The Indigo King - James A. Owen [2]
Solitude had not been created for him, but he took possession of it with the reluctant ease of an heir who receives an unexpected and unwanted inheritance. He laid the robe in one corner, and the scabbard in another, then sat cross-legged in the center of Solitude to examine the rolls of parchment.
Some of them contained drawings and notations; a few, directions that may or may not have been accurate, to places that may or may not have existed. They were maps, more or less, and at one time it had been his driven purpose to create them. But that was before, when his sight was clearer and his motives more pure. Somehow, somewhen, he had lost his way—and in the process, ended up on a path that had brought him here, to Solitude.
Still, he could not help but wonder: Was it the first step on that path, or the last, that had proven to be his undoing? He looked down at the maps. The oldest had been made by his hand more than a millennium before; but the newest of them had been begun, then abandoned, a century ago. He examined it more closely and saw that the delicate lines were obscured by blood—the same that marked the cloak and scabbard as symbols of his shame.
Some things cannot be undone. But someone who is lost might still return to the proper path, if they only have something to show them the way.
Taking the quill in hand, he dipped the point into the bottle. Whether the place he drew existed then didn’t matter—it would, eventually. All that mattered now was that he was, at long last, finding his purpose again. Would that he had done so a day earlier. Just one day.
As he began to draw, tears streamed from his eyes, dropping to the parchment, where they mingled freely with the ink and blood in equal measure. The man in Solitude was a mapmaker once more.
PART ONE
The Mythopoeia
CHAPTER ONE
The Booke of Dayes
Hurrying along one of the tree-lined paths at Magdalen College in Oxford, John glanced up at the cloud-clotted sky and decided that he rather liked the English weather. Constant clouds made for soft light; soft light that cast no shadows. And John liked to avoid shadows as much as possible.
As he passed through the elaborate gate that marked the entrance to Addison’s Walk, he looked down at his watch, checking his progress, then looked again. The watch had stopped, and not for the first time. It had been a gift from his youngest child, his only daughter, and while her love in the gift was evident, the selection had been made from a child’s point of view and was therefore more aesthetic than practical. The case was burnished gold (although it was most certainly gold-colored tin), the face was painted with spring flowers, and on the back was the embossed image of a frog wearing a bonnet.
John had absentmindedly pulled it out of his pocket during one of the frequent gatherings of his friends at Magdalen, much to their amusement. Barfield in particular loved to approach him now at inopportune moments just to ask the time—and hopefully embarrass John in the process.
John sighed and tucked the watch back in his pocket, then pulled his collar tighter and hurried on. He was probably already late for the dinner he’d been invited to at the college, and although he had always been punctual (mostly), events of recent years had made him much more aware of the consequences tardiness can bring.
Five years earlier, after a sudden and unexpected journey to the Archipelago of Dreams, he’d found himself a half hour late for an evening with visiting friends that had been planned by his wife. Even had he not taken an oath of secrecy regarding the Archipelago, he would scarcely have been able to explain that he was late because he’d been saving Peter Pan’s granddaughter and thousands of other children from the Pied Piper, and had only just returned