Chapter 1: Hard Water
The sign went up on a Tuesday, and it was so plain you almost walked past it.
No name. No painted teapot, no curling gold script like the two fancy tea rooms up by the harbor master's office. Just a board of new pine, sanded to a finish you could have eaten off, nailed above a narrow door on Lantern Street with one word burned into it: TEA.
You stopped in the middle of the pavement. A dockhand bumped your shoulder and swore at you, and you didn't notice.
Lantern Street had not had a tea shop in all the years you'd been walking it to the trading house. It had a ropemaker, a pawnbroker, a bakery that sold bread like wet sand, and, until last winter, a tobacconist who'd died owing everybody money. That shopfront had sat empty for months, windows soaped over, the door chained. Now the soap was gone. The glass was so clean it looked like there was no glass at all.
You were a tea buyer. You had been one for nine years, first as a clerk sorting chests in the Albrecht and Sons warehouse, then on the floor, now as the person the firm sent to the auctions with a cup, a spoon, and the authority to spend more money in an afternoon than most people on Lantern Street saw in a year. You had tasted tea from every province of the old empire and the islands beyond. You could tell a first flush from a second blindfolded. You had once ruined a man's entire shipment by noting, in front of buyers from three houses, that his "highland gold" had been grown about four meters above sea level.
You did not walk past tea shops.
You opened the door. A bell jangled.
Inside it was small, six tables, maybe eight, and so clean the air itself felt scrubbed. The floor had been sanded and oiled. The counter was the same pale pine as the sign. Behind it, on shelves, stood a row of tins, labeled in a cramped, precise hand. There was a smell of black tea and lye soap and something faintly floral, and not one speck of dust anywhere, not on the windowsill, not on the lamp, not in the corners where dust lived in every other building in this town.
A man came out from the back room with a cloth over his shoulder.
He was short, shorter than you, and the first thing you noticed was not his height. It was the scar. It ran across his face from brow to jaw, a long pale seam that pulled the corner of his right eye half-closed. The second thing was his right hand: two fingers gone, the index and the middle, the knuckles healed over neat and shiny. The third thing was the cane hooked over the end of the counter, and the slight hitch in his step as he came toward it, which he clearly hated and refused to acknowledge.
The fourth thing was his face, which, scar aside, looked like it had been carved for the specific purpose of expressing contempt.
"We're not open," he said.
"Your sign's up."
"Sign goes up first. Shop opens tomorrow."
"The door wasn't locked."
He looked at the door. Then back at you. His eyes were grey, and flat, and very tired. "Tch."
You realized who he was in the same breath. Everyone in this town knew the stories, even if they'd stopped saying them out loud. The Paradis devils. The ones who had stood against the end of the world on the deck of a flying boat, and come back down to a world that didn't know what to do with them. There had been a man among them they called humanity's strongest. Some said he'd killed a hundred Titans. Some said a thousand. Some said he was dead.
He was not dead. He was standing in front of you with a dishcloth over his shoulder, glaring at you like you'd tracked mud in.
You checked your boots. You hadn't.
"Is the tea ready?" you asked.
"What?"
"For tomorrow. You must have been testing it. I can smell it." You nodded at the tins. "Is it ready?"
He looked at you for a long moment, the way you might look at a stray dog trying to decide if it bit.
"Sit," he said, finally. "Don't touch anything."
He brought it to you in a white cup with no handle, on a white saucer, and set it down in front of you with a precision that suggested he'd measured the distance from the table's edge.
The color was a clear dark amber, like old honey held up to a window. The steam carried a scent that made you sit up: malty, deep, a faint stone-fruit sweetness underneath. Good leaf. Better than good. You knew this tea. It came from the eastern hill estates, and it was not cheap, and somebody had bought it with real care.
You lifted the cup. Breathed. Tasted.
He stood by the counter with his arms folded and watched you. You could feel him watching.
You set the cup down.
"Well?" he said.
You had a professional obligation. You had been trained by the hardest palate in the trading house, an old woman named Greta who had once fired a clerk for calling a tea "nice." Greta had a rule. You told the truth about a tea, especially when it hurt, because the truth was the only thing a buyer had that a merchant couldn't fake.
"The leaf is excellent," you said. "Eastern hills, second flush, probably from the Moravec estate or one of its neighbors. Whoever sold it to you knew what they had."
His arms stayed folded, but something in his shoulders shifted a fraction. Pleased, maybe.
