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the case, he lifted out the great golden chain; then, in his shyness, he held it out to Rocannon, saying, “You give it to her.”  
    So the blue jewel first lay, for a moment, in Rocannon’s hand.  
    His mind was not on it; he turned straight to the beautiful, alien woman, with his handful of blue fire and gold. She did not raise her hands to take it, but bent her head, and he slipped the necklace over her hair. It lay like a burning fuse along her golden-brown throat. She looked up from it with such pride, delight, and gratitude in her face that Rocannon stood wordless, and the little curator murmured hurriedly in his own language, “You’re welcome, you’re very welcome.” She bowed her golden head to him and to Rocannon. Then, turning, she nodded to her squat guards—or captors? —and, drawing her worn blue cloak about her, paced down the long hall and was gone. Ketho and Rocannon stood looking after her.  
    “What I feel...” Rocannon began.  
    “Well?” Ketho inquired hoarsely, after a long pause. “What I feel sometimes is that I... meeting these people from worlds we know so little of, you know, sometimes... that I have as it were blundered through the corner of a legend, or a tragic myth, maybe, which I do not understand....”  
    “Yes,” said the curator, clearing his throat. “I wonder... I wonder what her name is.”  
    Semley the Fair, Semley the Golden, Semley of the Necklace. The Clayfolk had bent to her will, and so had even the Starlords in that terrible place where the Clayfolk had taken her, the city at the end of the night. They had bowed to her, and given her gladly her treasure from amongst their own.  
    But she could not yet shake off the feeling of those caverns about her where rock lowered overhead, where you could not tell who spoke or what they did, where voices boomed and grey hands reached out— Enough of that. She had paid for the necklace; very well. Now it was hers. The price was paid, the past was the past.  
    Her windsteed had crept out of some kind of box, with his eyes filmy and his fur rimed with ice, and at first when they had left the caves of the Gdemiar he would not fly. Now he seemed all right again, riding a smooth south wind through the bright sky toward Hallan. “Go quick, go quick,” she told him, beginning to laugh as the wind cleared away her mind’s darkness. “I want to see Durhal soon, soon....”  
    And swiftly they flew, coming to Hallan by dusk of the second day. Now the caves of the Clayfolk seemed no more than last year’s nightmare, as the steed swooped with her up the thousand steps of Hallan and across the Chasmbridge where the forests fell away for a thousand feet. In the gold light of evening in the flightcourt she dismounted and walked up the last steps between the stiff carven figures of heroes and the two gatewards, who bowed to her, staring at the beautiful, fiery thing around her neck.  
    In the Forehall she stopped a passing girl, a very pretty girl, by her looks one of Durhal’s close kin, though Semley could not call to mind her name. “Do you know me, maiden? I am Semley, Durhal’s wife. Will you go tell the Lady Durossa that I have come back?”  
    For she was afraid to go in and perhaps face Durhal at once, alone; she wanted Durossa’s support.  
    The girl was gazing at her, her face very strange. But she murmured, “Yes, Lady,” and darted off toward the Tower.  
    Semley stood waiting in the gilt, ruinous hall. No one came by; were they all at table in the Revel-hall? The silence was uneasy. After a minute Semley started toward the stairs to the Tower. But an old woman was coming to her across the stone floor, holding her arms out, weeping.  
    “Oh Semley, Semley!”  
    She had never seen the grey-haired woman, and shrank back.  
    “But Lady, who are you?”  
    “I am Durossa, Semley.”  
    She was quiet and still, all the time that Durossa embraced her and wept, and asked if it were true the Clayfolk had