Soft snowflakes rustled d to the earth, swept sideways and forward by the fierce wind—their falling path had a strange cutting edge to it like a scythe.
The world beyond the door was a single sheet of stark white. The snow that sealed the world, sealed away Jasnah's sight along with it, reducing everything to dull brightness.
There wasn't a great deal she could actually make out through the driving storm.
Outside the door, a few heavily branched pines swayed back and forth under the assault of the blizzard, their hissing, rustling branches sounding like the low groans of trees pushed past what they could bear.
A snaking river ran past the front door.
The river was deep in its winter low-water season, yet as it passed by the cabin, it made the crisp, rushing sound of a current running high and fast.
The small oddity held Jasnah's attention for a few extra seconds, until she finally realised the sound was actually coming from shards of ice floating scattered on the river's surface, knocking and grinding against one another as the current carried them along.
That the river's surface hadn't fully frozen over yet, despite such bitter cold, told her the current snowstorm hadn't been going on for long.
The scenery visible on the far bank was no genuinely from the near one. A little further off in the distance, scattered among sparse spruce trees, sat a handful of small wooden houses, their sloped roofs buried under fresh snow, thin curls of hearth-smoke rising steadily from every chimney.
Beyond that scattered cluster, everything dissolved into unbroken, dull white.
'Probably a Muggle village,' she thought, watching the geography, 'set on some gentle slope at the foot of the mountains.'
The thought passed through Jasnah's mind.
Perhaps out of some shame at having been saved, of all people, by a Muggle, she left him for last in her survey—her gaze finally settled on the Muggle himself, splitting firewood in the open-sided shed a dozen-odd feet away from the cabin.
He was an old man, unmistakably. That he was skinny and grey-haired went without saying; his hearing, too, was probably not what it had once been.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have failed to hear the creak of the door hinge turning as she'd wrenched it open.
His mind, too, might well have gr a little muddled with age. Even Jasnah, with only the wind's edge grazing her cheek from the doorway, felt as though a brush studded with countless metal bristles were scraping across her face.
Yet the old man standing in the open-sided shed wore nothing but a shabby, pale-yellow sweater, full of holes, indifferent to the deep cold pressing in on everything around him. His wrinkled hands gripped the axe handle firmly, swinging it d again and again into the waiting wood.
But—Jasnah's brows drew together slightly at the observation.
She realised that the old Muggle probably wasn't immune to the cold at all—he was simply too poor to more than a single proper robe, and that same robe was currently draped over her.
"You—"
She hesitated for a moment. Reasoning, from the surrounding scenery and her last clear memory, that she was in all likelihood still somewhere inside Germany's borders, Jasnah chose to address the aged Muggle in German.
"Hast du mich gerettet?"
TN: "Did you save me?"
Just as she'd expected, the old Muggle, his back still turned toward the cabin, remained absorbed in his work and hadn't heard a single word she'd said.
So, she raised her voice further and said it again, louder.
It still did no good. The ferocious wind and snow swallowed her voice whole into inaudibility, and there was, besides that, the irritating thud-thud-thud of the axe-blade hammering into wood.
A flicker of impatience appeared across Jasnah's eyes.
But she couldn't manage to walk over to the shed herself to close the distance—the accumulated snow on the ground came up well past her calves, and her right leg was broken.
Fortunately, the old Muggle finally finished splitting that length of pine he'd been working through.
He bent d slowly, spread his arms wide to gather the scattered pieces of freshly split wood together into a bundle, and lifted the whole collection up against his chest.
Their eyes finally met across the distance.
Contrary to what Jasnah had expected—she'd assumed that the old Muggle would show at least some surprise at finding her awake and standing, or perhaps it wouldn't have been especially strange for him to show some relief, or even joy—there was no trace of any emotion at all visible in the old Muggle's dull, grey eyes.
He simply looked at her, indifferent.
Of course, it wasn't as though the old Muggle showed nothing at all in response.
He gave her a single, brief nod, then, still holding the gathered firewood against his chest, waded with difficulty into the deep snow outside the shed, waddling toward the cabin door like some slow duck.
Jasnah pressed her lips tight. One hand braced against the wall, she hopped backward on one foot, mortified, to clear a path for the old Muggle into the house.
The instant the door fully behind him, air as warm and soft as a hot spring wrapped around her again. Jasnah narrowed her eyes at the change, and only then noticed that in the brief moment she'd stood exposed by the open door, her entire face had already gone numb with the cold, and a thin layer of frost had formed across her eyelashes.
What was more, her right leg now throbbed with a sharper pain than before—the bitter cold had evidently frozen the blood that had been soaking through her bandage.
Frost had gathered thick across the old Muggle's deeply wrinkled face as well, as though someone had smeared coarse salt across his skin. He pointed toward the bed with his cloudy eyes then turned and crossed to the fireplace in two steps, crouched d low, set the gathered firewood aside, and stacked it into a pile beside the hearth.
Jasnah's lips pressed even tighter together at the whole exchange.
