She sat before the fireplace, staring blankly at the flames leaping within the hearth, entirely motionless.
Jasnah had held this posture for hours now, unmoving, her own thoughts turning in endless circles.
Frustration and regret had tormented her for a while, gnawing at her from every angle, but after that initial wave passed, emptiness and numbness swallowed all her remaining emotions.
This was not the same experience as serving her sentence in Azkaban.
In that prison, she'd needed to gather every single ounce of her own will just to resist the Dementors that eroded her soul a little more with each passing day.
The feeling of being thoroughly stripped of happiness had driven her toward despair but at the same time, that same despair had paradoxically stoked her own hatred, and her will to fight back against it, giving her something to push against.
Here, in this village cut off from the wider world, no one came to torment her. She could lie safely in a warm bed the entire day through, undisturbed by anyone.
She didn't need to rack her brain completing the various tasks her father assigned her; didn't need to feign familiarity with those Death Eaters who had never once been truly close to her; didn't need to fight the Aurors to the death in some desperate confrontation.
And it was precisely this particular absence—this strange safety that made everything so much harder to bear than Azkaban had been.
The only thing left for her to do, it seemed, was think.
'But think about what, exactly? '
She found that she had nothing left to think about that led anywhere useful.
And that particular emptiness was exactly the source of her suffering now.
Jasnah had always considered herself an intelligent witch.
It went without saying. All these years she had steeped herself in the dark side of the wizarding world, keeping to the shadows, completing one dangerous mission after another and until Bryan Watson had caught her, she had never once been captured before. That fact alone had always seemed sufficient proof of her intelligence.
But now, in a sudden flash of clarity, she realised that the moment contact with her own father had been severed or worse, the moment her father had actually died somewhere in that collapse, and she could no longer receive his instructions to guide her—she had fallen into a kind of utter, paralysing bewilderment.
The arms wrapped around her own drawn-up knees tightened faintly at the realisation. That face, lovely and touched throughout with a certain natural allure, was filled now with helplessness.
'If father truly was dead, what was she meant to do with the rest of her life?
Serve Voldemort instead, then?'
No—that particular thought was laughable. She and that dark wizard who worshipped violence and slaughter above all else were simply not the same kind of person at all.
'Follow in father's footsteps instead, then? Keep holding high the banner that would free wizards from their lowliness, quietly gathering strength together in the shadows, until one day, far in some future, she sounded the horn of war once more?'
The corners of Jasnah's pale mouth twitched at the thought.
She genuinely couldn't do it. Not as long as Bryan Watson still walked this same earth.
She had seen with her own eyes, up close, how Watson had utterly destroyed their entire underground stronghold, had watched up close as he faced down the Dark Lord.
A wizard of that calibre possessed wisdom and power she could never hope to match across her lifetime.
And besides all of that, she didn't possess her father's willpower, or his lofty, sustaining dream that had carried him through decades of struggle.
To make wizards hold their heads properly high, to make Muggles grovel before them—that had been the goal she'd fought for across the past ten years of her life. But thinking it over now, alone, it didn't seem all that interesting or worthwhile after all.
'So how, was I meant to spend the rest of my life?'
Her hands were stained with the blood of Muggles and wizards both. There was no soil left for her anywhere across Europe, or even the Americas—not unless she buried her name and hid herself away in darkness for the remainder of her days, becoming no one.
Jasnah turned her head to look out at the world stretching beyond the cabin.
The bitter wind howled fiercer outside. Over the frozen river visible before the door, a white whirl of driving snow swept past now and again in restless waves.
The afternoon was only half properly over, yet the sky above had already gone as dark as the dead of night.
'Or—spend the rest of my life right here?'
The thought that leapt suddenly, unexpectedly into her mind made the corners of Jasnah's pale mouth move again, faintly. In her own heart, she shook her head firmly.
She rejected the strange proposal she'd just made to herself, though she couldn't properly say why.
Swish—Swish—Swish—
A strange sound rose out of the eternal, monotonous howl of the wind—faint at first, then grew steadily stronger.
As if struck by a sudden electric shock, Jasnah shot up abruptly from where she'd been curled tightly before the fireplace, hopped urgently on her single good leg toward the door, and gripped the frame hard, her eyes went wide as she stared out into the dim, snow-filled world beyond.
When that thin, familiar figure finally appeared in her line of sight, dragging a heavily loaded sled with difficulty from behind a snowbank, Jasnah's heart skipped a beat at the sight.
'It really was Enno!'
"Where have you been, Enno!"
Her excitement never quite touched her face—she kept her usual cold, composed expression throughout and she didn't notice the thread of tension and irritation woven through her demanding tone as she called out.
