Diadem

They snapped a circlet onto her brow to be rid of her, and it would not come off — and inside it a chorus of the long-dead began, at last, to sing. So opens the wandering of Aleytys: half an outworlder on a world that has no name for what she is, cursed with a crown that fuses to living flesh and cannot be pried loose. The Diadem is an artifact out of some vanished star-culture, and it is not empty. Locked in its gemwork are the trapped minds of the dead — among them Shadith the singer and Swardheld the swordsman — riding behind Aleytys's eyes as she crosses backwater planets and glittering trade-worlds in search of the mother who abandoned her. The Diadem Saga runs nine books, opening with Diadem from the Stars, and it moves the way a caravan moves: planet to planet, each with its own weather and gods and dangers, the psi-powers waking in Aleytys a little more with every crossing. When the imprisoned voices are finally freed into bodies of their own, the world does not close — it branches. Shadith walks out into her own trilogies (Shadith's Quest, then Shadowsong) as a hunter of prey and of injustice; Swardheld takes up his own road. One author holds it all: Jo Clayton, whose prose is sensory to the fingertips — heat, dust, strange fruit, alien courts. Expect planetary romance with a science-fiction spine: adventure that lingers on the texture of each world rather than its hardware, headed always by women who arrive as outsiders and leave changed. Begin at the beginning — Diadem from the Stars — and follow the caravan in the order it was written.