Iva lifted the brush again and resumed the wash line at the flatter angle. The bristles tracked cleaner. Mavrek returned to the mixing table after a moment and said nothing more. The workshop settled around them into lamp hiss and stonescrape and the occasional muted knock from the island platform beyond.
By the time she finally set the brush down, the night had thickened outside the slats and the festival lanterns on the far platform had become floating amber points across the inner water. Iva flexed her cramped hand once.
He had corrected her brush angle first. Then he had described her hands. The admiration would not come loose because the accuracy beneath it was too sound, and she could not dismiss accuracy without becoming someone she refused to be.
Criticism could be shelved. This was worse. This was being seen correctly by a man who had already begun, without asking, to make the seeing public. And by Lantern Flood the whole settlement would have benches for it.
7
THE WORKSHOP DOOR
He said he was not going to pretend he did not want her, and if she would rather leave that was what she should do, and Iva put her pack down.
The words landed in the workshop with no more force than if he had commented on the weather, which was somehow worse than if he'd dragged them out and made a scene of wanting. She stood at the worktable with the strap of her restoration pack looped over one wrist, lamp heat low against her cheek, and stared at the folded cloths beside the jar he'd just sealed as if one of them might rearrange itself into a sensible answer.
Mavrek had said it once. No repetition. No prowling advance. He had turned back to the pigment slab almost immediately, grinding a last measure of blue into oil with that same infuriating patience he brought to everything. The lamp threw gold over the side of his face, over the stained backs of his hands, over the worktable where her pack waited half lifted.
If you would rather leave, do it now.
Clear enough for any fool. Clear enough for a woman who had built three years of her life on exits and still stood there not taking one.
Her fingers loosened from the pack strap.
The bag settled onto the worktable with a soft, decisive thud.
Her brushes and knives sat inside it. Her careful professional life remained on Mavrek's table because she had not carried it out when offered the chance.
He did not look up at once. He finished the turn of the grinding stone, scraped the pigment into the shallow dish, covered it with wax cloth, and only then lifted his head.
Their eyes met across the lamplight.
No triumph in his face. No satisfaction either. The offer had been genuine. He had meant to let her walk away if walking was what she chose.
"Close the door, woman," he said quietly. "If you stay."
The address struck low and hot through her belly.
She could still leave. Even now. Pick the pack back up, make some withering remark about festival fever rotting the male mind, go up the walkway to her room and lie to herself all night with some dignity left.
Instead she turned, crossed the few steps to the workshop door, and swung it shut.
The latch fell into place with a small iron click that seemed to travel through her whole body.
The room changed at once. The world outside reduced to muffled lantern noise and cut-off festival sound; the workshop had always been intimate by accident, and now it was intimate on purpose. The whole settlement remained only one door away, which was perhaps why the choice felt so ruinously alive.
Iva kept her hand on the latch one beat too long. "This is a terrible idea," she said to the door.
"Aye."
She turned back. He stood where he'd been, one hand braced on the worktable, shirt open at the throat, hair partly loose, not advancing. Waiting without any visible strain in it.
She hated him a little for how safe that patience made him feel. So she crossed the room in six sharp steps and stopped close enough to smell the maruk on his hands.
The air between them was thick with it. Warm resin, sea-salt, crushed green things, lamp oil, stone dust, and underneath all of it the darker heat of him that the workshop had been soaking into her for two weeks.
"You spent yesterday telling the market what my hands could do," she said.
"Aye."