Ezalor Pours Tea at First Light
Quibbins takes tea with Ezalor at dawn and feels he has sat with something that remembers when morning was brand new.
An old man at a dawn fire admires the sunrise as if he had a hand in it, and Quibbins drinks his tea.
takes tea with at dawn and feels he has sat with something that remembers when morning was brand new. He finds the old man crouched over a sputtering fire, coaxing a kettle to boil, frail and bundled up and mumbling like any wanderer, while his horse whinnies nervously. A trapper had warned him not to be fooled by old Ezalor: he met him lost one starless night, and then the North Star flared like a lantern.
Sure enough, the old man seems harmless, though his staff leans against a rock glowing faintly in the way staves do not, and he mutters about first light and how the first light of dawn used to run faster, then chuckles as if sharing a joke with the universe. He greets Quibbins, gestures at the sunrise and calls it beautiful, and not bad, if he does say so himself. The horse snorts.
The kettle squeals, Ezalor pours unsteadily, and the fire seems to flare. Quibbins sips and tells himself it is only morning sunlight.
The North Star's flare is the trapper's telling, and Ezalor's pride in the sunrise stays his joke rather than a claim to have made it.