"Aye."
Still no apology.
He rinsed the brush, set it down, and finally looked at the slate in her hand. "What did Dema send?"
The question startled her because for one disloyal moment she had forgotten the requisition entirely.
"Shell-white stock for the east flood wall. And a request that you stop stealing the best reed labels from the storage office."
"I do not steal. I reallocate."
"With astonishing consistency."
She handed him the slate. Their fingers touched, dry this time, no oil. The contact still landed.
Mavrek read the requisition in silence, nodded once, and set it on the low chest by his stool. Then he turned back to the sample strip as if the room full of failures were not a disclosure of any particular significance.
The thought of her own beauty collection still sat at the back of her throat. The hidden underpaint handprint. The gold edge on the repaired navigation line. The exact look of the named error left named. Things she kept nowhere but memory, because writing them down would risk them becoming readable to someone else.
She did not tell him.
The not-telling happened so quickly and naturally it almost escaped notice. She simply held the information back and let the silence close over it. Then, because some traitorous corner of her mind was paying better attention than the rest, she noticed the withholding after it had already occurred.
Interesting. Not to be examined tonight.
"If you ever find the color," she said instead, because the air had grown too quiet around the things unsaid, "I assume the settlement will hear about it at market whether they want to or not."
Mavrek's gaze stayed on the strip in his hand. "Aye."
"Horrifying."
"You are still here." The words landed like a future disguised as observation.
That one lodged.
She had no answer that was not more personal than the room required. So she gave him none. She inclined her head toward the slate on the chest, toward the shelves, toward the whole embarrassing private weather system of his unsolved color, and turned for the workshop door.
At the reed screen she glanced back once.
Mavrek had already returned to the sample in his hand, lamp light catching the furrow between his brows as he watched the pigment dry into another near-miss. Twenty years of trying and still no color. Just a man continuing the search because not continuing was apparently impossible.
Iva went back through the front workshop and out into Brineshell's dusk with the knowledge sitting strange and warm inside her, and the confession she had almost made still caught between her teeth like a stone she could neither swallow nor spit. Tomorrow she would go back to the scaffold carrying both.
13
THE ARGUMENT ON THE WALL
They had been on the scaffold for twelve hours and the light was failing and Iva was about to make the call that proved she belonged on this wall.
By the time they moved the damaged courtship-record panel into the restoration studio beside the scaffold storage, both of them wore the day plainly. Mineral dust at the cuffs. Salt dried white at the collar edges. The small raw ache in the shoulders that came from holding careful angles too long above one's head. The studio gave them better control over the panel and worse control over the mood.
Closed access, one high lamp, sample boards pinned on the back wall in crowded ranks, a worktable too narrow for indifference.
The panel on the easel between them had lost most of its warmth. Two witness figures remained only as ghost outlines. The original maruk-red ceremonial lines had degraded to a rotten brown and the surviving shell-white highlights had taken on the yellowed weakness of bad repairs laid over worse. Standard matching would make the section readable. It would not make it true.
Mavrek ground marsh-red at the side table, jaw set in the particular line it took when he was deep in a material question.
"If you put iron oxide under that wash," he said without looking up, "the existing fixative will cloud. You'll kill the lift."