Sold into slavery, Aleytys' fate was to be worse than that of the usual slave girl's bondage. For her new owners were insectoid and she was to serve as proxy-mother to the old Queen's sucessor. In short, like an Earth wasp's prey, she would be both bearer and foos for what was to come..Had Aleytys been any other human, this would have been the end. But she was the wearer of the diadem, that creation of the galactic science that linked her nervous sytem to powers of strange potency..The fate of Aleytys on Irsud is a gripping novel of an eerie world and a dread conflict, a vivid step in the saga of a heroine that Publishers Weekly decribes as beeing "As tough as, and more belivable and engaging than, the general run of swords-and-scorcery barbarians.