3. What the Paint Remembers #2
The reef flat smelled of salt heat and living stone.
Small crabs vanished sideways into cracks at her shadow.
She crouched near a seam of exposed mineral and chipped three samples from the reef lip, bagging them by instinctive color names first and proper notation second.
Pale green veined with chalk. Blue-gray granular with shell sparkle.
A rusty red deposit that looked promising in wet light and much less promising once dry.
"That one turns brown when ground."
The voice came from her left, cheerful as weather and almost as impossible to resent on first hearing.
Iva straightened with the red sample still in hand.
A red-brown orc stood ankle-deep in a tide pool ten paces off, a spear trident slung over one shoulder and a woven catch bag hanging against one hip.
Shorter than Mavrek by enough to be noticeable only because she had, against her will, acquired a scale for that sort of thing.
Broad through the chest, wind-scoured face, expression open in the way of men who had never once needed to ration friendliness.
"Useful," she said. "Thank you."
"You are welcome. That blue-gray there is the better match for your north panel if you grind out the shell grit first." He stepped closer and pointed with two wet fingers at the bag by her boot.
"And the pale green is not green once heated.
More a sad yellow. Brineshell ruined a whole fishing tally to learn that lesson. "
Three samples corrected in one breath. Annoying. Also useful enough that she could not pretend otherwise.
"You usually ambush strangers on the reef to improve their classification?" she asked.
"Only the interesting ones." He grinned, entirely without shame. "Fetch."
"Iva Sorrel."
"Aye, I know who you are. Hard not to. You are the woman on Mavrek's scaffold."
There it was again, the grammar she was still learning.
She tied off the corrected bags one at a time. "I am the woman restoring Dema's wall."
"That too."
Fetch crouched by another pool and reached in elbow-deep without looking. When his hand came out it held a reef eel thrashing around his wrist. He thumped it once against the stone, neat and practiced, and slid it into the catch bag.
"He said you read paint the way old marsh wives read births," Fetch said.
Iva stared at him. "Did he."
"Aye." Fetch looked mildly delighted by her expression. "Compliment, in case you wondered. Mavrek does not waste praise."
Horrible word. She bent to her sample bag again because looking busy was easier than answering. "If he has opinions on my work, he may keep them for the wall."
"He has opinions on everything. You will suffer."
That one pulled the corner of her mouth before she could stop it. Fetch saw and looked even more entertained, which seemed unfair.
He speared another fish in the shallows with insulting ease.
"His mother," he said, quieter now, as if the wind had changed direction and he simply happened to be talking into it.
"She and a man from the outer islands. Long time.
They kept it quiet. Not hidden, exactly.
Just -- unwitnessed. When the man drowned in a flood surge, the settlement had no record. No bond on any wall.
His family said what they liked about the arrangement afterward, and nobody could argue because there was nothing painted to hold up against the telling."
He pulled the trident point from the rock and inspected it, turning the barb in the light as though checking its edge was the more interesting task.
Iva said nothing. The tide pool between them reflected a scrap of cloud.
"Mavrek was twelve," Fetch said. "She never recovered the argument."
He left it there. No moral. No and that is why he is the way he is. Just the fact, rough-edged and dropped on the reef flat like another corrected mineral.
"You tell every visitor household history while they work?" she asked, because the alternative was to let the thought show on her face.
"Only the interesting ones," Fetch said again. "And only when they are misclassifying more than minerals."
Insufferable man.
He rose, water streaming from one calf, and nudged the three corrected bags with his toes. "Blue-gray for the north. Red-brown only if you want disappointment. Yellow-stone never near heat. That one explodes petty and vindictive. Ask the apprentice with half an eyebrow."
"I will endeavor not to repeat the lesson."
"Good." He hitched the catch bag higher on his shoulder. "Tell Mavrek I found better eel on the west lip. He has been choosing the lazy pools."
Then he was gone along the reef shelf with the easy balance of a man born to wet stone, lifting one hand without looking back.
Iva stayed where she was until he vanished around the curve of exposed reef.
Three corrected mineral samples in her bag. Useful. Verifiable.
The other thing he had given her sat heavier. A mother loved in private and left with nothing anyone would publicly confirm. The inference from there to Mavrek's exactness around witnesses was already half-drawn in her mind, and she distrusted it for that reason. Too neat. Too quick.
She had been wrong before when she let a partial picture harden into certainty. A single visible fact was never the whole story, no matter how beautifully it completed the pattern.
She closed the sample bag and started back toward the workshop over the wet shining rock, salt drying on her ankles. One incomplete shard. Three corrected samples. The memory of a hidden courtship scene under whitewash, still warm with its own buried clarity.
And the low persistent ache of wanting to uncover more of it before anyone told her to stop, or decided which part of the truth was fit for daylight.