as they walk down the hall – the kid must have hit another growth spurt. “Purple was the color of royalty in ancient Rome, so since I was gonna come here and help you be King, it seemed like a good choice.”
“Excellent logic.” Margo’s fairy eye fixes itself on the scurrying figure of her Secretary of Agriculture, coming at them from twenty yards away with a stupid, constipated expression on his bug-eyed face. She tugs on Lily’s hand, steers them around a corner towards the gardens. “I’ve got some very important things for us to take care of, so we’ve got a packed schedule. No time for bullshit,” she says sharply over her shoulder, letting her voice carry down the stone hallway.
“Papa said I was supposed to remember how many times you swore in front of me so he can yell at you later,” Lily remarks casually.
Margo looks sideways at her. “And do you plan on doing that?”
Lily shrugs. “Maybe. But if I get extra dessert tonight, I bet I’ll forget to, probably.”
Margo comes to a dead stop and looks down into Lily’s big, innocent brown eyes. “Straight-faced blackmail, huh?” Her heart swells with pride. “I’m such a good influence.”
–
El’s the one who comes to pick Lily up in the morning, portaling directly into Margo’s suite of rooms with the spell only he knows. “There are my favorite girls,” he says, throwing his arms wide. “Did you have fun? Is the kingdom still standing?”
“Um, duh,” Lily says, running forward to hug him around the waist. “I’m a good junior king.”
“You’re learning from the best.” Eliot picks a stray piece of hay out of her hair and bends himself nearly in half to kiss the top of her head. He looks up at Margo and mouths how’d she do?
“We had a great time,” Margo says, while silently giving a thumbs up and rotating it sideways a bit to indicate mixed bag, but mostly good. “We did some horseback riding–”
“On the really tall bay one! Drip Pickwick had to lift me up even off the mounting block.”
“–then we hung out in the throne room while I had an audience with the parliament of owls–”
“They smell really, really bad.”
“–which Lily was smart enough to not comment on in the moment.”
“Yeah, but I can tell my dad,” Lily says. Margo can hear the eye-roll in her tone. Sassy little shit.
“She wanted to look around the library after dinner, and then it was time to call it a night.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Eliot says. He leans down to kiss Lily’s head again, but she squirms out of his grip, kneeling down to rummage in the backpack that Margo just re-packed for her. “How was the night?” he asks Margo.
Margo weighs how to answer, knowing there’s some history to the question, that Lily’s been a terrible sleeper since she was a squalling infant, that she still ends up curled between her dads in their bed nine nights out of ten. The most accurate answer to El’s question is not great – Margo woke up at ass o’clock in the morning, moons still in the sky, with a little hand pushing on her shoulder, shaking her awake.
Mm? Whassit?
I need to come sleep with you. I need to.
Margo held the blankets open, let the kid snuggle up into a ball and shove her cold little toes between Margo’s calves.
Nightmares again? Lily nodded into her shoulder. Well, whatever the monster was, it can’t get you here. I’ll fuck it up first.
A half-hearted, slightly wet giggle. I had a dream that the portal didn’t work and my dads couldn’t get me.
Margo’s heart twisted in her chest; a familiar leaden pain gnawed at her stomach. The kid didn’t know – no way they’d told her, yet, about any of the dozen times they almost lost each other. So she didn’t know, either, about all the ways they’d fought their way back from the end of the world. Oh, sweetie. She smoothed Lily’s flyaway hair back from her face. That can’t happen, okay? I can always get to them, and they’ll always get to us. Your dads and me, we’re some seriously stubborn bitches. We find a way.
“Good enough for her first time,” she eventually answers. Eliot gives her a questioning look, but she shakes her head minutely. “She’ll get better with practice.”
Lily finally finds what she’s looking for in her bag and holds it up triumphantly: a scrapped draft of a royal decree that now has a spindly-legged, multi-colored horse drawn on the back. “It’s made of real goat skin,” she says enthusiastically, holding it out for Eliot to admire.
“That’s great, baby.” Eliot takes the drawing, holding it between the very tips of his fingers. “Before you show me everything,” he adds, grabbing Lily’s shoulder so she can’t crouch down again, “go say bye to Aunt Bambi and we’ll head home.”
As they practiced, Lily gives her a wobbly but passable bow. Margo nods regally at her, and even manages to hold a straight face for a beat before she pulls Lily into a hug. “See you soon, junior king. Don’t take any shit from anyone.”
“Bambi–”
“Ask her,” Margo says, all wide-eyed innocence. “Lily, baby, how much did I swear in front of you?”
Lily gives a frankly pretty believable shrug. “I don’t remember any.”
“Of course you don’t,” Eliot sighs.
Margo steps gracefully forward and goes up on her toes to kiss his cheek. “What can I say? I’m a good influence.”