She slung the tool satchel over her shoulder and started down.
On the midway landing she stopped because stopping was somehow easier than turning her head to see if he was watching. The drums carried across the water again, joined now by reed-pipe scales and the shouted correction of someone drilling children into ceremonial order. Lantern Flood was coming.
Behind her, Mavrek said only, "Mind the second rung. It sticks."
Ordinary. Infuriatingly ordinary.
She stepped over the bad rung and kept going.
The walkback to her room was the longest she had taken in Brineshell.
She crossed the covered market with her jaw tight enough to ache. She knew what people here believed a public claim meant.Not possession in the mainland sense. Witness. Declaration. A thing done where a community could hold both parties inside memory and custom. A name said in front of other names so it could not be quietly denied later. The opposite of an appendix line, then.
By the time she reached the outside stairs to her room, her pulse was high and stupid. She climbed fast, went inside, shut the door, and stood with her back against it as if someone had followed.
No one had. That was part of the problem.
The room smelled of sea damp, lamp oil, and the rosemary soap she had bought from the quay woman who watered all her stock. On the small table lay the commission calendar, a stack of notes, and the ferry timetable she had already unfolded once this week and then refolded with unnecessary precision.
She crossed to it at once.
If directness had been demanded of her and refused in the body, then she would answer with mathematics. She lit the lamp, flattened the timetable, and began.
East flood-record panel: now recoverable, two days to completion if the weather held.
Upper witness band: one and a half days.
Central current braid and claim border repairs: two more.
Protective final seal: half a day.
Six days.
Not full completion. Not perfection. But the wall would hold. The public face of it would stand. Another contractor could be paid to close minor edges after she left.
She wrote the six-day estimate in the margin and turned to the ferry sheet.
There it was. Morning departure on the western tide four days before Lantern Flood, transfer at Lowwater Exchange bydusk. A clean exit. By the time Mavrek lifted the ceremony brush on festival morning, she could be nowhere in Brineshell at all.
She had done this before. Not this exact commission. But the arithmetic itself, yes. Calculate the necessary minimum. Decide what could be abandoned. Pack tools in reverse order of need. Leave before the local affection, or irritation, or habit of recognition could root too deeply.
She reached for the ferry sheet again and a second scrap of paper slid loose from beneath it, catching against her wrist. The math had only just closed around one choice before the other hand wrote itself back into it.
His note.
She had shoved it into the timetable without realizing. The paper landed across the schedule columns with his neat hand showing through the lamp glow.
Wait until the stone holds warmth on the inside of your wrist.
Iva stared at it with flat disbelief, as if the room itself had conspired against her by preserving evidence.
The math remained sound. Six days. Four clear before the festival. Enough coin for passage.
The ritual should have closed around her like armor.
It did not.
Because the crack had already formed: a pigment-sample wall crowded with reef blue and marsh green they had argued over shoulder to shoulder; a commission contract that had proved she had been helping build her own disappearance; one blunt declaration on a scaffold with the drums carrying the sound of witness under it, and his white knuckles the only sign that the bluntness had cost him anything at all.