But before Enno could even answer her, Jasnah already had her own answer laid out before her.
On the sled he'd dragged back with such visible arduous difficulty lay a reindeer—judging by its size, it weighed no less than four hundred pounds all told.
And it had already been gutted, its hide was stripped entirely clean away.
"You went—"
Jasnah's lips moved a few further times, working to form the question, and then stopped.
They'd spent several days together by now, and Jasnah knew well enough that Enno had no particularly strong appetite to speak of—she'd seen his cellar, stocked with enough potatoes alone to see him comfortably through to next spring. So—
Enno showed not the slightest interest in how Jasnah had managed to work out his own name in his absence. He only nodded at her once, indifferent to the small mystery, then hauled the weight of the reindeer down off the sled and dragged it arduously toward the house.
For a man his age, with a body so thin and battered by decades of hard labour, this task was simply too much to ask of himself.
However he'd managed it, there was no way Enno could have hauled a reindeer this heavy into the house alone and it was hard to imagine how he'd even managed to hunt the animal in the first place, given the circumstances. That very morning, when he'd first gone out, he hadn't taken his old hunting rifle with him.
"Let me help you with that!"
Jasnah, who'd gone silent for a moment, snapped back to herself quickly and said with sudden urgency.
A young woman who'd lost use of a leg wouldn't ordinarily, under normal circumstances, have much physical strength to offer in a situation like this but that particular calculation was an entirely different matter if the woman in question happened to be a trained witch.
Though she no longer had her working wand, her magic itself hadn't left her. A small Featherweight Charm to lighten the load wasn't especially difficult for her to manage.
As for the established law against using magic openly in front of Muggles—that concern wasn't worth a second thought.
Enno, worn out from a long day's labour, showed no interest in resting first. The moment Jasnah had gotten the reindeer safely up onto the square table with her assistance, he fetched his knives without pause, evidently ready to butcher the animal.
"Let me—"
Jasnah, it seemed, had gradually picked up something of Enno's habit of saying little, and left the offer at that, without further explanation.
'The Severing Charm.'
Genuinely not the easiest spell in the world to control without a wand but she managed it, in the end, through careful, focused concentration.
After no small effort on her part, Jasnah finally got all four of the reindeer's legs detached and set aside.
"What were the wizards you knew before like?"
Panting slightly for breath from the exertion, she turned her own head, saw Enno watching her cast her spells with silent, unreadable focus, and asked it offhandedly.
No answer came, as she'd half expected.
Jasnah had already grown used to this kind of silence by now—she wasn't especially bothered by it any longer.
"You saw wizards during the Muggles' own Second World War, didn't you? Then have you heard of Gellert Grindelwald? Those wizards who allied with your people—they were fighting for him."
"They fought for themselves."
Enno said it calmly.
Jasnah glanced at him, faintly surprised by the response, and thought the answer over for a moment.
"You're not wrong. They fought for wizards' freedom, broadly speaking—you could reasonably call that fighting for themselves, in a sense. But Grindelwald led them. He gave them a direction to march in. It's a pity that if he'd won, the world wouldn't look nearly so wretched as it currently does."
Enno used his knife to carve a few pieces of meat carefully from the leg he'd already detached, rinsed them briefly under water, then tossed them onto the fireplace grate.
Sizzle!
As the remaining blood boiled off in the heat, an unpleasant smell of scorching, improperly seasoned flesh rose steadily into the small room's air.
Jasnah didn't want their first real meal in days ruined like this. She hurried over to stop him and took over the actual cooking herself.
"The world has always been a wretched place. Whether he'd won that war or not—it would have ended up being much the same."
Jasnah had thought the conversation was already over at that point, but unexpectedly, watching her carefully roast the meat over the fire, Enno spoke again unprompted.
"For your kind, maybe—"
After a few seconds of silence, the surprise faded gradually from Jasnah's face at the continued engagement.
"But not for wizards. If Grindelwald had beaten Dumbledore, back then, in that final confrontation—wizards would have won their freedom. They wouldn't have to hide themselves away any longer in front of lowly Muggles."
"Wizards have always had freedom. They never actually needed anyone to fight for it on their behalf. And Muggles aren't lowly, either—their wisdom is no less than a wizard's. They built an entire civilisation every bit as great as magic—"
Enno stared silently at the sizzling, oil-popping meat before him, and under Jasnah's visibly displeased gaze—said the longest string of words he had spoken aloud since the two of them had first met.
"Grindelwald wasn't fighting for wizards' freedom at all. He… was only ever, truly, fighting for his own ambition."
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