That would not have involved a staff. She would have been one of the staff, in all likelihood.If she had managed a political marriage with a good pros...ect for a clan chief ... a staff, yeah. But the odds for that kind of marriage weren’t as good as she’d thought they were when younger.Their new teacher, Evangeline, walked in.“You busy?” Donna said.“No, completely at lose ends, Milady.”“Good, sit down. You want anything from the kitchen?”“A heaping serving of whatever’s cooking, but I imagine. Did she see something? Like the close relationship with the dead chief?" No. She bought into their animosity, in the fear of magical reprisal against him. Her mother hides things well. It took detail, Grandfather. Specifics. It helped that I actually saw the diseased carcasses specifically placed in the stream. And she did know the timing of the disease, her village being struck and the other village following after her mother found the source and the cure." And the fact that she didn't share. I reached out and I touched his face, my hand had no strength to it and dropped away to land somewhere near my head. When I looked clearly at him for the brief moment I was allowed, I was horrified to see the blood from my own fingers stain his hansom face… My last thought and vision was of him and how much we could have shared together if only we had reached each other sooner. If we had only realized in time, what we were to each other, for I could feel myself slowly dying, just as surely as I. "Okay, that's it for to-day," she said. "I'm going to have to get youa wig, too. But for the time being you're just going to be a man in adress."That was what I was. I thought about all the crossdressing storiesI had read. In those stories, whenever the man reached this point,dressed as I was, he felt a rush of joy, or of relief, or of arousal.Even if he disliked it, the author usually made him feel a covertsense of enjoyment. Not me. I just felt...well, like a damned fool,as I had told.