6. Festival Preparations
FESTIVAL PREPARATIONS
Iva increased her working hours on the twelfth day because deadlines were simpler than festivals and infinitely less interested in her private life.
Simple plan: finish the restoration before the ceremony forced the whole settlement into public ritual, collect the remaining payment, take the first available ferry out of Brineshell, and let the reef wall stand behind whatever claims and bonds and painted witnesses the community intended without her body anywhere near them.
Brineshell, naturally, responded by becoming more social every hour.
From the scaffold she watched the settlement reorganize itself around Lantern Flood.
The central island platform had grown visible above the inner water now, not just as a skeleton of poles but as a real structure with railings, hanging lantern frames, and broad steps rising toward the ceremony stage.
Traders came in by ferry with baskets of salt cakes, smoked eel, shell ornaments, and bolts of festival cloth in colors too cheerful for her taste.
The covered market thickened with bodies.
Children carried wax candles by the crate in solemn little processions.
Dema crossed three walkways at once in the manner of a woman attempting to schedule weather.
Even half-built, the stage looked designed to make a public fact out of whatever stood on it.
Iva worked harder.
She took first light on the scaffold and stayed there past the point any reasonable restorer would have called the day's line.
Her hands ached. Her shoulders burned. The repaired sections spread steadily under her labor all the same, and each newly stabilized edge felt like proof that order remained possible if one simply kept moving.
Mavrek adjusted to the extended hours as if he had expected this exact response, bringing fresh cloths without remark, replacing empty pigment bowls, climbing beside her when the iconography required his eye and leaving when it did not.
The rhythm between them had settled into something so functional it might have been mistaken for safety.
It was not safety. It was efficiency with a pulse under it.
By midday the sun had turned the inner reef water into hammered white metal. Iva was reworking a damaged wash near the lower claim band when a voice from below said, cheerful and entirely unwelcome, "You will stay for the ceremony, then?"
She looked down.
An orc woman stood at the scaffold base with a basket of brine-plums against one hip, a strip of shell-white cloth tied around her hair, and flour on one forearm as if she'd come straight from the bread tables.
Middle years, sturdy build, the kind of face that had been absorbing gossip professionally for decades and now distributed it with the serene conviction of a public service.
"Pardon?" Iva said.
"Lantern Flood. The claim day." The woman gestured toward the central island where the platform gleamed beyond the walkway posts. "Would be a shame to miss it. Especially this year."
Especially this year.
Iva dipped her brush in the rinse shell. "My work schedule is not set by shame, fortunately."
The woman laughed. "No, well, fair. Dema has you hung up there like a gull on a line. Still. Your tidepainter is doing something worth watching."
Your tidepainter.
Iva kept her attention on the wash line and wished, without much hope, for lightning.
"I am here on commission," she said. "The restoration determines my schedule."
"Aye, of course." Still friendly. Worse luck.
"Though he was talking about the restoration at market yesterday, so I thought perhaps you meant to stay long enough to see how it looks with the lanterns.
He said no one in Brineshell had seen a dead section brought back so cleanly in years.
Named the way you matched the flood blue on the north record. "
The brush stopped in her fingers.
He had mentioned her name in public.
Not merely "the commission artist." Her, apparently, with enough technical detail attached that a woman from the kitchens now knew the specifics of pigment matching on the north wall.
Outrage first. Then, arriving almost on top of it and therefore more offensive, a low involuntary warmth at the base of her throat. She killed it before it could settle.
He did not get to place her in Brineshell's social memory by the simple act of speaking accurately at market.
Except that was precisely what he had done, and the infuriating part was that he had probably not thought of it as placing her anywhere.
He had described. That was his nature. Describing, for Mavrek, was not a social strategy.
It was breathing. Good work, here, traveled by mouth faster than ferries.
Which meant the damage was not calculated. It was structural. Worse than intentional, because she could not build outrage around it.
"That was unnecessary of him," she said.
The woman -- Talla, she offered a moment later, kitchens and bread tables -- shifted the basket on her hip. "Was it?"
Honest question. No weapon in it. Just a local woman who assumed being named for good work was not a private assault.
Below, footsteps crossed the workshop threshold behind Talla. The scaffold ropes told her first, then the air.
Mavrek emerged from the shadow with two stoppered jars in hand. Talla glanced over her shoulder and grinned.
"There. Speak of the bastard painter."
"Talla," Mavrek said, which in his mouth managed to sound both greeting and warning.
"I was inviting your restorer to stay where she can actually watch the festival instead of fleeing before the decent parts."
His expression did not alter. But something shifted in the set of his jaw, brief and tight -- the look of a man hearing a phrase he had not sanctioned used in front of someone whose reaction mattered to him. Not embarrassment. Exposure.
