She could leave four days before Lantern Flood, finish the critical wall sections in time, and send Renne a note by morning tide agreeing to Norstave in principle. The arithmetic still held.
The arithmetic no longer felt like safety. It felt memorized.
Each evening her room closed around her too tightly. She sat on the cot with the guild proposal in her lap and saw only Mavrek's workshop wall behind it, sample strips pinned in reef blue and marsh green, his notes in that blunt precise hand. She unfolded the ferry sheet and smelled maruk oil where there was none.
Sleep became a series of wrong doors.
On the fourth evening she came down from the scaffold after dark with blue grit in the lines of her palms and a neck so tight she wanted to put her head through the nearest wall simply to change its angle. Dema called up from the ledger table that the east braces would be shifted at first bell. Iva answered something likely professional. She did not hear herself.
Back in her room she tried to wash the day off at the basin. The water turned blue. Her hands shook slightly from the hours of fine work, a tremor too small for anyone but her to notice. She dried them, sat on the cot, and reached for the guild proposal one more time because the ritual of studying it had become a kind of compulsion.
The proposal was not on the table.
It had slid off during the day, or she had knocked it reaching for the lamp that morning — it lay face-down on the floor between the cot and the wall, its clean official corner bent where it had landed against Mavrek's folded note. The two documents sat touching on the floorboards like an argument conducted entirely in paper. Wait until the stone holds warmth on the inside of your wrist.
And below it, the guild's fee column, visible through the good paper where his handwriting bled through from behind. Neither future had consented to remain abstract.
She picked up both sheets and her hands would not stop shaking.
Not from the scaffold hours. From the fact that every night for three nights she had picked up these same two documents and handled them as if they were separate decisions, and they had found each other on the floor without her help.
She put them on the table, pressed her palms flat against the wood, and breathed until the tremor stilled.
Then she turned toward the covered walkway instead of the bed.
No plan assembled itself around the turn. No speech. No clean internal sentence at all. Only movement, the body's exhausted decision to stop circling a wound and put a hand on something solid if such a thing still existed.
The walkwayboards held the day's warmth in patches where lantern light fell. Below, the tide had blacked out the mud edges and turned the channels to ink. Workers on the central island were lifting claim-arches into place, voices traveling over the water in bursts. The whole settlement had begun building the ceremony in earnest.
The workshop door stood open to the main room. Beyond it, the kesh at the back held steadier light.
Mavrek was there at the side table, sleeves pushed to the elbow, working over a shallow mixing bowl with the deliberate patience he brought to every task that mattered. Oil glowed amber in the lamp. A set of narrower ceremony brushes lay wrapped beside his hand. He had his hair loose for once, dark against the back of his neck and shoulder. His forearms were streaked with old pigment, blue-green and amber caught permanently in the grain of him.
He looked up when her step sounded on the board.
No surprise.
No triumph.
Only recognition, immediate and complete, as if some part of him had expected the doorway to fill with her sooner or later and had made peace with either answer.
"Iva," he said.
Her name, nothing else.
She had thought perhaps the smell, or the room, or the three days of being absent from it would force a break in him. Instead he dipped the stirring stick once more through the oil, set it across the bowl, and nudged the wooden stool nearer the table with one bare foot.
"Sit," he said.
Then he went back to his work.
The ordinariness of it struck lower than any seduction could have. There was no drama here to push against. He had been here the entire time, unchanged.
She did not sit.
The kesh was warm at the back of the workshop, warmed stones banked under reed matting and furs folded at the edge of the sleep platform. Sample strips and color trials climbed the wall nearest the bed in narrow pinned rows, twenty years of unfinished seeking. The room held work everywhere, even in its private spaces.
Mavrek reached for another small jar and loosened the stopper.