"Go ahead and guess," was all Tove said.
"Another spell to keep the heat in the little houses?"
"Yep."
They were slowly making their way around a huge market place. That morning they had gone shopping for some proper winter clothes for Alaia. On the first day Tove had promised to take her, and later, when she actually took a closer look at the clothes Alaia had brought with her from Cametonia, she realised the situation was worse than she had assumed. A lot worse. So now Alaia had a brand new layer of clothes woven with heat magic, and she was almost warm roaming the Winter Market that was going on on the big market place of Old Town, right in front of city hall.
When they had gotten to there, the city hall had been the thing to first draw Alaia's attention. It was one of the oldest buildings in all of Old Town, and in fact all of Embärfjell, dating back a thousand years. And a lot of Old Town wasn't that far behind in age. While there were some newer buildings, most of Old Town buildings had an age far into the hundreds. It had taken Alaia a couple of days to simply get used to walking among things that were so ancient. In Cametonia, a two hundred-year-old building was old. Anything comparable in age to the city hall were now ruins. Everytime she stepped out of her apartment she felt like she was walking among history.
After a moment of letting her stare, Tove had nudged her and drawn her attention to the Winter Market they were actually there to see. The market place was filled with tiny wooden houses, a few meters in each dimension. Each of them had a person inside, waving at them through a window with a counter where their wares were spread out. There were artful lights hanging from strings over the path between the stalls, lighting the marketplace up in a thousand different colours. The snow on the ground and on the roofs of the tiny houses glittered in the lamp light.
To Alaia it seemed there was everything on sale at the market. She went from stall to stall, first looking at incredibly warm-looking mittens and hats, then pausing to marvel at some beautiful hand-made candles and soaps, moving on to other stalls selling cooking utensils made from a wonderful-smelling wood or cookies and dry cakes or candies or hot coffee and warm pastries.
Especially from the food stalls Alaia wanted to try everything, so she ended up eating a couple too may pastries (her favorites had been the ones with cinnamon) and taking home three different kinds of cookies and two cakes. And some spicy peppermint sweets that Tove insisted she try. Apparently they were some sort of traditional local thing, as were all the pastries she had tried.
It had been the best days she had had since getting on the boat back in Cametonia. It felt like maybe this place wasn't too bad a place to live.
~X~
Alaia was sitting at her desk, tired. She had been sorting out the old correspondent's papers all day again. She had not realised how much of his old work things he had left behind for her to clean. Common sense told her she should just throw all his papers out, and start with a clean desk and her own work, but some stubborn part of her had decided she wanted to go through all of the papers before throwing them out. Just in case. You never knew if there was something interesting there, or something that would prove relevant to what she should be reporting back home. She couldn't just throw away news, could she?
She sighed. She'd been staring at the same piece of paper for a few minutes now, unable to take in what it said enough to figure out if it was important or not. She closed her eyes and rubbed them, as if that would make them less tired. She looked up at the one duck she had decided to keep on her desk. Even the duck looked tired. Maybe she should go home. It wasn't as if she was getting any more work done today anyway.
"Hey," came Tove's voice from the door. Alaia turned.
"Hey," she said, tiredly, trying to smile.
"Rough day?" Tove asked. "What have you been working on?"
"Still working on clearing out my predecessor's papers."
"Still? How much did he leave behind?"
"A lot, apparently."
"Well, you look like you need some coffee."
"I have coffee," Alaia said, lifting a half-full cup that had stopped being hot a long time ago and now was merely lukewarm. She put the cup back down. "What I need is to go home and continue tomorrow when my head and eyes are functioning again."
"You should go home then. It's getting late anyway," Tove said.
Alaia turned to check the time, but accidentally knocked over the cup of coffee she'd just moved.
"Oh, mother of gods. Oh no, oh no no," Alaia tried to stop the mess by lifting the cup back up, but it was of course already empty. The brown liquid spread fast on the even surface of the desk. Alaia started snatching the piles of papers off the desk as fast as she could. Tove hurried to the kitchen to get her a bunch of paper towels to help clean up the mess.
"Thanks. Here, could you spread these papers on the table there, to dry?" Alaia handed Tove one of the piles she had almost been able to save from the coffee as Tove handed her the paper towels.
"What are these papers anyway?" Tove asked as she started laying them on a side table, one by one.
"Ah, I don't know yet," Alaia answered, trying to get the paper towel on her hand to soak in just a little more coffee before taking out a new one. "That was the pile I've been sorting through today. Oh, great, there's coffee on the floor too."
"There is so much here though," Tove said. "It's really admirable that you're going through all of it to make sure nothing important is lost."
"I guess..." Alaia stopped to think for a moment, wiping coffee off the floor. "But I don't know. There hasn't been much, mostly personal notes. Maybe I should toss them after all. I just keep thinking I should know what I'm throwing out before throwing it out. Just in case there's something there I'll need for my work. I don't know. I'll think about it tomorrow, I'm too tired now."
"Well, even if there was something relevant in these papers, I don't know how much help they'll be. I'm not saying the coffee there completely destroyed these papers, but I am saying about half of each page is now pretty much illegib..."
Tove's voice trialed off mid-word.
"Tove?" Alaia turned to look at her. She was staring at one of the coffee-stained sheets, her eyes darting back and forth around the paper.
"Tove?" Alaia asked again, trying to get her attention.
Tove said nothing. She dropped the rest of the papers on the table and hurried out of the room, one liquid-stained sheet in her hand.
____________________________________________________
The topic for tomorrow is Flag(s).
~matu
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