The flaw: he wanted to claim her publicly so badly that the community had already begun doing it for him, and the recognition that this might cost rather than gift sat on his face for one unguarded instant before he smoothed it.
"She has work," he said.
"Everyone has work. That is why festivals were invented." Talla bounced the basket once against her hip. "Think on it, Sorrel. Lantern Flood happens whether you approve of public life or not."
With that she went off toward the market bridge, leaving behind the smell of bread flour and brine-plums and a problem no longer containable to the scaffold.
Iva kept her eyes on the wall a moment too long.
"You mentioned my work at market," she said, because not saying it would have sat between them like a tool left in the wrong place.
Mavrek set the jars on the tied side shelf. "Aye."
No apology.
"Without asking."
"It was your work."
She tightened the lid on her rinse shell hard enough to crack the dried lime at the rim. "Brineshell appears to confuse observation with permission."
"Often," he said. Then, quieter: "I spoke to Fetch about technique. Others heard."
That should have helped. It did not. Whether he had announced her at market or merely spoken too precisely within earshot of a settlement that treated precision as news, the result was the same. She now existed in Brineshell's public conversation by name.
The afternoon sharpened the breach rather than absorbing it.
Every voice that drifted up from the market walkways below the scaffold seemed capable of carrying her back to herself in a stranger's mouth.
Shell ash. Flood blue. Repair wash. When Mavrek passed her fresh cloths through the remaining hours, she took them without looking at him.
He did not attempt a second explanation.
That evening she stayed in the workshop after the other laborers had gone because the walkways felt socially contaminated, full of people who might know the details of her hand from a conversation she had not consented to join.
The lamplit interior at least reduced the world to manageable scale.
One lamp on the central table. One on the rear hook near the sample boards.
The open side of the workshop showed only slices of walkway now, lantern glow passing like submerged gold through the slats.
She worked the lower edge of the navigation panel by lamplight, rebuilding a damaged wash where the evening color allowed her to judge the depth better than noon glare. Outside, festival hammers rang from the island platform. Somewhere farther off, laughter ran down a walkway and disappeared.
When Mavrek entered carrying the next day's pigment stock, the workshop shrank.
He took in the lamp, the half-finished section, her still on the bench when any reasonable person should have gone to bed, and said nothing.
He crossed to the worktable, set down the sealed jars, and began mixing at the grinding slab with the long patient rhythm she now knew too well.
Stone against pigment. Oil uncorked. The faint wet scrape of a knife through resin.
After a while he said, "Your brush is too upright."
No preamble. Just the note itself.
Iva stopped with the bristles a hair from the wall. She knew, before she checked, that he was right. Fourteen hours on the scaffold and then the bench had pulled her wrist stiffer than she realized.
"It is not," she said automatically.
"Aye, it is."
She adjusted the angle a fraction flatter and the wash line immediately sat cleaner under the bristles.
Annoying. Useful. Impossible to argue with now that the wall had sided against her.
"You are tired," he said.
"Perceptive."
"Your hand still reads the surface first." He wiped the mixing knife on cloth and came nearer, stopping at a respectable distance. "But when you are rested, the fingers loosen before the brush commits. You let the wall tell on itself. Tonight you are asking it to hurry."
She did not move.
The correction had come first. Practical. Accurate. Which meant the description after it did not sit in the easy category of flattery. He was describing the technique when it was right.
The subject of that description was her hands.
Iva looked down at them because there was nowhere else safe to put her eyes. Ink stains ground permanent into the cuticles. A tiny crescent scar at the thumb web from a shell knife. Long fingers, too narrow for heavy labor. Hands she had always thought of as tools first, evidence second.
"Most men who admire a woman's hands are about to ask her for free labor," she said.
The corner of his mouth moved. "I already have your labor. Dema paid for it."
That nearly got a laugh from her. She strangled it before it became a sound.
He went on, unhelpfully, "What I named was not for purchase."
She had no prepared response for admiration that arrived honest. So she gave him none.
Iva lifted the brush again and resumed the wash line at the flatter angle.
The bristles tracked cleaner. Mavrek returned to the mixing table after a moment and said nothing more.
The workshop settled around them into lamp hiss and stone scrape and the occasional muted knock from the island platform beyond.
By the time she finally set the brush down, the night had thickened outside the slats and the festival lanterns on the far platform had become floating amber points across the inner water. Iva flexed her cramped hand once.
He had corrected her brush angle first. Then he had described her hands. The admiration would not come loose because the accuracy beneath it was too sound, and she could not dismiss accuracy without becoming someone she refused to be.
Criticism could be shelved. This was worse. This was being seen correctly by a man who had already begun, without asking, to make the seeing public. And by Lantern Flood the whole settlement would have benches for it.