"Wake up. Wake up—"
Jasnah, deep in sleep, suddenly heard someone calling to her. Her mind tore free of the strange, shifting images instantly, rising urgently toward the surface of that whole sea of dreams.
"Mm… what is it?"
The familiar, taciturn voice let Jasnah know precisely who was calling her before she'd even opened her eyes. Reluctantly she drew her right hand out from the warm bedding and rubbed the back of it against her bleary, sleep-fogged eyes.
"Food's ready—"
Enno said, standing silently beside the bed.
"Oh. Are you heading out already?"
Jasnah asked, yawning lazily into the dim room.
Perhaps it was from calling on her own magic so consistently often, day after day, these past several weeks—she had grown steadily more sluggish in the mornings.
In her very first days trapped in this house, she had been restless and anxious every single day, unable to properly eat from the tension alone.
But as time had passed, she'd come, unexpectedly, to savour this instead—the slow, languid feeling of dragging herself out of a warm bed at her own pace.
Once Jasnah had woken, Enno turned and left the room without further comment, walking out through the door.
Jasnah was long past being surprised by this particular pattern. It wasn't so much that he was genuinely cold toward her—it was that he had lived alone for so many decades, he'd simply lost the capacity to express feeling.
As her vision was clearing slowly from its lingering haze, Jasnah looked over toward the square table sitting by the bed.
Two wooden bowls sat waiting on it. One was already entirely empty—it seemed Enno had eaten his breakfast well before he'd woken her.
A thing like that would have been impossible, in years past, before all this.
In the old days, no matter how deeply she slept, even the smallest unfamiliar sound nearby would jolt her instantly, fully awake.
If she let herself keep sinking into this kind of soft comfort, she found herself fearing that once she returned to the outside world, the Aurors would have her firmly in their hands before very long.
Jasnah's mouth twitched in a small self-mocking motion at the thought.
"Hm?"
As her gaze turned toward the fogged-over window shutters, her eyebrow, only just clear of sleep's lingering fog, drew faintly together with attention.
The days here in deep winter were short, the sun was rarely seen through the cloud cover. But these past several weeks, Enno had always waited patiently until the first traces of suitable light before heading out on his own. Never, until this particular morning, had he woken her while the dark outside remained this deep and unbroken.
Realising that her own grogginess wasn't from a full night's exhaustion but rather from simply not having slept enough hours, Jasnah's gaze sharpened considerably.
Fully awake now and alert, it took her only a moment further to notice that something was wrong with the room around her.
'The house was too empty.'
The smoked fish and smoked venison that had for weeks hung from the rafters were completely gone.
The neatly stacked firewood that had always sat by the hearth, the coiled rope and various knives and the old hunting rifle that had hung on the walls, the large mat Enno had spent all these past days sewing together—all of it had simply vanished.
Her expression went blank for a moment. Then, understanding arrived all at once, her face changed. She threw on her cloak in a rush and hurried out of bed toward the door.
One glance through the doorway was enough. Jasnah's lips pressed themselves into a tight, unreadable line.
Enno was out in his own work shed, feeding a team of sturdy-looking sled dogs their morning meal. Beside him stood the sledge itself—the very one she and he had spent so many days repairing together, and which now looked entirely new.
Compared to how it had looked before, the cargo bed of the sledge had nearly doubled in its total size, and had been divided into two levels, upper and lower.
Everything that had vanished from the log cabin had already been sorted and stowed neatly away in the lower level. The upper level still stood empty.
A powerful, complicated feeling surged up suddenly from her chest.
Now she genuinely understood, what the whole hide of reindeer skin, and all those days Enno had spent sewing that mat, had actually been for all along.
He had made the mat into a proper canopy, braced it up securely with wooden support beams, and fixed the whole structure onto the sledge—turning the simple, humble sledge into something closer to a carriage.
"Where did these sled dogs come from?"
Jasnah asked softly, her lips parting slowly, her voice came out rough and ragged with unexpected emotion.
"The village—"
Enno said in his characteristically low voice. These days he was occasionally willing to answer a bit of proper "small talk," too.
"Will there be any danger on the road?"
She watched Enno go back into the house and empty out, piece by piece, the very bedding she had slept in these past days, stuffing it into the upper level of the sledge, then laying it back out for the journey.
