Elias had not looked away from her once as they talked. Tired as he was, there was no hint in him of the desperate anger she had seen only a day prior. There was still grief, Dora thought, but it was tempered with something softer and less violent. “You are correct, of course,” Elias told her. “I despise these silly balls. I did not come here simply to dance.” He cleared his throat slightly. “I have again had little success today. I found myself sitting alone in the dark, tired and bitter. And I suppose I could have stayed like that. But I promised Albert that I would be kinder to myself. And so I tried to think of where I would want to be, if I were not so bound to this hopeless task.”
Dora knitted her brow. “You cannot have thought of Lady Cushing’s ball,” she said sceptically.
“I did not,” Elias said. “I thought of you, Dora. But you are here, and so here I am.” Those golden eyes held hers, and a flustered heat pooled against the surface of Dora’s skin. “I did not come here only to dance. I came here only to dance with you. It is quite a different thing.”
The dancing began, and it was a good thing that it did—Dora was suddenly certain that she could not manage to stay still beneath those eyes for even a moment longer. Her head was swimming, and her breath was oddly short. Elias had a reassuring hold on her, and she found herself wondering whether she would still be able to stand upright once he finally let her go.
“You are very quiet,” Elias said, after they had taken a few rotations around the floor. His gaze did not waver from her face. Dora thought he might be searching for something in her expression.
“I do not know what to say,” she admitted. “I think I am deeply touched. But if I am supposed to react in some particular way, I should warn you that I do not know it. My condition confounds me.” Dora found herself looking at his chin now, instead of into his eyes. “I am a doll sometimes, and not a human being at all.”
Elias pressed gently at her back, leading them aside from the other dancers. He paused there for a moment, and Dora felt his gaze hot on her face. “Surely, you cannot think that of yourself,” he murmured. “Or has someone else said it to you, perhaps?”
Dora stayed very silent. She did not want to admit that she had accidentally plucked the words from that pile of misery at the bottom of her mind. It would be too much like admitting that Auntie Frances had won some battle over her.
Elias leaned down towards her, probably closer than was proper. “It may be true that you only have half a soul, Dora,” he whispered, with a surprising abundance of empathy in his voice. “But that does not make you half a person.”
Dora trembled at that, without quite knowing why. She felt the words all the way to her bones—deeper and more piercing than anything that Auntie Frances had ever said to her. The rare sincerity in his voice struck her squarely in what remained of her heart, somehow painful and relieving all at once.
Wet tears trickled down her cheeks. Too late, Dora reached up to wipe at them, bewildered.
Elias blinked. “Are you—are you all right?” he asked softly.
Dora nodded slowly. “It must be all this candle smoke,” she lied evenly. “It always does make my eyes water.”
Elias squeezed her hand. “There are better ways to light a room,” he said. “Perhaps I might help.” He released her hand to reach into his jacket, from which he withdrew a wand of twisted glass.
The candles in the room all snuffed out in the space of an instant. Gasps and whispers rippled among the crowd—but they soon transformed into awed murmurs. Wavering pinprick lights kindled in the air, scattered like faerie dust across the ballroom. One floated just past Dora, and she reached out to touch it with rapt fascination. The light flickered against her skin, but it neither burned nor cooled where it touched. Instead, it caught briefly upon her fingers and then fluttered away again like a floating ember.
“Are they stars?” she whispered in wonder.
“I am flattered by your wild estimation of my abilities,” Elias said, with a hint of pleasant mirth. “I should lie and say that I have indeed brought down the stars for your amusement. But it’s a simple magic trick, and nothing more.” He flicked a finger, and a haze of twinkling stars swept towards her, settling into the fabric of her dress and the strands of her hair.
A few of those gathered in the ballroom began to turn their attention towards Dora at that. If she had been anyone other than herself, she might have been embarrassed at the sudden attention. But Elias was smiling at her with a whimsical pleasure, and she was swimming in stars—and as the musicians slowly found their beat again and he took her back into his arms to dance, Dora could only feel the brightest, most wonderful lantern warmth she had ever known before.
The atmosphere until that moment had been tense and somewhat smothering, as many balls were. But without the heat of all those candles, in the gentle light of those calm, floating faerie lights, there was suddenly a hushed sort of reverence; no one wanted to be the first to break the lovely spell that had come upon them all.
Looking up at Elias in the flickering starlight, Dora found herself utterly arrested. There was an ethereal, otherworldly beauty to him just now that made her think he must surely be at least part faerie. Dora imagined his skin like moonlight, his hair like white silk, his eyes like banked embers. He was looking at her,
