Enough exposed. The wall, certainly.
Iva folded her arms because it kept her hands occupied. "Then demonstrate."
His gaze flicked to her face and held for one fraction too long. "Aye."
He unstopped the bottle. The smell came up at once, warmer than the workshop trace she had caught on him the day before. Salt, crushed something green, resin, and an undernote that sat low in her body before she had any business letting it. Professional hazard, she told herself. Strong materials often had a bodily register. Fumes, resin heat, old binders. She was not a novice trembling because an orc uncorked oil near her mouth.
Mavrek tipped a little into a shallow shell palette and spoke while he worked, the words clipped and exact.
"Pressed reef flora, salt, resin, warming compound. Thin enough to move into the cracks before it catches. If the old layer still lives, the color wakes instead of dulling. Watch the edge."
She did watch the edge. She watched his hand, too, which was inconveniently attached to the edge at the time. His fingers were stained amber at the tips where the oil had eaten into old callus. The brush moved with a painter's confidence rather thana conservator's fear, not careless, never that, but willing to trust the material to answer if handled correctly.
The first stroke kissed the exposed seam.
The change was faint. A sheen first, then a subtle darkening under the fractured blue, not wetness exactly but a return of depth. The old pigment took the oil and seemed to loosen its jaw. A line that had looked dead a breath before responded with a hidden blue-green flare.
And yes, there, if one looked for it properly: the slight rise of warmth through the surface itself, visible in the way the oil thinned and spread differently over living binder than over chalked loss.
Iva leaned in before she thought better of it. "Again."
He did, slower this time.
"You see it," he said.
"The response pattern at the seam." Her voice came out flatter than she intended, so she added, "I'm not blind."
"I had not thought you were."
No mockery. Which made the heat in her face more irritating.
He laid a second stroke, then used the pad of his thumb to steady the wall beneath the brush head without actually smearing the line. That thumb, broad and scarred and stained with amber oil, should not have been the most interesting thing in Brineshell.
Yet there she was, noting the sure pressure of it, the steadiness, the controlled drag of the brush against old stone as if she had misplaced her professional priorities somewhere under the scaffold and not yet found them again.
The oil's warmth breathed up through the surface. She saw it in the mural first. She absolutely saw it in the mural first. The blue deepened, the old white wash took on a low glow, and thedamaged edge ceased looking like a corpse and returned, briefly, to being part of a painted whole.
"How long before set?" she asked.
"Depends on humidity. Here, not long. The wall drinks faster during dry-channel weeks. During flood months it lingers."
"And if overapplied?"
"It goes gummy. Shines too hard. Makes the color read falsely." He glanced toward the flood line running below the restored section. "A grief scene starts looking like celebration. A marriage reads like weather."
She should have found it affected. Instead she understood exactly what he meant and disliked the ease of it.
"You speak about pigment like a priest speaks about sin."
"A poor priest, then." He recorked the bottle. "Sin is simpler."
That nearly got her again.
She took the shell palette from him before she could stop herself. The oil sat in the curved shell warm as living skin. She touched the brush tip lightly to the remaining oil and tested it on a fragment no larger than her thumbnail, because if one was to be unsettled, one might as well produce data from it.
Warmth. Faint, immediate.
Not on her, not really. Through the brush, through the shell, through the surface responding beneath it. But enough that her pulse skipped once and then had the poor manners to keep going.