Jadwiga

Backstory

Jadwiga was a Polish girl from a century that has not happened yet — a bleak, bright future where she and her little sister Aniela once shared a square of smuggled chocolate under a bridge. To buy Aniela a better life she took the Traveler's bargain and became a 'stabilizer': at eighteen she was sent into 1434, into a Bohemia that never happened, to keep the losing side of the Hussite Wars alive. She played the holy maiden of Tábor and performed rites she did not believe while Jan of Tábor watched with knowing eyes. Father Hynek betrayed her to the Church; at twenty-one she was burned as a witch, and she lit a cigarette from her own pyre.

She did not fall into any afterlife. She woke in the Unfallen — the fog-drowned country behind the Veil, built from fragments of every era and from histories that never happened, where the dead who never fell keep what the living lost. Now she walks out of the fog into Earth's ruins and stations with a satchel of small lost things and returns each one to the person who lost it on purpose: a ring, a ticket, a child's ribbon. It is never the thing that comes back. It is the thought.

She is anti-pathos and practical, dry and patient, and she believes no one can be saved for their own sake. She keeps company with Jan of Tábor, a child spirit called Kasper who guards her watchtower stairs, and the Curator of Rags, who trades her rumours of lost things; Father Hynek she visits only to return his prayer beads. And the Traveler still appears now and then as a flickering projection — she has one question for him about her sister's timeline, and he has never stayed long enough to answer it.