The oil marked her in an amber crescent just below the elbow.
Iva went still.
Mavrek did too, but only for the span of one shared breath. His eyes dropped to the oil on her skin, then returned to the wall with that same exacting calm he brought to everything else.
"Hold the dish," he said.
Not apology. Not pretending it had not happened. Merely the next necessary instruction.
She held the dish.
The oil warmed almost at once.
Not imagination. Maruk carried heat in it; she knew that. She had watched it wake old pigment on stone and loosen cracked binders back into temporary life. On skin, the warmth sat lower and stranger, a persistent little ember beneath the amber smear.
She kept her arm angled away from her body and continued working because the alternative was to look at it, and looking at it would have made the contact real in a way she was not prepared to manage on a scaffold above half the settlement.
Below them the settlement went on with its ordinary noise. A cartwheel clattered over the inner bridge planks. Someone called for rush bundles at the market. Iva cleaned the exposed line beneath the broken hull while the warm spot on her arm refused to become abstract material information and the panel below her hands refused to become merely historical.
Names of the dead along the bottom. Chartmaker named with them. Warm oil on her arm.
She worked through all three.
Mavrek thinned the binder and laid the first pass into the seam beside her. "Less pressure there," he said. "The substrate gives."
"I can see that."
"Aye."
They moved along the panel in practiced increments. She cleaned salt from the lower inscription band and uncovered three more letters in a dead ferryman's name. He stabilized the split hull line and rebuilt a missing edge in the wash beneath it, his brushwork confident and lean. Once she had to step behind him to reach the shelf jar tied to the side pole, and her oil-marked arm brushed the linen of his back as she passed.
The warmth there flared, sharper. She nearly dropped the jar.
The wall offered no help. Under her knife the inscription band came cleaner and cleaner, names surfacing from damage one after another like accusations refusing burial. One of the painted hands reaching from the water had been rendered with such economy that it became more disturbing the longer she looked: three white strokes and a thumb mark, enough to tell the story of a body going under because a line on a chart had been wrong.
She had once believed, with the arrogant innocence of a talented younger sister, that accuracy was a kind of love. Get the line right, get the depth right, mark the shoal cleanly, and no one drowns.
Then one winter chart had been exact in every way that mattered except the one that killed.
Do not.
The command cracked through her. Not here. Not with Mavrek beside her and the warm amber on her arm and the names at the bottom of the wall being coaxed back into visibilityunder her own hand. She had spent three years learning how to keep the wound on its leash. She was not going to let a painted chartmaker and a drop of ritual oil drag it into daylight on a scaffold.
So she kept working. Knife. Cloth. Binder. Note the surviving line. Note the missing line.
Do not think about the boots set side by side under the bench at the infirmary because someone had not known what else to do with them, small boots, smaller than she always expected when she remembered them, as if grief had made her brother larger than he had actually been -- do not -- the hearing chamber that smelled of wet wool and old paper --do not--
The oil stayed warm.
By the time the light began to slope gold across the repaired section, the split hull had been stabilized, two names restored to legibility, and the chartmaker's attribution half-cleaned from under a skin of flood grime. Mavrek climbed down first to tie off the material jars before evening damp set in. Iva remained on the upper plank a moment longer than necessary, looking at the panel without really seeing it.
She wrapped the tools, descended, and went straight to the workshop basin before her mind could invent any noble argument for waiting.
The cleaningbasin sat under the west slats where the last of the light came in thin bands across the rim. She had scrubbed pigment from her hands there every day since arrival, removing lime, ash, resin dust, fish-glue tack, every honest trace a workday left. There was comfort in it usually. Order restored by soap, sand, clean water.
She set down the tool roll, rolled her sleeve higher, and attacked the amber crescent on her arm with lye soap and rough cloth.
It dulled. It did not disappear. Neither, apparently, did anything laid on the skin with enough intention.