Especially this year.
Iva dipped her brush in the rinse shell. "My work schedule is not set by shame, fortunately."
The woman laughed. "No, well, fair. Dema has you hung up there like a gull on a line. Still. Your tidepainter is doing something worth watching."
Your tidepainter.
Iva kept her attention on the wash line and wished, without much hope, for lightning.
"I am here on commission," she said. "The restoration determines my schedule."
"Aye, of course." Still friendly. Worse luck. "Though he was talking about the restoration at market yesterday, so I thought perhaps you meant to stay long enough to see how it looks with the lanterns. He said no one in Brineshell had seen a dead section brought back so cleanly in years. Named the way you matched the flood blue on the north record."
The brush stopped in her fingers.
He had mentioned her name in public.
Not merely "the commission artist." Her, apparently, with enough technical detail attached that a woman from the kitchens now knew the specifics of pigment matching on the north wall.
Outrage first. Then, arriving almost on top of it and therefore more offensive, a low involuntary warmth at the base of her throat. She killed it before it could settle.
He did not get to place her in Brineshell's social memory by the simple act of speaking accurately at market. Except that was precisely what he had done, and the infuriating part was that he had probably not thought of it as placing her anywhere. He haddescribed. That was his nature. Describing, for Mavrek, was not a social strategy. It was breathing. Good work, here, traveled by mouth faster than ferries.
Which meant the damage was not calculated. It was structural. Worse than intentional, because she could not build outrage around it.
"That was unnecessary of him," she said.
The woman -- Talla, she offered a moment later, kitchens and bread tables -- shifted the basket on her hip. "Was it?"
Honest question. No weapon in it. Just a local woman who assumed being named for good work was not a private assault.
Below, footsteps crossed the workshop threshold behind Talla. The scaffold ropes told her first, then the air.
Mavrek emerged from the shadow with two stoppered jars in hand. Talla glanced over her shoulder and grinned.
"There. Speak of the bastard painter."
"Talla," Mavrek said, which in his mouth managed to sound both greeting and warning.
"I was inviting your restorer to stay where she can actually watch the festival instead of fleeing before the decent parts."
His expression did not alter. But something shifted in the set of his jaw, brief and tight -- the look of a man hearing a phrase he had not sanctioned used in front of someone whose reaction mattered to him. Not embarrassment. Exposure.
The flaw: he wanted to claim her publicly so badly that the community had already begun doing it for him, and the recognition that this might cost rather than gift sat on his face for one unguarded instant before he smoothed it.
"She has work," he said.
"Everyone has work. That is why festivals were invented." Talla bounced the basket once against her hip. "Think on it, Sorrel. Lantern Flood happens whether you approve of public life or not."
With that she went off toward the market bridge, leaving behind the smell of bread flour and brine-plums and a problem no longer containable to the scaffold.
Iva kept her eyes on the wall a moment too long.
"You mentioned my work at market," she said, because not saying it would have sat between them like a tool left in the wrong place.
Mavrek set the jars on the tied side shelf. "Aye."
No apology.