Venya sat on the edge of the bed in her bedroom.
She laid the cub down beside her.
It lay there, snoring, its eyes moving behind its lids and ears twitching occasionally as it dreamed.
Its fur was dirty.
Some of the blood had come from its mother, but a small cut marked one of its hind legs as well.
Venya gently parted the fur around it with two fingers.
The skin beneath was red but not visibly swollen, and the cut did not look deep.
She would have to clean it properly before she could be sure.
The cub kept sleeping, utterly unaware of her inspection.
That was probably a good sign.
“You little furball,” Venya murmured.
First, she needed water to clean their injuries and for both of them to drink.
She went to the storage room to get a waterskin.
She hefted it in one hand.
It was alarmingly light.
Two empty ones lay beside it.
That was all she had.
The inn had a well in front of it.
But she couldn’t use it.
The rope she had was too short.
Besides, God only knew what was inside it.
Bodies?
Dead rats?
Was the water safe to drink?
She carried the waterskin through the kitchen and out the back door to the fire pit she had built in the backyard.
Venya was sure the water had been clean when the waterskin was filled, but it had been sitting there for some time.
She put the waterskin down and took wood from the stack of firewood she and Melia had collected the day before.
Only the old, otherwise unusable wood from the inn or the dead sticks from outside were dry enough to burn.
It was not wise to use the fireplaces in the inn.
The chimneys had not been used for years, decades even.
They might be blocked.
And if not, they might be cracked, so lighting a fire could burn down the inn.
The fire pit was surrounded by stones, with one larger rock serving as a stool.
She had two copper pots, way too fancy to be blackened over an open fire, but she had to use what she had.
A sturdy stick had been driven into the ground at an angle, extending over the fire.
One of the pots hung from it, full of water.
Once the water had boiled, she carried the pot inside and set it on the sturdy stone table in the kitchen to cool.
The table had been one of the inn’s pleasant surprises.
Then she returned to her room to fetch the cub.
“Fuck!” The bed was empty.
She must have left the door ajar.
The inn was a big place, and she imagined one disaster after another.
The cub hardly weighed anything, so it was unlikely to fall through the rotten floorboards.
Still, there were plenty of tight spaces it could get stuck in, gaps it could fall through, and dark corners it could crawl into.
She checked the floor around the doorframe.
She soon noticed a few tiny paw prints heading to the common room.
Most of the floors in the inn were still covered in dust.
Their trips back and forth with supplies had cleared a path through the dust across the common room, from the front door to her bedroom.
She and Melia had swept the kitchen and storage room clean, along with the paths connecting them to her bedroom.
She followed the erratic trail of paw prints on the floor.
Beside the huge fireplace at one end of the common room, the cub had torn at a patch of grass growing through the damp floorboards.
Venya glanced up at the hole in the roof and frowned.
A cool draft came down the chimney, and Venya rubbed one arm.
At least that meant the chimney wasn’t completely blocked.
The paw prints would have amused her, but she was too worried.
The prints continued behind overturned furniture.
When Venya lifted a broken table out of the way, she found several shards of glass beneath it.
She twisted the hem of her apron in one hand.
Then the paw prints led onto the cleared path and vanished.
A little farther along, Venya found a drop of blood on the floor.
The small cut on the cub’s leg must have torn open.
That was bad.
The mother lynx would come back as a ghost and claw her to pieces if she couldn’t take care of the cub.
Venya couldn’t have been more relieved when the prints reappeared beneath the staircase.
She pressed her lips together when she saw a rusty nail jut from a broken floorboard only inches from the cub’s trail.
“Hope you didn’t go upstairs,” she said aloud.
She probably could not follow the cub there.
Then she noticed footprints leading up the stairs and onto the gallery.
There were no paw prints among them.
The cub had not gone upstairs.
The footprints were larger than any Venya, Melia, or Rive had left on the common room floor.
She was sure these had not been there when she first explored the inn, but they didn’t look fresh either.
Most likely, the shadowy figure she had seen in her room on her first evening had left them.
The abandoned inn was not so abandoned after all.
She didn’t know what to make of it.
Perhaps she should find herself a better weapon than her measly folding knife.
But if the shadowy figure had meant to hurt her, they’d already had the chance.
At least she knew now that if the stairs had supported a man that size, or a very large woman, they would probably support her too.
While searching for traces of the cub, she heard a muffled crash in the direction of the kitchen.
She hurried there, but the kitchen was empty.
The door of the storage room had never closed properly, so it was not hard for her to guess where the cub was now.
She pulled it open.
There it was, trapped under an overturned food crate.
“Mewp,” it rasped, pleading for help.
She crouched and lifted the crate and set it aside.
The little culprit was chewing on the last piece of dried meat with its small sharp teeth and purring happily.
“Damn, there goes my plan to breastfeed you,” she said dryly.
The food crates and everything else that had been neatly stacked only a short while ago were now in a mess on the floor.
She was mostly upset about the bread that was scattered on the dirty floor.
A little nap had done wonders for the small cub.
“Little imp among the knaves, always the one who misbehaves.” It was a rhyme that her Granny used to sing to her when she was caught with her hand in a cookie jar.
Her cousins had usually been the ones who put her up to it.
“Cub, you need a name.
You are not an imp or a knave, but a lynx who misbehaves.” Venya scratched its head.
She couldn’t be angry with the cub.
It was probably just hungry.
Venya surveyed the mess around them.
“Look at this mess,” she muttered.
“You’re a little mess.” The cub blinked innocently at her.
“Mess?
That’s not a nice name.” She drew out the word.
“Mess… Ves?” There it was.
The cub looked like a Ves.
“Do you like Ves?” she asked the cub.
“Say yes if you do.” “Mewp.” Venya didn’t know if it was agreement or disagreement, but it made her laugh out loud.
“We need to clean your cut, Ves.” When the cub leaped into her lap, one of its hind paws struck the carved box.
Its lid sprang open, and something metallic rolled across the floor.
She couldn’t quite see what had come out of the box in the dim light of the storage room.
She let Ves go, picked up the box and the round object, and carried them into the kitchen, where the light was better.
“Look, little imp.
It’s a gold bracelet.” “What did you say it was?” Melia shrieked behind her.
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Mewp!