Tea and Monsters

Point of Sighs was the last book that Lisa and I were able to talk about before her illness meant putting aside creative work. We knew we wanted to look at Astreiant’s tea trade, and at the ways that archaic, outdated beliefs persist and frequently turn out to have some basis in fact, however distorted. Both of these were ideas that deepened our understanding of Astreiant, from its myths and legends to the national and international economies, and even while she was sick Lisa was able to contribute to those discussions. What we didn’t have was a plot. 

With Fairs’ Point, we’d worked out the crime and its solution, but not all the details; for Point of Sighs, we had come up with two big plot points, and that was it. In fact, when Lisa died we were still arguing over whether or not Philip would join the City Guard. Lisa felt this took too much focus away from the Points; I thought it was the best way to give Philip a job that also provided a built-in conflict for subsequent stories. When I came back to the idea, nearly six years after Lisa’s death, I went with what I thought would work best. Not without guilt, mind you, but I did think I could have convinced her in the end.

The Riverdeme was entirely Lisa’s creation, however, and I was happy to build on what she’d done. Astreiant is an old city, layered with history and myth; if you dig very far below its streets, you’d find fragments of previous buildings and signs of the people who’d lived there hundreds of years before. Wicked’s tavern, sited in what was once a temple, is  lighter example of that layered past. (And of the Astreianter sense of humor: Wicked got her name for buying up and converting the old place, though it had long fallen out of use as a religious site.) The Riverdeme, though, was serious. The Sier was always meant to be a dangerous river. It was based in part on the Piscataqua, with its complex, 12-knot currents and 8-foot tides, and in a world with magic, there was every reason to assume that something might personify that power and danger. But since Astreiant depended on the river for much of its economy, there was also every reason to think that the city would already have dealt with the problem, and it was easy enough to think of a way that it had. But if that magistical containment failed… That was another useful plot piece, and eventually ended up driving much of the story.

But that left the tea. Lisa and I both loved tea (I still do) and we had had a great deal of fun figuring out what kinds of tea were available in the city, where it came from, and what it tasted like. We discussed what teas Nico and Philip drank: Nico prefers single-leaf teas, of the highest quality he can afford — unless he’s working, when he drinks a strong, bitter, cheap tea known as a stone-blend. Philip, on the other hand, likes complex blends, with citrus and spice and florals. We invented names for various varietals and blends, and once I came back to the story, I spent hours naming the major and minor tea companies and listing their best products. The problem was how to fit all of this into the story of the Riverdeme. Or should it be the other way around? It took me a while to figure out how to connect the two, and to say much more would be a spoiler. It was a satisfying combination to write, and I hope equally so to read.

I did, however, indulge myself just a little. Adagio Teas offers the chance to create your own tea blend, and I did exactly that. It’s more the sort of tea Philip likes, but Nico wouldn’t turn it down either: lemon, orange, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and cardamom on a base of black and Ceylon tea, with a touch of marigold flowers. I bought a batch to repackage and give away at the original launch party at Baltic, and discovered today that the blend is still available through Adagio. I’ll be ordering another batch to celebrate the new edition.