"You don't understand Grindelwald. He was the single greatest wizard who ever lived!"
Jasnah's eyebrows drew sharply together, and she glared with anger at Enno.
"He did so many remarkable things in his time. He very nearly kept his promise—if that Muggle-loving Dumbledore hadn't personally stopped him!"
"The Führer promised to make the German people the greatest people on this whole earth, too."
Enno actually let out a wheezy, humourless chuckle at the comparison. "But in the end he only ever genuinely did one thing—kill."
Jasnah opened her mouth sharply to argue back, but the words died away before she could speak them aloud.
For one thing, Enno was a Muggle himself, after all, and enslaving Muggles was precisely what Gellert Grindelwald had originally set out to accomplish yet for the sake of her life Enno had saved, she was willing to grant him some measure of decency in this exchange, setting aside the deeper contradiction.
For another, more private reason, she was, if she was honest with herself, no longer as unwaveringly devoted to that cause as she had once been, not so long ago.
Coming to terms with this realisation had been a genuinely brutal process for her soul to work through.
She had been forced, over these strange days, to admit that for over a decade of her life, the cause she had fought for so ardently had actually been her father's dream, not hers from the start.
She was like a machine without independent feeling but the one who had operated her, guided her every purpose, no longer fed her the necessary instructions, and now she didn't know what to do with herself, left idling.
Her father had taught her magic over years. He had taught her, too, how to survive in the dark corners of the world. But he had never taught her how to find a purpose of her own choosing.
Jasnah lost all desire to speak further, and roasted the venison in continuous silence, while Enno went steadily to work on the reindeer hide, he'd stripped for himself.
In this village cut off from the wider world, there was no such thing as ordinary time passing in any measurable way.
After the first two days, Jasnah had simply stopped bothering to count them at all, it was feeling increasingly pointless. By the time she had finished roasting the venison and the potatoes Enno loved so much, the darkness outside had already thickened into a blackness so thorough she couldn't evem see her hand held before her face.
After supper, Enno did not rest for long before he went straight back to tanning the hide, his hands never stayed still for long.
Watching the old man's focused, patient stillness by the hearth, something close to admiration stirred, unexpectedly, in Jasnah's chest.
In the days she had spent here so far, she had watched this old man Enno's every movement with close attention.
Aside from eating and sleeping, there was never a moment when Enno sat totally idle—he always found something useful to occupy his own hands with, some small, necessary task.
'Perhaps,' she thought, 'that was his secret: how he had managed to live alone here for half a full century without loneliness eventually driving him mad.'
After a moment's further thought, Jasnah began working on what remained of the venison too, following his example.
She kept carefully using the Severing Charm, refining her control with each spell.
Without a wand, even a small charm like this one had become terribly difficult to consistently cast.
But now, curiously, that very difficulty had become a rare and unexpected kind of pleasure to her, something to work toward.
With no impatience left in her by this point, she threw herself into the effort, and with each fresh attempt, her wandless casting of the Severing Charm grew steadily smoother and more assured.
Whoosh!
Perhaps only a few dozen minutes had passed in total. Perhaps, she considered afterward, it had actually been several full hours.
When a complete, entirely bared reindeer skeleton finally lay before her, Jasnah let out a long, deeply satisfied breath, her heart was filling with a joy she couldn't put into words.
It was a joy remarkably like the one she remembered from many years before—the same satisfaction that had filled her the day she'd finally mastered her very first spell through difficult practice, and her father had praised her warmly for it.
Casting had drained her available magic and left her body exhausted from the effort, but her spirit still burned bright with accomplishment.
"I can help you cut wood as well—"
Jasnah didn't notice the faint note of pride that had crept into her voice as she said it to Enno.
To prove what she was now capable of, she raised her hand and swept it decisively through the air.
A hazy blade of light flashed past in response, and the wobbling square table instantly lost one entire corner—the resulting cut was clean and perfectly even due to her improved control.
"Tomorrow—"
Enno glanced briefly at the newly missing corner of the table and said, entirely unmoved by the demonstration,
"It's time for bed now."
