"And you agreed to it."
Dema met her eyes squarely. "I agreed to getting the wall restored before Lantern Flood by the best person available. The guild paperwork was the road that existed to reach you."
"I signed it without reading this section," Iva said, because the shame wanted witness of its own, apparently.
"Aye." Dema's voice stayed flat. "Many people sign the wound they already expect."
The sentence landed so cleanly it was almost cruel.
Iva shut the packet with more force than paper merited. "I need air."
"Take it quickly. The east scaffold comes down for half an hour at second bell."
Of course. Even in ruin, scheduling.
She carriedthe contamination with her to the wall.
The afternoon light at the scaffold was too bright for the mood she brought to it. The repaired sections looked mercilessly alive. She climbed anyway.
Mavrek arrived ten minutes later with two fresh pigment jars and one glance too many.
He read surfaces for a living. Today she was one. Her strokes came faster, harder, cleaner in some places and almost punishing in others. Not sloppy. Never sloppy. Angry precision. The kind that improved output while destroying the body executing it.
Mavrek tied the jars to the side shelf and said nothing.
He worked below her on the lower border for a while, passing up cloths when needed. No questions. Nowhat happened.At last he said, while smoothing a wash under the restored witness line, "The oldest sections of this wall carry no individual painter's name."
Iva blinked. "That seems inefficient."
"Aye." He sounded almost dry. "There was no recording custom yet. The early bands were collective. Village memory and painter memory, no separate marks."
She kept working, though every nerve in her had sharpened to the new topic.
"My grandmother's generation argued about changing it," he said. "Some wanted every section signed. Some thought names on a public wall were pride inviting storm."
Not comfort. Not obvious parallel. History offered in a fragment that refused usefulness on demand.
"Which side won," she said. It came out more like accusation than question.
Mavrek mixed the next shell-white wash in silence before answering.
"Enough of one side to mark some sections. Enough of the other to leave others unnamed."
"Helpful," she said.
"It was not meant to be." He looked up briefly, not at her face but at the line of work she'd just laid down. "Only true."
He had not offered the fragment to solve her. He had offered it because it belonged to the wall. Brineshell had been arguing the question for generations. No one had won decisively enough to silence the other side.
She finished the section instead of asking more.
The work that came out of her over the next hour was terrible for her nerves and excellent for the wall. The witness figures sharpened into presence without losing age. The ceremonial line warmed under the new glaze exactly enough to read as skin heat rather than ornament. The repaired shell-white catches along the throat and wrist held light as if they had not spent years rotting under salt damage and bad patching.
Mavrek saw it. She knew the moment he saw it because his hand stilled on the lower border.
He still did not ask what had shifted in her.
When the last wash settled, Iva stepped back on the scaffold plank and looked at the panel full-on.