Hissune, somehow comprehending what was expected of him, lightly touched the tips of his fingers to hers for an instant, and took from her a startling, tingling inrush of energy that might have caused him to leap back if he had not been holding himself under such taut control. But from that unexpected current he found himself gaining a surge of renewed assurance, strength, poise.

Then he turned to the Coronal.

"My lord," he whispered.

Hissune was astonished and dismayed by the alteration in Lord Valentine's appearance since he last had seen the Coronal, so very long ago in the Labyrinth, at the beginning of his ill-starred grand processional.

Then Lord Valentine had been in the grip of terrible fatigue, but even so his features had displayed an inner light, a certain irrepressible joyousness, that no weariness could altogether dispel. Not now. The cruel sun of Suvrael had darkened his skin and bleached his hair, giving him a strangely fierce, almost barbaric look. His eyes were deep and hooded, his face was gaunt and lined, there was no trace whatever of that amiable sunniness of spirit that was his most visible trait of character. He seemed altogether unfamiliar: somber, tense, remote.

Hissune began to offer the starburst sign. But Lord Valentine brushed it away impatiently and, reaching forward, seized Hissune's hand, gripping it tightly a moment. That too was unsettling. One did not shake hands with Coronals. And at the contact of their hands Hissune again felt a current flowing into him: but this energy, unlike that which had come from the Lady, left him disturbed, jangled, ill at ease.

When the Coronal released him Hissune stepped back and beckoned to Elsinome, who was standing immobile by the threshold as though she had been turned to stone by the sight of two Powers of Majipoor in the same room. In a thick, hoarse voice he said, "My lord—good Lady—I pray you welcome my mother, the lady Elsinome—"

"A worthy mother for so worthy a son," said the Lady: the first words she had spoken, and her voice seemed to Hissune to be the finest he had ever heard: rich, calm, musical. "Come to me, Elsinome."

Breaking from her trancelike state, Elsinome advanced across the smooth marble floor, and the Lady advanced also toward her, so that they met by the eight-sided pool at the room's center. There the Lady took Elsinome in her arms, and embraced her closely and with great warmth; and when finally the two women parted, Hissune saw that his mother seemed like one who has for a long while been in darkness, and who now has emerged into the full brightness of the sun. Her eyes were shining, her face was flushed, there was no sign of timidity or awe about her.

She looked now toward Lord Valentine and began to make the starburst sign, only to have the Coronal reject it as he had from Hissune, holding out the palm of his hand to her and saying, "That is not necessary, good lady Elsinome."