Jasnah felt her own heart, little by little, hollowing itself out at the sight. Her expression grew numb, and she asked, almost mechanically, "I've heard there might be avalanches and wild animals somewhere along the road."
Bang, bang, bang!
Once he'd finished making up the bed in the carriage, Enno began nailing together a simple wooden rack in the space toward the back of it. When it was done, he went back inside once more, carried the small stove carefully out, and set it fast and secure within the newly built rack.
"If the road is too dangerous—"
Jasnah said, her head lowered, faltering over the words. But Enno seemed not to hear her at all. He went back inside once more, stepped up on a stool, and took down the oil lamp still hanging from the rafters, then carried it back out and hung it inside the finished carriage.
"Once you've brought me to town—can you make it back here alone afterward?"
Jasnah asked softly.
"It's fine—"
Enno began fitting the leather harnesses onto the waiting sled dogs.
Jasnah brushed back her hair, which had gone unkempt and tangled these past weeks of simple living, and bit lightly at her lower lip.
"Once we reach town—come with me on to Berlin, afterward. I promised you, remember, I'd give you a great sum—"
Her words trailed off mid-sentence, and Jasnah closed her mouth, unable to continue.
It was, of course, true. She had promised—if Enno agreed to see her safely all the way to town, she would give him a great sum of gold as payment.
But what use was gold to Enno?
He had lived his entire life in this quiet, isolated village. To him, gold was worth less than a simple pile of firewood.
But then, beyond gold, what else did she have to repay him with?
As if they somehow sensed this would be a hard journey ahead, the borrowed sled dogs looked up at her one by one in turn, their eyes dark and distant, as though silently reproaching her.
Jasnah found she had nothing further left to say.
She walked back inside, deflated, and sat back down at the table to eat what would be her very last breakfast in this cabin.
The steaming venison broth before her could do nothing to save her heart, which was slowly turning to ice as the morning progressed.
She was about to break free of this mountain village that had caged her here. And return, at last, to the wider world outside.
So why, then, did she feel no happiness in the prospect at all?
Was she afraid that once she got out, she'd discover her father already dead, and that the rest of her life would be spent adrift, long and aimless, going nowhere in particular?
It seemed that was it.
A life without any purpose was hollow. Compared to this emptiness, even her difficult days in Azkaban had been "full of fight" —spent, every day, resisting the Dementors' slow devouring of her mind, at least giving her something to struggle against.
Enno had finished all his preparations by now. He brought over a full basin of water and set it down by the hearth, watching in silence as Jasnah, her head bowed low, ate through her breakfast.
He was like a slab of stone throughout—always cold on the surface, never once revealing any weakness beneath it. That was, at least, how it seemed to her, on the surface of things.
"I'm done—"
Jasnah finished off the unpalatable food remaining in her wooden bowl, and finally lifted her head to meet his eyes.
Enno nodded once at that. He picked the water basin carefully up off the floor and poured its entire contents into the hearth.
Hiss!
After a fierce, sudden burst of hissing steam, thick smoke billowed rapidly up into the chimney above.
Jasnah stared at the hearth, lost in a daze. For the very first time in all these days, the firebox that had blazed without pause finally went dark.
"Let's go, then—"
Enno said. He walked over, took up Jasnah's cane in one hand, and supported her arm gently with the other, helping her rise.
The canopy sewn from the hides of all manner of different animals, kept out every draft, and with the small stove burning steadily inside the carriage besides, Jasnah, wrapped now in warm bedding, felt no cold at all despite the deep winter outside.
But she paid none of that particular comfort any real mind. Sitting quietly inside the carriage, she gazed instead, entirely transfixed, at the small cabin fading steadily into darkness behind them as they began to move.
Whoosh!
The wild wind swept the gathered clouds steadily along. For the very first time in all these days, the starry sky finally showed its face though the faint, distant starlight left the whole veil of stars looking somewhat bleak and forlorn against the vast dark.
Enno took his seat at the front of the carriage, the leather reins already settled firmly in hand, separated from her now by only the canopy's thin cloth wall between them.
"Let's go—"
Inside the carriage, Jasnah's face had gone wooden and unmoving.
Whish—
The carriage shuddered a few times under the dogs' first pull, and began sliding steadily out onto the frozen, waiting river.
'Goodbye, then.'
Gazing back at the small snow-covered cabin still standing on the gentle slope behind them, Jasnah said it in the deepest depths of her heart.
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