Iva could have corrected her. Could have said, not whoever, not some anonymous technical hand floating unattached behind guild paperwork and festival courtesy, me. The name was there. It would have taken one sentence.
She did not say it.
"Thank you," she said again, because repetition was easier than truth.
Renne studied her for one moment too long, as if sensing some imbalance she could not diagnose without access to the correct vocabulary. Then she nodded.
"If you decide regarding Norstave, Dema knows where to send for me before I take the first southbound ferry once the festival traffic clears."
She left Iva there on the walkway with the portfolio under her arm.
Iva turned toward the scaffold out of instinct, the oldest route in her days here. She had gone there after difficultconversations, after festival logistics, after waking with escape arithmetic in her blood. The scaffold had always offered one thing no person and no institution could improve by talking over it: immediate necessary labor.
The lane opened.
The scaffold was empty.
Bare uprights remained stacked against the wall where the dismantling crew had left them for later hauling. The working planks were gone. The side shelves removed. No pigment jars. No cloths hung to dry. No brace ropes. The space where five weeks of her life had suspended itself in work now stood open to the air, stripped back to architecture without purpose.
She stopped at the foot of it.
There was nothing left to restore.
The murals were restored.
The guild's offer remained.
Mavrek's claim remained.
Work no longer stood between them and her.
From behind, carried thin through the walkway slats, came the renewed swell of community voices at the wall and, under them, the lower steadier rhythm of festival drums from the island. Brineshell was moving toward its ceremony. The commission that had given her a reason to stay was finished. What she stayed for now, if she stayed, would no longer be the mural.
Iva put one hand on the nearest stripped upright. The wood was warm from the sun.
Then she let it go. Tomorrow there would be no scaffold left to climb instead.
20
THE DECISION
The refusal letter took three sentences to write because the important decisions had always been short. It was the living under the wrong decision that had taken three years.
Iva woke before first bell with the shape of the letter already complete in her mind.
The room above the cooper's shed was still blue with predawn, every edge waiting for light to decide whether it belonged to work or lodging or departure. Her satchel hung from the peg by the door. The ferry timetable lay folded beneath the guild proposal on the table where she had left it last night. Outside, Brineshell had not yet committed itself to noise.
Only the occasional creak of rope against piling, a boatman coughing somewhere down the western lane, the tide turning under the boards with the private confidence of a thing that never asked permission to return.
She lit the lamp anyway.
Not for the room. For the desk.
Paper first. Good paper, not the rough market stock she used for pigment tallies. She had one clean sheet left from the packetshe'd bought in Lowwater Exchange and hoarded against any correspondence serious enough to deserve a decent surface. The guild proposal sat under her palm for one moment while she looked at the seal on the top page and thought, with surprising calm, that she no longer owed it awe.
She moved it aside.
The letter itself came cleanly.