No greeting. No I am Mavrek, welcome to Brineshell. Straight to professional correction. Efficient, blunt, and so precisely placed that her spine went hot under her work blouse.
"That sequence assumes a neutral underlayer," she said.
"Aye."
"The commission brief suggested fish glue."
"The commission brief was written by a woman who sees deadlines and not paint."
That, regrettably, was accurate enough to be Dema's portrait done in three lines. Iva's jaw tightened. She bent over the paper,reread her own notation, then looked toward the wall through the workshop opening, mentally tracing the amber cast she had seen under the lower surviving fragments. Warming binder. Luminous finish. Not fish glue. Not rush varnish.
Maruk.
She hated the way recognition came with a clean, immediate drop in her stomach. Not because he had embarrassed her. No one else was here to witness it. Because he was right, and the correction had been exact, and she did not have room in this contract for the kind of man who corrected her without performing.
"You named the oil from surface residue?" she asked.
"From residue. From the smell. From the way the old painter cut the blue." He looked at her then, at last, and his eyes were a strange dusk-water color, amber and gray together. Unblinking. "You saw the resin on the lower frieze."
Not a question. A placement of fact. He had not only seen the error in her plan, he had seen the route by which she would understand it.
Iva wanted, quite suddenly, to dislike him on principle. Territorial local artist interferes with outside conservator. She had handled that kind of man before, could parry him blindfolded. But there was nothing theatrical in his stance, nothing petty. He was paying attention in the same exact way he presumably paid attention to walls, weather, wounds. Without mercy because mercy had nothing to do with accuracy.
"I had not yet confirmed it," she said.
"You would have."
He said it as flatly as he had said no. Her shoulders prickled under it.
"Perhaps."
The corner of one broad mouth twitched. Not amusement exactly. Recognition. "Mavrek."
So this was Brineshell's tidepainter. Of course it was. No one else in a place like this would speak about damaged murals as if they were family members misbehaving.
"Sorrel," she said.
"I know."
Infuriating.
He moved around the table then, not close enough to crowd her, not far enough to be dismissed. His hand hovered above her sequence notes again. The back of that hand was crossed by old brush scars and faint newer cuts that looked reef-made rather than workshop-made.
"You have the first lift here." He indicated the upper margin of the plan. "Move it lower. Take the dead patch from the side where the salt has already broken the grip. Then oil test. Then heat cloth. If the maruk rises, you know the old layer yet lives."
"And if it does not?"
"Then the painter was a fool, and you may -- what is the word. Proceed."
He had searched for it. Not a man who weighed every sentence for elegance before releasing it. Just a man used to speaking inside his own craft and occasionally missing the bureaucratic verb. The small fumble disarmed her more than the rest of it.
"Proceed as written," she said. "Yes."
He watched the correction happen. Gods, he watched everything.
She wrote the new order in the margin before she could reconsider the indignity of doing it under his gaze. The pencil bit the paper harder than necessary.
"You keep maruk as a standard fixative here?" she asked, because a technical question was safer than acknowledging anything else.