Her hand moved almost of its own accord, revising the sequence in neat, tight script. She redrew the arrows. Added an alternative branch for partial underbinding. Marked theprobable location of the old oil pocket where he said it would sit, because the longer she looked at the wall in memory the more likely it seemed that he had indeed identified the structure properly. She did it fast, with irritation snapping through her like static.
She did not want to want the fix. She wanted the original plan to stand because it was hers. Instead she improved the page before he had fully crossed the walkway outside.
There. Accurate. Annoying.
The workshop had altered around her in his absence. Not physically. She could still see the central table, the scaffold poles, the sample strips, the shadowed reed screen at the back. Yet the room now possessed edges she had not mapped when she entered, because earlier it had only been a workspace.
Now it was also the place where a man had looked at her notes, seen the fault, and then looked at her as though fault and face belonged to one continuous surface worth close study.
Exit first.
The habit came back so quickly it made bile rise in her throat. Main walkway door: wide, visible from three directions, poor choice if the path outside crowded during market hours. Rear access: scaffolding opening directly onto the reef wall support track, narrower but faster. Window slats on the west side, too small for much beyond air, but useful for sound.
Distance to Reedwalk lodging: three turns, one stair, less than four minutes if unobstructed, six if festival workers blocked the inner bridge.
She stood very still in the middle of the workshop while the old calculations assembled themselves around her bones.
She had not done this in three years. Not since the first weeks after the guild hearing, when every new town had felt one accusation away from becoming another place she could not remain. Not since she had taught herself to take rooms withback stairs, to work near doors, to keep her papers wrapped and ready to move. The habits had quieted with time. Or she had told herself they had.
Perhaps she had only gotten better at choosing places dim enough not to wake them.
Brineshell would not permit dimness. The reef ring threw light everywhere. The wall demanded public labor. And now there was Mavrek, who had looked at her plan before he looked at her face, which should have made him safer. Instead it made him worse. Because when he finally had looked at her, the attention had not changed. Same patience. Same exactness. Same unblinking read.
He was right about the fixative. She had mapped the exits after.
Mavrek was the problem. And Brineshell, damn it, looked built to remember exactly the sort of thing she had spent three years trying not to leave behind.
2
THE SCAFFOLD
The scaffold was small, bright, and shared, and Mavrek's scent reached her before his voice.
On the second morning Iva climbed it before first meal, carrying a wrapped roll of brushes in her teeth and a tray of knives against her hip, because if she started early enough perhaps Brineshell would forget to look up at the wall and remember its own business. An idiotic hope. The reef ring gathered light and flung it everywhere.
By the time she set her tools on the plank, the inner water below was already flashing white-green, and the wall at her shoulder had taken on that deceptive softness old mineral surfaces sometimes wore in hard light, as if the paint were skin and not stone and salt and labor layered over generations.
She chose the least-damaged section first. Establish method. Confirm substrate stability. See how Brineshell's old painters had worked before she risked the uglier wounds. Also: begin where failure would be smallest if the local tidepainter proved impossible to endure in close quarters.
He did not make that test easy on her by being impossible in any convenient way.
Below, on the workshop floor and the narrow platform at the scaffold base, Mavrek moved through the morning with the steady rhythm of a man who knew where every jar belonged without looking. Grinding stone against pigment slab. The soft knock of corks. Cloth unrolled, refolded. She could hear him more often than she could see him, and that ought to have made him easier to ignore. It did not. The sound made its own map under her skin.
Worse when he climbed, because then the plank accepted his weight in a long answering bend and the smell of him rose ahead of his head and shoulders into her space: mineral oil first, sea salt, then that lower warmth she kept trying to classify as workshop heat and failing.
He came up the ladder without hurry and without wasting motion, broad hands dark with old pigment, a bundle of cloths looped through one wrist.
"Your left edge dries faster than the rest," he said.
Not good morning. Naturally.
Iva kept her knife angled under a curled blister of paint. "That is because the sun strikes it first."
"Aye. Wet it less."
"Thank you. I had planned to drown the wall for variety."
One of those brief almost-smiles moved through his face and vanished. He set the cloth bundle beside her knee, then looked not at her but at the section she'd exposed, his attention sharp enough to feel like a second instrument in the work. "That line beneath the white shell mark is older than the upper marriage band."