Free The Crown of Dalemark by Diana Wynne Jones Page B

like, and the purple trousers were a pure invention. This so amused Maewen that she left Wend’s embarrassing presence in order to go down to the hallway and buy a postcard of Amil in his breeches and write a “Wish you were here” message on it to Mum and Aunt Liss. Then she made a foray into Kernsburgh itself to post it.
    The city was even more crowded than the palace, and the traffic was terrible. A very few glances into the shops as she passed showed Maewen that she had barely enough money even for ordinary presents for Mum and Aunt Liss. Kernsburgh sold things from all over the world, and it was expensive. But the distressing thing to someone who had been brought up in the country like Maewen was that the place seemed to have almost no trees once you were down on street level.
    â€œWhere do all the trees go?” she asked Dad that evening.
    It was a perfect example of the way she and Dad got on. Dad knew just what she was talking about although he was busy laying out sheets of stiff paper and notebooks on the other end of the table. “In people’s gardens, I think,” he said. “I believe Amil the Great planned it that way, because there were no trees on the site when he started to rebuild Kernsburgh.”
    â€œThen he made a mistake,” Maewen said. “It’s all buildings and cars, and it makes me cough.”
    â€œYou’d have coughed worse when the place was new,” Dad said. “Two hundred years ago it would have been smog from coal fires. Though I’m never sure it was such a good thing when they discovered oil under the Marshes. It makes the Queen a rich woman, I suppose, but it has its drawbacks.”
    â€œWhere is the Queen?” Maewen asked. “I’ve been almost all over the palace now, and—”
    â€œOh, she very rarely comes here these days,” Dad said. “She’s pretty old, you know, and she prefers the warmth in the South. She almost only ever comes to the Tannoreth for state occasions.”
    â€œAnd the Crown Prince?” Maewen asked, feeling rather let down.
    â€œHe lives in Hannart,” Dad answered absently, busy with a notebook. “Doesn’t get on with his mother or with public events.”
    â€œWhat are you doing?” Maewen asked him.
    â€œTrying to establish our family tree,” said her father. “It’s a hobby of mine—and damned exasperating, too. You can come and look if you like.”
    Maewen came and leaned on his square, warm shoulder, and he spread scrawled books and careful diagrams out for her to see. “Here,” he said. “My family. As far as I can tell we go back to one of the traveling Singers. I think his name may have been Clennen, but Singers wandered about so and were so little documented that it’s a fiendish job to find out for sure. Compared with that period, the last hundred years were a doddle, and I thought those were bad enough. And when we get to your mother’s family, things get even worse. Here.” Dad pushed sheets of paper in front of Maewen, hectically scrawled all over in pale pencil. “See? There’s some connection with Amil II’s brother Edril, but that’s as far as—”
    â€œYou mean Mum descends from Amil the Great!” Maewen exclaimed.
    â€œSo do a lot of people. If you mean that accounts for your mother’s standoffish vagueness,” Dad said dryly, “I hardly think so. If you remember that everyone has four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, you can see that almost everyone has to be related if you go back far enough. We’re talking here about doubling the number of ancestors each person has every generation, and halving—or even quartering—the number of people those ancestors could have come from. The population of Dalemark was quite small until a hundred years ago.”
    He was lecturing again. Maewen tried to listen. She was quite interested in the