Fetch reappeared on the higher shelf with two eels hanging from one fist and took one look at them across the tide pool.
"Am I interrupting something terribly professional?"
"Yes," Iva said.
"Shame." He dropped the eels into the basket with a wet slap. "The west lip has the red-brown deposit if you are both in the mood for disappointment and character-building."
Mavrek rose, gathering the full sample bags. The movement brought him briefly into the sun at a new angle, and the oil on his forearms flashed again beneath the rolled cuffs. Iva looked away after. As before, too late.
He offered her a hand up from the pool edge.
She stared at it one beat too long, then took it because refusing would have been childish and because the reef under her boots remained treacherous. His grip was dry despite the water and warm despite the wind, the callused strength of it closing around her fingers only long enough to bring her to level ground. Then he let go.
"You will need the deeper blue from the east seam tomorrow," he said. "It will hold under the north inscription wash."
"I know."
"Aye."
Fetch looked from one to the other with the expression of a man who would pay actual money to hear the thoughts being suppressed around him.
The walk back across the flats happened under full sun with the sample bags knocking against her thigh. Finer than the original work. He had said it just after she slipped. Just after naming the guild. Just when she had nothing polished, nothing ready, nothing but wet cuffs and exposed nerves and the reef glare all around her.
Accurate praise arrived like a hand under the chin, forcing the face up. She had no practice being seen correctly. Criticism she could fight. This had no surface to push against.
By the time the workshop shadow fell across the stone steps, she understood only that the issue had crossed into open air and found her there. Tomorrow, she suspected, it would not politely return to shadow.
6
FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS
Iva increased her working hours on the twelfth day because deadlines were simpler than festivals and infinitely less interested in her private life.
Simple plan: finish the restoration before the ceremony forced the whole settlement into public ritual, collect the remaining payment, take the first available ferry out of Brineshell, and let the reef wall stand behind whatever claims and bonds and painted witnesses the community intended without her body anywhere near them.
Brineshell, naturally, responded by becoming more social every hour.
From the scaffold she watched the settlement reorganize itself around Lantern Flood. The central island platform had grown visible above the inner water now, not just as a skeleton of poles but as a real structure with railings, hanging lantern frames, and broad steps rising toward the ceremony stage. Traders came in by ferry with baskets of salt cakes, smoked eel, shell ornaments, and bolts of festival cloth in colors too cheerful for her taste.
The covered market thickened with bodies. Children carried wax candles by the crate in solemn little processions. Dema crossed three walkways at once in the manner of a woman attempting to schedule weather. Even half-built, the stage looked designed to make a public fact out of whatever stood on it.
Iva worked harder.
She took first light on the scaffold and stayed there past the point any reasonable restorer would have called the day's line. Her hands ached. Her shoulders burned. The repaired sections spread steadily under her labor all the same, and each newly stabilized edge felt like proof that order remained possible if one simply kept moving.
Mavrek adjusted to the extended hours as if he had expected this exact response, bringing fresh cloths without remark, replacing empty pigment bowls, climbing beside her when the iconography required his eye and leaving when it did not. The rhythm between them had settled into something so functional it might have been mistaken for safety.
It was not safety. It was efficiency with a pulse under it.
By midday the sun had turned the inner reef water into hammered white metal. Iva was reworking a damaged wash near the lower claim band when a voice from below said, cheerful and entirely unwelcome, "You will stay for the ceremony, then?"
She looked down.
An orc woman stood at the scaffold base with a basket of brine-plums against one hip, a strip of shell-white cloth tied around her hair, and flour on one forearm as if she'd come straight from the bread tables. Middle years, sturdy build, the kind of face that had been absorbing gossip professionally for decades and now distributed it with the serene conviction of a public service.
"Pardon?" Iva said.
"Lantern Flood. The claim day." The woman gestured toward the central island where the platform gleamed beyond the walkway posts. "Would be a shame to miss it. Especially this year."