Aside from the faint whine of wind and snow drifting steadily in from outside and the occasional crackle of burning wood settling in the hearth, the cabin had fallen into silence, without a trace of noise.
'The Apparition had failed?!'
Already haggard from her ordeal, Jasnah's face went pale in a single instant, drained entirely of whatever colour had returned to it.
After a moment's stunned daze, she quickly composed herself and tried to Apparate again.
The pull of connection to that other space was certainly there—but her body could not slip properly into the void, however hard she reached for it. Some powerful, invisible force was holding her firmly back.
'This could only be the effect of an Anti-Apparition Charm.'
After a brief spell of panic, Jasnah's expression sharpened, her eyes were glinting now with menace as she stared directly into the old Muggle's clouded, unfocused ones across the room.
'Had this old Muggle lied to me, then? Was he actually a wizard, hiding his true identity, who had saved me for some unknown reason?'
The thought flickered rapidly through Jasnah's mind. She had spent almost ten years living on the dark fringes of Europe's magical world, and she knew all too well how deceitful people's hearts could prove to be beneath their surface presentation. And yet—
Her gaze settled steadily over the old Muggle's deeply wrinkled face, and the certainty behind her own initial suspicion began, gradually, to waver under closer scrutiny.
By all appearances, taken together, he really did seem to be just an ordinary Muggle. She could sense that there was no trace of magic present within his old body.
'Then who had sealed off this entire stretch of mountains and forbidden Apparition here? The German Ministry of Magic?'
Another thought leapt suddenly into her mind at that, and unmistakable alarm crossed her face.
That possibility was, on reflection, certainly plausible.
Given the sheer severity of the crime of breaching Erkstag, the German Ministry might well have moved decisively to seal off the entire surrounding mountain range—combing thoroughly through both land and sea to root out any Death Eaters who might not have properly escaped the collapse.
Or, alternatively, they might simply be searching for some criminals who had somehow survived the flash flood, been unknowingly left behind by her fellow Death Eaters in the chaos, and had no choice but to go into hiding somewhere in these woods.
That guess held up reasonably well under her scrutiny.
Her overall situation, without any question, had become dire.
She had lost contact with her father in the collapse—she didn't even know whether he was alive.
Without her wand, she had lost the one thing she could reliably depend on in any dangerous situation, and the existence of the Anti-Apparition Charm had now cut off any realistic chance of simply leaving this Muggle village under her own power.
"Let me ask you something—"
After a long silence, Jasnah looked over at the old Muggle, now seated comfortably at the table, gnawing on a bland, unseasoned boiled potato.
"Can you get me out of here—to the nearest proper town, at least? I need to catch a bus to Berlin from wherever that is."
Her tone paused briefly, and she added, with coldness entering it, "If you can take me there, I can—I mean, once I'm properly home again, I can send you a considerable sum of money afterward. Enough, for you to live out a comfortable, dignified retirement somewhere in Berlin, rather than out here."
"Snow. Can't go."
The old Muggle kept his head down over his potato throughout, his voice was not shifting in the slightest at the mention of money he'd, evidently, never seen.
Jasnah glared at him with fury, gritting her white teeth hard against the frustration.
This stubborn old relic of a Muggle didn't seem to genuinely want anything to do with her—every single time he spoke, it proved to be only ever a bare handful of words, without explanation or apparent interest in her situation.
Her own chest heaved a few times with suppressed emotions, and then, as she scanned the cramped little cabin she found herself confined within, her anger began, gradually, to recede somewhat.
Clearly, this old Muggle had no family of his own remaining. He'd likely lived alone here for a great many years, judging by the accumulated evidence around her.
And he was, in all reasonable likelihood, a solitary, deeply reclusive sort of person.
When she'd first woken and glanced out through the doorway earlier, the small handful of houses that made up this Muggle settlement tucked deep in the mountains had all stood clustered across the river from where she now sat.
Only this old man lived alone on this particular side of the water which meant it was quite possible he never properly spoke with his own neighbours at all.
So of course, working through it, he carried himself exactly like this: closed off and taciturn, offering nothing beyond bare necessity. Perhaps, he really went a whole year at a time without saying more than a handful of sentences to another living soul.
Creak—
Having polished off two of the four boiled potatoes originally on his plate, the old Muggle rose slowly from the table.
