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Page 270
The dress Rhiannon chose that night was black, but so interwoven with threads of gold and silver and with sparkling stones that it was bright as a rainbow. It was not, like modern gowns, draped in graceful folds, but laced tight under the breasts and down the waist to the hips, where it widened greatly. The undertunic was a blue so pale it looked like silver under the wide black sleeves and where it showed at the throat. More stones decked the wrists and neckline of the tunic: polished onyx, yellow citrine, golden topaz, pale green chrysoprase, cloudy chrysolite, aquamarine, amethyst, ruby spinel, and carnelian. They were set in an intricate pattern that caught the eye so well that it was an effort to look away.
Then Rhiannon hung her ears with real precious stones, diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires. Last of all, she set a gold band around her forehead to keep her hair out of her face. From this band hung thin chains of gold fastened together into an open meshwork by horizontal chains, and fixed along the vertical strands were more jewels. They slipped in and out of Rhiannon's heavy mass of raven hair, twinkling.
"Did Llewelyn empty his treasury for you?" Alinor whispered, stunned.
Rhiannon laughed. To her the things were pretty and an aid in her art. She had no sense of their real value. "No," she replied, "these are mine. Kicva gave them to me. Her father, Gwydyon, brought them home from some far place. When he was young and desired Angharad, he traveled very widely seeking things that would please her. The more fool he. He won her with his own power, by singing. He was a great bardthe last, I think."
"If he won what you wear by singing, he was indeed a great bard," Alinor remarked cynically.
She was never ungenerous, but minstrels were paid in copper or very small silver in Roselynde, not in twenty yards of gold and gems. Later, however, she

 
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