"The water's wrong," you said.
The shoulders stopped.
"Your water," you said, "is hard. This whole port sits on limestone. Everything out of the town pipes is full of chalk. It's flattening the top notes and making the finish go chalky. Can you taste that? At the back of the tongue, like licking a wall." You turned the cup on its saucer. "And you've steeped it about thirty seconds too long, which is pulling out the tannin to compensate for the flatness, which is making it bitter. So it's flat and bitter, which is a terrible combination, and it's a crime, because the leaf is beautiful."
The silence in the shop was absolute. Somewhere out on Lantern Street, a cart rattled by.
He unfolded his arms. He walked over to your table, not hurrying, the hitch in his step sharper now. He picked up your cup, the way he must have held a cup for years, from above, fingertips around the rim instead of the side, and with the three fingers he had left. He drank. He set it down.
Then he looked at you.
"Who the hell are you?" said Levi Ackerman.
You told him. Your name, which he didn't repeat. Albrecht and Sons. Nine years on the floor. Greta.
"So you're a professional complainer," he said.
"I'm a professional taster. Complaining is incidental."
"Tch." He stared at the cup for another long moment. "The water."
"Rainwater," you said. "Or there's a spring up past the old lighthouse that the brewers use. It's soft. A man named Pell sells it by the barrel. He overcharges, but it's worth it."
"And the steep."
"Three minutes. Not three and a half. Off the boil, not on it." You hesitated. "I'm not trying to insult you. The leaf really is beautiful. I'd just hate to see it wasted."
He picked up the cup again and looked at it as if it had personally betrayed him. Then he took it back behind the counter, and poured it down the drain, and you watched him scrub the cup with a cloth so hard you thought he might wear through the glaze.
"Shop opens tomorrow," he said, without turning around. "Seven in the morning."
You stood up and put a coin on the table.
"It's not open," he said. "I'm not taking your money."
"Then consider it a deposit," you said. "I'll be back at seven."
He turned around then and looked at you over the counter, and for the first time there was something in his face besides tiredness and contempt. You couldn't name it. It might have been a challenge.
"You'd better be," Levi said, "because I'm going to make you eat those words."
You were back at seven. He had rainwater.
It was better. It was much better. You told him so, and also that he'd over-warmed the cup, which was costing him about two degrees on the pour. He told you to get out. You stayed and had a second cup.
You came back the next day, and the next. You came back so many mornings in a row that the dockhands who'd started drifting in for a cup on their way to the wharf began nodding at you like a fixture, and the old ropemaker from across the street started calling you "the critic." Levi never once said good morning. He would see you come in, say "Tch," and put the kettle on. And then he would bring you a cup and stand by the counter, arms folded, and wait.
Some mornings you said it was good. Those mornings he'd go very still, and then turn away, and his ears would go faintly pink.
Some mornings you said it wasn't. Those mornings he'd argue, in short, flat, furious sentences, and you'd argue back, and by the time you left for the trading house your blood would be up and you'd be grinning like an idiot.
On the eighteenth morning, you came in and he wasn't behind the counter.
He was at a table in the corner with a tin open in front of him and a frown carved deeper than usual. He didn't look up when the bell rang. He just pushed the tin across the table toward you.
"Smell that," he said.
You sat down across from him. You lifted the tin and breathed. Then you breathed again, and set it down very carefully, and looked at him.
"That's not eastern hill," you said.
"No."
"That's lowland leaf. Cheap stuff, cut with something. Maybe dried willow. And they've rolled it in," you tipped a few leaves into your palm and rubbed them, and your fingertips came away faintly grey, "in graphite powder, I think. To make it look darker. Older. Like proper aged leaf." You looked up. "Where did you get this?"
"Same merchant as always," Levi said. His voice was very quiet. "Same price. He told me the new crate was a better grade."
You thought about the merchants on the harbor, the ones who hung around the auction houses and sold to small shops who didn't have a buyer of their own. You thought about how much money Levi must have sunk into that first crate of real eastern hill. You thought about how the soldiers from Paradis were treated in this town, still, even now, when they weren't in the room.
"He thinks you can't tell," you said.
Levi looked at the tin. A muscle moved in his jaw.
"I couldn't," he said. "Not the first time." Then his eyes came up, flat and grey and steady, and fixed on you. "You can."
You understood a beat before he said it.
"Tomorrow there's an auction at the Old Exchange," Levi said. "He'll be there. I want you with me."