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He mentally shook himself out of it and focused on ensnaring her instead.
“What is your name, fair maiden?” he said in his own approximation of courtly speech.
“Are you Titania in this world, or only in your dreams?”
Her eyes flashed briefly with light at that.
“How do you know my dreams, my lord? This is real, is it not? Right now, here, with you.”
It was and it wasn’t, he didn’t say. He had stepped out of her dreams and into her reality, but he was merely illusion.
Though, in her case, the dream was more reality than the human world she hid in.
“I can feel the heat of your palm against my own,” she whispered as they spun dizzily around the ballroom, engulfed in a sea of candlelight.
“I have heard your voice for the first time. And…”
She leaned in close, standing on tiptoes, and inhaled deeply against his jawline, her soft cheek just barely grazing his skin, before gracefully settling back into a turn.
“I can smell the sun and the sea about you,” she murmured.
“You cannot be a mere dream. And yet, you don’t seem real at the same time. Have you appeared now just to beguile me?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
Again, truth.
She made it so easy to be honest. As if she’d doused him in truth serum without his knowledge.
“To what end, good sir?” she asked with a playful squint. “There are much lovelier conquests to be had tonight.”
“But only one you,” he returned.
“I need…”
He almost blurted that he needed her to come away with him willingly. To enter the portal that would lead them into a realm of darkness. To trust him with her loving, beating heart.
A stranger. A monster who could barely recall his name.
So that he could offer her gift to the Master in return for his freedom.
This truth he managed not to divulge, though his tongue still stuck to the roof of his mouth in its struggle to get it out.
“I need…to know you,” he said instead.
“Let me know you, Lady Brigid.”
At last, the final notes of the dance ended, and they came to a gentle stop, as if floating down from a bed of fluffy clouds.
“How do you know my name?” she asked. “I have not given it.”
They were standing in the center of the ballroom. Though surrounded by a few brave couples who dared to share their limelight, he almost felt as if they were entirely alone.
“You are the Titania of the real world,” he said low, just for her.
“You are my enchanting faerie queen. And now I would know the woman who dons the queenly cloak. Dreams, as lovely as they are, always come to a bittersweet end. But if we see each other in the waking world, our story continues beyond the end.”
“So that we still dream while awake, and we wake to dream?” she quipped.
