"No."
"Good. Trumpets slow everything down."
The exchange had taken less than two minutes. Iva's body was still catching up to the fact that asking had not required penance.
"Thank you," she said.
Dema's one clear eye narrowed. "It was incorrect before. This is not a favor. It is a correction."
That settled the request into bone.
She didnot go down to the dock for Renne's ferry.
From the upper walkway above the reef lane she could see enough: deckhands finishing the knots, two crates of shell glass bound for Lowwater under netting, a priest in marsh gray still arguing with a ferryman about votive reeds. Renne stood near the stern under the low ferry roof, travel coat buttoned, leather portfolio tucked under one arm.
Iva had considered whether courtesy required a final dockside exchange. Then she had decided no. Not from bitterness. From proportion.
The important conversation had already happened. The wall had been corrected. Her name sat on the plaque below the restored sections. One more farewell at the gangplank would only ask the guild to remain central to the morning a little longer. She saw no reason to keep arranging herself around that institution's appetite.
The ferry pushed off. Water widened between hull and dock, first by inches, then by that precise ferryyard measure where shouting could still reverse things, then by more than comfort could bridge. Renne's coat collar lifted once in the wind. The leather portfolio stayed visible a moment longer beneath the roof slats.
Iva watched until the ferry cleared the reef gap and became another moving shape among many on the morning water.
Then she left the upper walkway and crossed toward the reef lane.
A reed seller lifting shutters from her spice rack called across to ask whether lantern smoke would hurt the east mural section. Iva answered yes, if the fools were persistent and the shields poorly set. The woman nodded and went back to her shutters. At the next lane a child carrying three chalk sticks stared at the fading anchor at her throat.
"Will it wash off all at once or by pieces."
"By pieces," Iva said.
He considered this with the seriousness of early scholarship and seemed satisfied.
None of it felt like questioning. The day had already absorbed the larger fact and moved on to practical consequences: smoke shields, cargo counts, claim marks drying in the heat.
By afternoonthe new plaque was mounted.
The painter was a narrow-shouldered islander with oxide stains at two nails and the resigned expression of a man long accustomed to Dema's timing. He was laying the final letters when she came within reading distance.
Restoration by Iva Sorrel, conservator.
No guild. No commission artist. Her name. No one had to politely look at her shoes to do it now.
The pigment he had used for the lettering caught the light with a warmth she recognized. The mineral-oxide base from the courtship panel. The same corrected underblue family she and Mavrek had argued over when the wall still stood half-sick behind salt bloom. Her call, proven right, now carrying the words of her authorship in another hand.
She stood before the plaque and read it once. Then again under her breath.
"Restoration by Iva Sorrel, conservator."
The syllables sat in the lane with no apology attached.
A man from the outer reedbanks stood under the courtship panel with his daughter on his hip and sounded the line out to her in a patient low voice because she had begun asking what letters meant.
"Restoration by Iva Sorrel, conservator," he read.
The child considered the wall, then the plaque, then Iva standing three steps away.
"What's a conservator."