Iva stood over the panel with a shell dish in one hand and the oxide already mixed thin in the other. "No."
That got his eyes on her.
"No," he repeated.
"No," she said again, because fatigue had stripped her of both diplomacy and appetite for it. "The existing fixative is not what you think it is."
He straightened from the table. The room tightened.
"It is maruk cut with fish glue," he said. "The same blend used on the lower claim bands for three generations."
"Not on this section."
"Because?"
There was the reasonable challenge. There was the twenty years of tidepainting behind it. There was the exact point where, in the old version of her life, she would have softened, qualified, made her competence small enough to pass without threatening anyone else's authority.
Iva set the oxide dish down with deliberate care. "Because the craquelure at the left witness circle does not feather like fish glue failure. It lifts in protein scales. And because the old shell-white on the throat line has the chalk bite of ash-cut casein underneath it. Fermented-milk binder, not fish. Whoever painted this section used a non-standard base to keep the ceremonial whites warmer."
Mavrek's expression did not change. "You think."
"I know."
The silence after that had edges.
He came around the easel to the panel, close enough that the day's heat in him reached her before his words did. He studiedthe surviving fracture line she had indicated, thumb braced under his jaw. The light was poor and they both knew it, but not too poor for what mattered.
"Casein on an exterior courtship panel would have been foolish," he said.
"Yes."
"Then why would a tidepainter use it?"
"Because he wanted the skin tones to hold warmth through salt exposure and thought he could protect the surface with heavier top sealing." Iva pointed to the surviving witness figure. "He overestimated the seal and underestimated storm damage. He was still right about the warmth."
Mavrek looked from the panel to the oxide dish as if both had personally offended him.
"If you are wrong," he said, "the patch goes dead in an hour."
"Then we remove two inches of failure instead of two feet."
He almost smiled at that, but the expression hardened before it formed. "Ach. You came ready to argue."
"No. I came ready to be right."
That landed. She saw it land.
The old reflex rose anyway, late and useless: soften it, retract, say something less direct before the male pride in the room turns into a new problem. But she was twelve hours into the workday, bone-tired, hot, and suddenly unwilling to spend one more scrap of energy making herself easy to surpass.
Mavrek took the finer brush from the rack and handed it to her handle-first.
"Then show me."
Iva did.
She loaded the brush with the oxide-thinned base and laid a test patch no longer than two inches into the most damaged margin of the witness circle, precisely where the original had failed beyond salvage but the surviving underlayer still offeredenough information to judge the result honestly. The stroke went on dark and ugly. It always did. Oxide needed drying time before it told the truth.
They waited.