The demonstration was not free for him either.
Iva held her slate too tightly and hoped no one close enough could hear the change in her breathing.
It was the professionalism that undid her. Not his hands on another woman's skin. Not the oil itself, though the scent carried on the sun-warmed air and wrapped around the whole platform. It was the full formal self in public. Mavrek as Brineshell knew him. The same unhurried authority she knew from the workshop, stripped of privacy and offered to witnesses as communal fact.
He finished with the final claim line at the inside of the volunteer's forearm and stepped back so the younger workers could study the placement.
"Do not paint what you are ashamed to witness," he said. "If it is to be hidden, do not use this oil."
The words landed under the same private place where her own restored sections still waited to be given back nameless.
The words landed under Iva's skin like hooks.
The volunteer smiled, thanked him, and stepped out for the first apprentice to practice. Talk resumed at once. Questions about ratios and line thickness. Someone asked whether marsh-red or shell-white carried better against dark skin in late-afternoon light. Mavrek answered without hurry, hands already busy decanting fresh oil.
He still had not looked at her.
That was another part of the charge. He was genuinely occupied. She was not the center of this public self. She stood at the edge in the commission-liaison position with a slate and a throat gone dry, watching a man perform the exact form of public attention she could not stop imagining on her own skin.
When the platform work shifted from demonstration into apprentice practice, Dema reappeared long enough to confiscate three volunteers for lantern rigging and dispatch Iva to confirm pigment storage near the south wall.
Iva stepped down from the platform too quickly and nearly collided with Fetch at the foot of the stairs.
He moved aside with that same wind-scoured cheer. "Careful, restorer."
"I am being careful."
Fetch's eyes flicked once over her face and did that infuriating softening he occasionally managed when he remembered other people were less entertained by themselves than he was.
"Aye," he said. "That is the trouble."
She started past him because standing still felt dangerous. Fetch caught the rail beside her instead of her arm, which she appreciated despite herself.
"Useful information," he said. "Before you walk off thinking no one noticed."
That stopped her.
Of course it did. Useful information was her oldest weakness.
Fetch kept his voice low, easy, pitched for her and not the workers still moving around the platform. "The community is watching you watch."
No flourish. No sly grin this time. Just the fact.
Iva stared at him. "That is a horrible sentence."
"Aye." Fetch's mouth twitched. "Still true."
He did not say what Mavrek intended. He left the information exactly where it belonged: on the visible surface.
They are watching you watch.
Which meant her own face had become part of Brineshell's social record now. Her watching had been legible enough in the demonstration circle that Fetch considered warning her before she stepped back into the general crowd.
"You are being useful in a way I specifically resent," she said.
"My strongest skill."
There the grin came back, small and not unkind.