Free The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones

After supper he lit a pipe and explained, “We’re just moving into the height of the tourist season now. As soon as the palace opens to the public, I have to be everywhere at once. But I’ve told everyone that you can explore anywhere you want. Tomorrow I’ll make sure they all know you, so there won’t be any trouble.”
    That evening they just talked, with Dad puffing clouds of pipe smoke through sunset light slanting in across the leading. Maewen found they got on. Dad seemed to think the same kind of thoughts that she did. Next morning he woke her quite surprisingly early and they had breakfast—supplied by another young lady—with rosy light slanting the other way across crusty rolls and rich black coffee. Just as Maewen was thinking how grown-up and leisurely this was, Dad sprang up and took her on a tour of the palace.
    The Tannoreth Palace was vast. Buildings of various ages rayed out around courtyards with fountains, or gardens with statues and summerhouses in them, and hedges and roses, and a small menagerie. At every huge room they came to—and on some of the stairways—at every picture or work of art or curious object, Dad gave her another of his little lectures. In between he was introducing her to bewildering numbers of people who worked in the palace: ladies in overalls polishing the long museum galleries or dusting gilded tables, security men, guides, secretaries, and Major Alksen, who was head of security. Maewen’s mind began to seize up. When Dad took her outside to be introduced to the gardeners, she was thinking, I shall never remember all this! Our minds are not the same after all. It was too early. Even though she was used to being up with the lark in the holidays to help Aunt Liss in the stables, she could see to a horse on autopilot, half asleep. This was different. No one introduced you to horses or expected you to know the history of the barn.
    Afterward she found the only thing she could remember from the entire tour was Major Alksen because he was so much her idea of a retired soldier. And Wend, of course. She was glad Dad had not reintroduced her to Wend. Maewen felt too much pure embarrassment to go near him.
    But she felt she was letting Dad down, or wasting opportunities, or something. So when Dad had given her another of his swift, awkward kisses and rushed off, Maewen felt herself bound to go all over the palace again.
    It took days. Some of the time she joined in the guided tours, having made sure first that the guide was not Wend, and the guides would give her a special smile among all the crowds of foreign schoolchildren, and ordinary families, and silk-suited men and women from Nepstan, and then go on with their spiels. She visited Amil’s tomb with one such crowd, but it was a cold, boring arched room inside, with a lot of gold lettering on the tombstone, and she only went there that once. She preferred indoors.
    Here she usually started her sightseeing in the Old Palace, where most of the pictures were. That was easy to find because of the art students. They lay on the floor in what had been the great hall but was now a ballroom, copying the perspective in the ceiling picture. On the walls of this room Amil the Great, with his mane of fair hair and a roll of plans trailing from one hand, supervised the building of the palace. Amil was wearing purple breeches, which Maewen thought were decidedly unfortunate. They looked worse in the copies the students made of them. On the ceiling there was the whole of Dalemark spread out, from the plains and slow rivers of the South to the mountains of the North, and full of battling figures, as Amil (in the same purple breeches) led his armies against the rebellious earls at the start of his reign.
    Next door to the ballroom was a smaller room where oil paintings hung in frames. This was where Maewen’s favorite pictures were. She got into the habit of stepping over the students lying on the floor