The faint flicker of pride sitting at the corner of Jasnah's mouth was snuffed out immediately at the flat dismissal.
Perhaps because he had once been a soldier, Enno's daily habits had always remained strictly disciplined, regardless of the circumstances or her small triumphs.
The oil lamp hanging from the rafters was put out for the night, and the fire still roaring in the hearth kept the quiet cabin warm and softly lit, holding back the bitter cold of the whole world outside its walls.
Today had been the most exhausting day Jasnah had spent here so far. Though her mind remained still buzzing with residual energy as she lay down, it wasn't long before the soft, steady sound of her breathing filled the small room.
Leaning against the hearth beneath his blanket, Enno slowly opened his eyes once more.
He gazed silently at Jasnah, her pale face flickering gold in the dying firelight. After a long while, the clouded look that usually sat in his eyes seemed to clear a little, and the line of his lips softened.
Perhaps another full week passed after that night. Perhaps, on reflection, it had been closer to half a month.
Through the endless, unmarked cycle of light and dark, Jasnah gradually grew used to life here in this isolated place.
She would never have guessed, before all this, that something as simple as a Severing Charm could bring her quite so much unexpected pleasure.
She was never idle now, following Enno's example closely.
Her still-injured leg kept her from following Enno into the forest to gather fallen deadwood himself, but she could stay behind productively in the shed and help cut the gathered logs apart with her spellwork.
Beyond that task, her Severing Charm could also cut cleanly through the thick ice that had frozen solid over the nearby water.
Fish, starved gradually of oxygen by the sealed ice above them, would always leap up desperately through the fresh gaps she cut, landing helplessly on the surface where the bitter cold froze them stiff within moments of the catch.
So, every single day now, she brought in a good catch for them both.
In the evenings, she and Enno would smoke the fish together carefully over the hearth's fire, turning the catch into properly preserved smoked fish for the winter ahead. They did quite the same with the venison, turning it into smoked meat that would keep.
Besides all of that, Enno had spent the past several days trying determinedly to rebuild his worn sled, enlarging the cargo bed greatly and strengthening its legs to bear more weight than before.
So Jasnah also used her Severing Charm to help him with the more precise woodworking involved.
Little by little, she found, to her surprise, that she could draw an entirely inexpressible pleasure from this simple, repetitive life they'd fallen into together.
Of course, the underlying worry sitting in her heart hadn't entirely vanished.
She had started, somewhere along the way, to enjoy looking up at the open sky each day.
Not that there was, in any objective sense, anything worth admiring in that gloomy, perpetually overcast sky, forever shedding its scraps of broken snow down onto the world below.
It was only that she feared, somewhere in the peace, that some Aurors searching for a fugitive might come flying in unexpectedly from the horizon without any warning at all, shattering everything she'd found here.
Watching Enno carefully sew the finally wind-dried reindeer hide into that absurdly oversized blanket of his, a sudden, unexpected wave of sadness rose in Jasnah's chest.
If the Aurors ever truly did catch her, whether or not it happened here in this village—they would interrogate her thoroughly about everything she had done these past weeks.
They would certainly use the Cruciatus Curse on her, without hesitation, and Veritaserum too, to be completely certain of the truth.
It really wasn't that she feared those particular methods of torture on their own terms. It was, rather, that if she eventually talked under that pressure, the Aurors would surely send someone afterward to properly wipe the memories of every villager she had come into contact with during her stay.
Enno would forget her. And she alone, in some freezing cell somewhere far from here, would be left to remember this stretch of time that had brought her heart its very first true peace.
"Have you ever thought about living somewhere else, Enno?"
Jasnah, who had been quiet for a long while, turning this private fear over, suddenly asked into the silence.
"I mean, moving across the river, to live among other people—or somewhere else in the country, some other city, Berlin, perhaps?"
"No."
Enno said simply while his head was bowed over his stitching.
"Why not, though?"
There was a new edge of urgency threading through Jasnah's voice now.
Enno set down the reindeer-hide blanket, slowly turned his head to look at Jasnah, and smiled at her calmly.
"I need to atone for the killing I once did."
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