Under Jasnah's dark, wary, tracking gaze, he pulled open the heavy door and stepped calmly back out into the storm.
A gust of bone-numbing snow and cold flooded immediately into the cabin at once through the open doorway. Struck by the sudden, punishing chill, Jasnah fell back onto the bed, shivering hard against the cold.
He was gone for less than half a minute. When he returned, a full layer of white snow had already settled over him like some improvised cloak, coating his shoulders and hair evenly.
But he paid no mind to the snow accumulated on his shoulders, nor to the furious, tracking glare the girl on the bed continued directing his way.
He simply made his own way steadily to the far corner of the room, lifted the tanned hides piled carelessly there aside, and began rummaging through the wooden chest beneath them.
A moment later, he pulled free a small metal file and began carefully sharpening the blade of the axe he'd just fetched back in from the shed.
Scrape, scrape, scrape—
The resulting noise was sharp enough that even the small flame contained inside the oil lamp trembled with each pass of the file.
Jasnah sat entirely motionless on the bed throughout, glaring steadily at the old Muggle she had, by this point, come to despise for his unbothered indifference.
After ten gruelling minutes of watching this in silence, the old man finally rose again, axe now in hand. He glanced briefly at the two remaining potatoes still sitting cold on the table, then left the cabin once more without further comment.
This time, notably, he shut the heavy door behind him. Not long after his departure, the steady sound of thudding—thump, thump, thump—began drifting in from somewhere outside.
Jasnah kept her own hard, cold eyes fixed on him the entire time, right up until he vanished from the cabin's field of view, swallowed by the howling wind and driving snow, that steady chopping noise still ringing out clearly through the storm.
Only then did the sharp, tracking quality in her gaze finally fade, giving way slowly to despair.
'I have to find some way out of here, and soon!'
Staring blankly now at the dim, shadowed pine-log walls of the cabin surrounding her, the same thought churned over and over in Jasnah's mind.
Never mind how unbearable it already felt, being trapped here indefinitely with this strange, standoffish old Muggle who seemed to want nothing to do with her.
The Aurors themselves, who could show up at any moment, weighed on her mind making it hard to think clearly.
But what could she possibly do to escape this predicament?
Jasnah's sleeve trembled slightly, and the wand now broken cleanly in two pieces appeared in her palm as she drew it out, turning it over in futile examination.
A wizard without a usable wand was like a beast stripped of both claws and fangs at once—stripped of nearly all its danger to anyone around it.
There was, of course, still wandless magic to consider as a fallback option.
But compared to properly trained nonverbal spellcasting, genuine wandless magic was considerably more difficult to reliably produce. Even a witch as accomplished as herself, working completely without her wand, could at best manage to conjure a few small, startling tricks—nothing substantial enough to actually do any good in a real confrontation.
She couldn't even take on the old man and his axe in her current condition.
And besides all of that, the wound on her right leg needed proper rest and careful attention—no unnecessary risks were acceptable right now, unless she genuinely wanted to spend the rest of her life limping permanently on a cane from improperly healed bones.
This Muggle village likely didn't possess an owl capable of properly carrying a letter for her and even if, by some chance, it did, she genuinely wouldn't dare risk using one under these circumstances.
If a proper Anti-Apparition Charm had been laid over this entire place, then every conventional method available to a witch had become thoroughly unsafe to attempt.
'The Muggle way, it seemed was the more reliable path forward after all.'
The thought settled steadily over her, and Jasnah sighed heavily, her gaze drifting toward the frosted, blurred window was, filled with helplessness at her circumstances.
The bad-tempered old Muggle had, after all, refused her request to take her to the nearest town, citing the blizzard raging outside.
That refusal, on honest reflection, wasn't entirely an excuse offered simply to be difficult.
She had no idea exactly where this village lay in relation to anywhere else, but it was likely some considerable distance from the nearest proper town or settlement.
For a Muggle specifically, going out in weather this brutal was a dangerous task—there was every chance of losing his own way in the wild and simply freeze to death somewhere in the storm before reaching help.
Perhaps there was a somewhat more hopeful possibility to hold onto.
That the German Ministry's Aurors will call off their search of these woods and lift the Anti-Apparition Charm.
If that were the case, all she had to do was wait quietly here. But could she really afford to entrust her life to luck she had no way of controlling?
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