The Necromancer ✓

Chapter Nine

I heard someone knock on the door and I answered it, still wearing the toweling robe. A woman was standing on the other side of the door. I stared at her, shocked. She was wearing a dark dress, with a hooded cloak. She was the only person I'd seen, in this world, who was shorter than me. She bobbed a curtsy as I stared at her.

"I'm here to help you dress, milady," she said. Her voice was soft, and breathy, and high pitched, like a little girl's. I thought then that she was a child, and that that was why she was so short, compared to the other Fae. I stepped aside, letting her come in. She held a large, bulky parcel in her arms. She put it down on the bed and started untying the string which bound it together.

"Who are you?" I asked. Her clothes and body bore a remarkable resemblance to the woman in my dream, but her voice was so different I knew she couldn't be the same person. Still... "Could you take your hood off?" She froze, her hands becoming still against the parcel's strings.

"As my lady wishes," she said. She raised her hands to the hood and pulled it back. She had her back to me so I couldn't immediately see her face. She had closely cut, feathery brown hair, that looked like it would be soft and fluffy to the touch, like a Yorkshire Terrier's coat.

Her shoulders were hunched, and her head was down as she turned to me. She turned very slowly, like it wasn't something she really wanted to do. I almost told her that she didn't have to show me what she looked like, if she didn't want to, but I didn't. I wanted to see her face, had to see her face. I had to know if she was the woman from my dreams.

She finally finished turning enough that I could see her face, but she kept her eyes downcast. She had very long, thick, dark lashes. Her eyes took up almost half of her face and I was glad that she hadn't turned them on me straight away. The size of her eyes alone would have marked her as strange, by human standards, but there was more. Her mouth was small and tilted upwards in the middle, like a cat's, and her nose seemed almost entirely absent.

It was the nose that made me realize what she was. I'd seen a picture of it as a little girl. Catriona gave me a book on faeries, for my birthday. I couldn't believe I'd forgotten about it. The brownie was one of the most fascinating creatures in that book, with its small sepia sketch of a face that looked like a skull with skin. The nose was hollow, only the indent of the nostrils showing that a nose was there. I remembered being fascinated by that picture because the brownie looked so fearsome, but by all accounts, they were sweet.

I couldn't help feeling that brownies were like me. I knew that I was a good person, but my parents hadn't been able to see past what they thought was monstrous. So it was with the brownie.

"You're a brownie, right?" I asked her.

"I haven't heard that term in a long time, miss," she said, turning her huge, darkly luminous eyes up to me.

"I'm sorry," I said, "I didn't mean to cause offense. Is there a proper name for what you are?"

"No," she shook her head, "brownie is as good as any other term, and better than some." She turned back to the parcel and continued to untie the strings. "They said that you didn't know much of the Fae's world."

"I don't," I said. "Just fairy tales."

"Faerie tales?" she asked.

"Like children's stories."

She looked up at me in abject horror. "I wouldn't want to tell my children about the doings of Faerie," she said.

"You have children?" I asked, surprised. She looked back down, away from me.

"No," she whispered. "They weren't really mine. I just cared for them, and the family."

"Like a nanny?"