She was, by this point, certain that she did not like this old Muggle. Still—she glanced d at her bandage, where the blood had freshly reopened from the cold exposure.
Staying a little longer wouldn't hurt, Jasnah thought to herself, weighing the practical reality, and then hopped her way back to sit properly at the edge of the bed once more.
"Was it you who saved me?"
It had only been a single wooden door standing between her and the storm, and yet it had managed to shut out most of the wind's roar. Jasnah caught her breath a couple of times, then asked the question again.
He added a few freshly split logs to the fire without immediately answering; the wood, still visibly damp on its outer surface, crackled and popped violently the moment it met the heat.
The old Muggle paid no mind to the small sparks landing occasionally on his cheek from the fire. His wrinkled hands seemed indifferent to heat or cold alike as he lifted the iron pot with bottom scorched thoroughly black from long years of use over open flame—off the mantel and set it d on the table.
Then, finally, he nodded in confirmation.
'At least he wasn't deaf.'
Jasnah found herself, to her surprise, letting out a small breath of relief, thinking it with something like gratitude.
"Where did you save me from?"
she asked again, her gaze sharp and focused as it followed the old Muggle shuffling slowly back toward the fireplace, tracking his movement.
Even now, recovering steadily, she still couldn't fully let her guard d around him.
"The river."
With that, the old Muggle spoke the first words either of them had exchanged while both were fully conscious.
His voice was hoarse and dry, carrying almost no trace of emotion.
'The river?!'
Jasnah froze in place for a moment at the answer, then glanced instinctively toward the fogged-over window nearby.
It was, indeed, an answer she hadn't expected. And yet it made a certain kind of sense.
When she'd followed her father into the assault on Erkstag, a torrential rain had been falling steadily, deep in the surrounding mountains.
Erkstag had collapsed under the combined blows of both sides in that fighting. If her luck had held through the chaos, it was entirely possible that a resulting flash flood had swept her into the nearby river, carried her all the way along its course through the mountains, and she'd finally been pulled free from the current when she happened to pass by this Muggle village.
She let out a small breath at the theory, a trace of relief seeped into her eyes.
It could only be called Merlin's favour, that in a catastrophe where the very sky itself had seemed to be falling in on everyone present, she had somehow not died.
Then what about her father—was he still alive?
As for the rest of the Death Eaters who had attacked Erkstag alongside her that night, she couldn't bring herself to care one way or the other whether they'd lived or died in the collapse.
The wizarding folk of Europe might fear the Death Eaters like Dementors, but after being part of the organization for a while, she'd come to understand something.
There were only two kinds of people inside the Death Eaters' ranks: the utterly, thoroughly mad, and the pitiable, who lived under Voldemort's brand of terror just as helplessly as anyone else caught, unable to escape the arrangement once committed to it.
In the instant her mind had drifted elsewhere, caught up in these private, wandering thoughts, the absurd old Muggle had already brought over a plate and a knife and fork but only a single set of each. Probably because he was too poor to more than one complete set to begin with.
The old Muggle lifted the lid off the pot, and Jasnah, having risen to her feet, glanced at what was inside and looked even more disdainful than before.
The fragrant-smelling food, she realized as she caught its scent, was nothing more than potatoes boiled in plain water.
"Thank you for saving me."
Jasnah said it, offering the old Muggle who'd unexpectedly saved her life a grudging word of thanks—and then her left hand, the one not braced against the wall for support, reached up toward her chest.
"Where are the—where are the coins that were sewn into my robe?"
Jasnah pressed her lips together, her tone edged with something less than friendly.
"Never saw any," the old Muggle said, his tone remained calm and unbothered.
It wasn't impossible, at that, thinking it through. Her robe had already been torn to shreds in the earlier fighting against the German Ministry's Aurors, and after being submerged by the flash flood and tumbled violently through the river's current, it made reasonable enough sense that the tattered remains of the robe had simply come apart entirely and fallen away from her body.
Jasnah's breath caught for a moment, and then she let the matter drop.
"I'm leaving now. Once I reach somewhere safe, I'll have someone bring you gold directly, as thanks for saving my life."
Jasnah said, chin lifted, her tone carrying a faint edge of hauteur.
She cast one more scornful, sidelong glance at the boiled potatoes the old man had spooned onto the plate and held out toward her, and then, without waiting for any reply from him, her gaze sharpened with purpose.
She began gathering the dormant magic within her body, readying herself to dissolve into the void of Apparition, and held her breath still in anticipation.
Apparition placed a certain strain on the body, and with her leg injured as badly as it was, she had to brace herself mentally in advance for pain, in case her eventual landing point came out badly off the intended mark from the disruption.
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds—
Just then, the firewood settled deep in the hearth burst suddenly into violent, crackling flame, and a gust of fire-heated wind surging from the fireplace set the hanging oil lamp creaking and swaying on its chain.
"I've still got a few dried fish."
The old Muggle said, watching Jasnah's face turn suddenly pale, and mistaking the reaction for simple dislike of the potatoes.
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