This time his judgement was more correct than perhaps even he could have anticipated: she had no reason to believe he would try the same thing twice and so walked, almost literally, into his arms. Her face displayed surprise, but no alarm this time; her hand, as if understanding what was required of it somewhat sooner than the rest of her, moved obediently to his shoulder—this in a woman for whom obedience had the ring of a prison sentence.
A Tuatha queen was not so hard to capture after all: a warm night (albeit one with no stars and in a strange city), a warm, firm body against her own, a hand to hold, a dance. And a story. Particularly a story so clearly about her; her vast vanity crowded out even the ability to be shamed for her vanity. All the rest might have provided a fleeting distraction, but the story bound her more surely than when he had possessed her name. One did not surrender one’s consciousness along with the name; there was no final, merciful subsuming of identity to make servitude more bearable. Now her attention was rapt, irresistible, and entirely voluntary. While she was still physically capable of escaping, she no longer had any will do to so. It was evident in the languid weight of the hand upon his shoulder, the way she swayed to his will as he turned her, the trusting manner in she finally closed her eyes, all the better to listen.
Only when he was finished speaking did she stir, the dazzled, dreamy veil lifting from her features to be replaced by dismay as she stared into his face and seemed to struggle to remember who he was. She put her fingers against his lower lip and shook her head, already too late to silence him. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”
Don’t do it to whom? To her, to bewitch her and make her lose her way? Or to himself, exhausting himself further in his efforts to retain whatever shaky foothold of control remained to him.
Her solution to that would be to simply cut through the knot of indecision by relinquishing control entirely. But that wasn’t his way. And for some reason that mattered now.