Iva met her eye. "I know where the form is too."
For one beat the older woman regarded her with that flat administrative patience she reserved for weather and self-inflicted complications.
"Then the form it is," she said.
No comfort. No lecture. Only the paper routed into the system, which somehow made the concession feel official enough to sting.
The wall waited above her, indifferent.
She spent the next two hours on work that did not require the missing fixative and despised every minute.
When a runner finally came, it was not one of Dema's market boys.
Mavrek crossed the square himself.
She saw him first from the corner of her eye, carrying a wooden materials tray in one hand and a jar crate in the other. He moved under the covered walkway without hurry, workshopdust still on one forearm. He looked like a man delivering materials because materials had been requested.
That, perversely, set her teeth on edge harder than if he had come armed for a quarrel.
She climbed down to the midway landing before he reached the ladder. No reason to force him higher. No reason to let him touch the plank where she had spent the day proving things to herself.
He stopped at the platform and set the tray against the rail with careful economy. Three jars, wax-sealed and labeled. One packet of chalk temper tied in oiled cloth. One narrow folded sheet tucked under the twine.
"Thin," he said, touching the first jar. "Holding. The third is cut for the older shell-lime if the edge still drinks too fast."
His voice stayed level. So did his face, mostly.
He reached into the tray again and brought out a small clay cup of the same cold dock tea the market women brewed. Set it beside the jars without comment.
"You forgot again," he said.
She had. Seven hours, no food, no drink. The cup sat there with the jars like a minor practical accusation.
"I did not put tea on the requisition form," she said.
"I reallocate."
She almost laughed. The tea was cold and good and the fact that he knew she would forget to eat was information she did not have time to process alongside the maruk jars and the wanting in his face that he left there without asking it to work on his behalf.
Iva put her hand on the nearest jar because not doing so would have looked stranger. The glass was warm from his grip.
"You could have sent this through a runner."
"A runner would have sloshed the holding mix."
Practical. Entirely practical. She drank the tea because refusing it would have been pettier than she could afford.
He handed her the folded sheet. "Ratios."
The paper brushed her fingers. His hand withdrew at once.
There were things available to say then, and none of them would have survived daylight without humiliating her or simplifying him.
She said, "Thank you."
The words came out clipped enough to pass for functional.
"Aye," he said.