"I know."
"Do you know what it records?"
She cut the next flake free and laid it in the discard tray. "If this is an examination, I will require advance notice."
"It is not an examination." He leaned nearer the wall, bracing one hand above the section while careful not to touch the damp surface. The plank narrowed abruptly with his body on it. There was room to work, technically. There was not room to forget he was there. "The lower line is a flood-turn mark. A marriage band would close the circle. This one leaves it open. They painted the old surge as a thing not yet finished."
Iva glanced where he indicated and, annoyingly, saw at once that he was right. The surviving curve cut upward instead of inward, a directional choice rather than an embrace. Record, not vow.
"You're telling me the iconography before I seal the gap."
"I am telling you not to restore a marriage where there was a flood."
"That would be professionally embarrassing, yes."
"And historically false."
There was something almost dry in that answer, and because she was perched three levels above the walkway with a knife in one hand and an orc tidepainter broadening the air around her, the laugh that threatened her throat came out instead as a sharper breath. She set the knife down and reached for the smallest brush.
This, as it turned out, was the rhythm of their days.
She worked where the damage required technical patience; he climbed when a detail of meaning, sequence, or old Brineshell custom made the image unreadable without context. He passed up warmed cloths, mixed small batches below, spoke rarely, and when he did it was always useful. The usefulness was the problem. Had he been territorial, she could have built a clean annoyance around him and worn it like gear.
Had he flirted, she could have frozen him with a look that made lesser men rediscover their tasks elsewhere. Instead he behaved as if the scaffold was simply the scaffold, the worksimply the work, and her presence on it an established fact worthy of attention but not performance.
It was the lack of pressure that made everything press.
On the third morning she found him already there, stripping wax cloth from a row of pigment jars while thin sunlight ran across the sample boards behind him. He had tied his hair back more severely than the day before. The back of his forearm bore a streak of green-blue dust that had worked into his skin like bruised water.
"You start before the kitchens," she said, because he was forcing conversation by existing competently at dawn.
"The wall does."
"The wall is not making porridge at first bell."
"Nay. But it is drying."
Again that almost-amusement, low and brief. He handed her a folded square of lint-free cloth. Their fingers did not touch. She noticed the absence anyway, which was a useless piece of information and lodged itself beside all the others.
By midday she had established the first section's cleaning response, isolated the softest patches, and confirmed that the chalking on the lower border could be arrested without losing the surviving hand lines. The satisfaction of method settled her. Not fully, because the scaffold still left her with nowhere to put herself except beside him when he climbed and above him when he worked below. But enough that the wall took precedence again for an hour at a time.
An hour, then his voice beneath her.
"Hold there."
She looked down. He stood on the lower cross brace with one hand on the ladder side, head tilted back toward the section she was cleaning on the northern panel.
"What?"
"You have reached the old oil pocket."
He said it the way another man might have said there is rain coming. Iva shifted back to give him room to climb, muttering at the plank for being narrower than it had been a minute earlier.
He came up carrying a stoppered amber bottle and a flat brush with the bristles cut short and blunt. Maruk, presumably. The oil showed through the glass thick as honey caught in low light.
"I thought you wanted the first lift complete before test."
"I did." He set the bottle on the plank between them and crouched with impossible steadiness for a man that size. "You have enough exposed now."