Star tenzing leaves are a luxury reserved for the magi and their apprentices, who claim that tea brewed from them grants clear sight and certainty of the future.
Brimstone believes it. The tea smells the way he imagines freedom might taste: night air and evangeline song and falling stars through a slit of sky. The old chimaera women speak of such things, and Brimstone scoffs at these fairy tales, but can't deny that when the aroma drifts down to the pits, it's something like magic.
He tastes it for the first time when he stares down the chief magus, who has come to pick a new batch of slaves for pain thralls. The seraph laughs to hide his rage, and as he turns away, tosses the still-hot dregs of his tea in Brimstone's face. It scalds his hide and trickles down to his tongue, and as two guards shackle his wrists, he closes his eyes to taste, and it is exactly as he imagined.
(But what he didn't imagine was that it would be as bitter as Ellai's tears.)
The second time he tastes it, it is offered to him by a calloused hand that burns as intensely as the tea itself. When Brimstone sips it, he is surprised to find that it has changed. It tastes of fire and forbidden things and a joy so fierce it seems as though he has swallowed a star.
Despite all that, it's still bitter, but the seraph man before him smiles and drops a cube of sugar into the cup. And maybe the magi speak true and maybe it's just the heat of his lover's wings, but the world seems to shimmer a little brighter then, like a veil lifted. As if seraph and chimaera weren't as different as sun and moons, as if hatred was a choice instead of a lifetime.
(And maybe it's forbidden, but neither of them cares when Brimstone finds himself on the bottom and a pain that isn't pain spreading through his body.)
The third time he tastes it, the night air is heavy and Nitid shines full silver and the tuft of his tail dips into the river of blood around him like a paintbrush.
"To life," the chimaera beside him toast with devilish grins, but all Brimstone can think about is the screams of seraphim – of his seraph – as they are led to the guillotine and how he stood there and watched the best laid plans come to terrible fruition.
When the rebel chimaera stormed the library of the magi, someone discovered their stores of star tenzing and set it to brew over the flames of so many ancient scrolls. A silver bowl of sugar cubes is passed around, and Brimstone takes one, and then another on impulse. The strange urge to laugh at the insanity of it all bubbles up inside him, and he gulps the tea down to quell it.
And he doesn't know what the others taste, but to him it reeks of ashes and blood and what he imagines shame might be like.
(He swallows it without flinching, because the others are watching, and because this is his way to honor the fallen.)
The fourth time he tastes it, Brimstone is bowed from age and ages of work and begins to squint to thread teeth and gems in endless strings. He won't give up his work to anyone, but the Warlord insists that he needs help, and sends him apprentices. Most don't last long.
The latest pair, a Naja and a parrot-beaked Anolis girl, appear in the doorway of the kitchen smiling furtively, and he knows what is in the silver pot they offer him before he lifts the lid. Loramendi boasts a grove of star tenzing right outside its walls, and its leaves are said to soothe aches and give confidence.
(Somehow the bit about clear sight got lost along the way. Brimstone isn't about to correct them.)
He accepts the tea because he knows they mean well and his tongue is like sandpaper and maybe it will taste different this time. It's been hundreds of years and still he remembers to reach for the sugar bowl: two cubes and then a third, delicate in his claws.
Brimstone throws it back in one draught and blinks, which is as close as he comes these days to surprise. Though not bitter like he expects, there is an odd flavor that most closely reminds him of the feeling he gets when his mind brushes against a revenant soul. Sea mist and greasepaint and adrenaline; and, beneath it all, a mingled sense of relief and deep exhaustion.
(Issa and Yasri will continue to surprise him for more than eighty years.)
The last time he tastes it, Brimstone can hear the vicious roar of the crowd in the agora below and, faintly, the thunk of the guillotine that means another soul has been set adrift.
He had told Thiago flatly that he couldn't attend Madrigal's execution because he had a resurrection to perform, and he does - but not Ixander's. The string of human teeth looks strange between his claws. Twiga had selected the purest diamonds and Issa had sorted each baby tooth, but Brimstone had insisted on doing the pain tithe.
It won't take much, he knows. The loss of Madrigal hurts worse than any bruise a vise can make.
Yasri pours the tea for him, plunking three sugar cubes in the way she remembers him doing, although she hasn't made star tenzing since that first time. It's not something to be used lightly.
Numbly, Brimstone chooses another, and even manages to swallow a trickle before his throat closes completely. Still, he recognizes that the taste has changed again. It is the dim silver of evangeline song and Ellai nights, the spice of secrets and betrayal, and for the first time he can taste the sweetness of sugar and it tastes like hope.
Four sugars, Brimstone decides, is enough.
(He can still taste the star tenzing on his tongue when he names Madrigal's next body Karou.)
It's requiem tea that brews now, and Brimstone's hand doesn't tremble at all as he pours it into wooden bowls and stone cups: the roughly hewn remnants of a Loramendi already lost, already burning. No sugar, not for this. A death like this is far sweeter than what their brothers and fathers face above.
They wait to drink it, every one of them. Gazing at him in the almost-light, still as prey. They don't want him to see them die.
Brimstone bears up under the weight of it, wordless. There is nothing to say that hasn't already been said. They all know that resurrection is but a ghost of a chance, but what else to do but try? Hope is the only thing, now. It always has been.
(Karou.)
His tail hushes across the stone as he climbs the crumbling stairs – and whether it's by chance or by design, the stone collapses in a cloud of ash behind him when he reaches the top, sealing the chimaera's tomb. Their thurible. To wait a year or a thousand, until the world can be remade.
(He steps into a world afire, imagining the darkness below, and he hopes they don't taste a thing.)