He froze and changed position slightly, shifting the torch so that its beam landed on the object from a different direction. He jumped into the pit and landed with both feet in the stream. The cold was a shock, but seeing his boots washed clean was somehow satisfying.

The hand was thin, skin leathery and hard, and still attached to an arm which disappeared into the soil. He reached out to touch it, then held back. He didn’t think it was his father’s hand. He wasn’t sure why, but there would have been a familiarity if this was his father, a sense of closeness after so long apart.

Bone reached out again and touched the hand. Cold. Hard. It might have been a stone sculpture, not the remains of a living thing.

He drew a knife from his belt, flicked it open, and started digging around the arm. The silt fell away and disintegrated into the stream. Great clumps dropped aside, and Bone was worried that the whole bank might collapse and crush him down into the water.

He dug, scraped, and realised how hard his heart was beating, how sweaty he was even though it was cool in the cave.

No, not cool. It was cold. Maybe the stream sucked in any warmth and swept it away.

The arm was connected to a torso. It appeared to be naked, covered in a fine down which was not caked and stuck to the skin. He worked upwards from the shoulder towards where the head should be.

No, this was not Mohserran. This was one of those two other creatures who had shared the cave with him, and shared their time in Longford, too. Francine the werewolf, perhaps, or the other creature. Both vaguely human, they were also utterly different from any normal person in ways his child’s mind had found difficult to understand. They kept to themselves, and to the families they had attached to—in the same way, he had come to understand, that Mohserran had fallen in close with his mother—so he’d never had much cause to speak to either of them, nor to ask who or what they were.

Now he was looking at the remains of one, and he saw its pelt, the curve of its head, the teeth almost too large for its mouth, and one closed eye. Burial had darkened its skin and fur, hardening it almost to the consistency of a fossil. The werewolf.

The gentle movement of torchlight across its skin gave the body a strange semblance of life.

“It’s not you,” Bone said. The reason he’d asked to come to Longford was somewhere else in these caves, and he knew that on the way back out he’d bury this body again. It had spent its life living cautiously amongst humans, and avoiding most of them. He would ensure it had a restful death.