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When Peach saw, he shot Georgie a glare. “It is Holywell Rock.”

“You hoped for something smaller.” Georgie could understand. “But you’re Charles Peach! You carried a horse.”

Peach pointed at the rock. “That’s three horses.”

“Three?” Georgie frowned. “Ponies, maybe.”

Peach twitched his head, as though this didn’t merit a verbal rebuttal.

“You’ll try, though.” Georgie smiled a hopeful smile.

“You’ll tell me what’s the reason?” Peach retorted.

“There’s something under it,” said Elf, and Peach flicked his glare to her. The expression on her face made him turn his eyes up to the heavens and mutter under his breath.

It seemed the opposite of prayerful, but also, promising.

“You’ll try,” said Georgie, more confidently.

Peach loosened his neckerchief, rolled his head on his shoulders, cracked his knuckles, and tried.

He tried, and he failed. He couldn’t get his arms around the boulder, or budge it with his shoulder, even as his boots slid and gouged the earth like a plow.

After a quarter hour of bone-cracking effort, he stepped away, red in the face and steaming. He didn’t so much as look at Georgie or Elf. He turned and strode down the path.

Georgie sagged as he disappeared into the woodland. Elf was biting her lip, arms tightly folded.

That cheeky, sarcastic, intolerable bird was still twit, twit, twitting.

And then Peach reappeared, a Christmas goose–sized rock under one arm. He was dragging a tree branch.

With the Christmas goose as a fulcrum, and the branch as a lever, he tried again. The branch snapped with a sound like a gunshot.

Peach didn’t flinch. He repositioned the shortened length.

Georgie watched him work with bated breath and didn’t realize Elf was gone, until she was back, dragging a second branch.

Peach directed its placement, and together, she and Peach levered Holywell Rock up by inches, and then Georgie braced Peach’s branch, while he set his shoulder to the rock once more. His neck bulged. A vein throbbed on his forehead. And Holywell Rock began to tilt.

Peach made a noise like a bull.

Holywell Rock flipped over. Georgie and Elf fell backward. Every bird that hadn’t fluttered off at that first crack of wood flapped into the air.

There was silence in the meadow. Peach was doubled up, hands on his thighs, heaving for breath.

Elf crawled forward. Georgie crawled too.

The recess in the earth was circular, perhaps a yard in diameter, embanked with masonry, its crumbled gray rim scratched white.

Georgie expected to confront their own face, and Elf’s, reflecting up from the surface of an ancient pool.

The well held only river stones. Stones those two Saxon nuns had thrown down on top of the sunken treasure, to conceal it.

Georgie’s gaze locked on Elf’s. She was thinking the same thing.

Together, the two of them stretched their arms down into the well. The stones were smooth and cold, bigger than muffins, for the most part, smaller than loaves of bread.

Georgie dropped them one by one on the grass, rapidly, carelessly. They clattered off each other. Some of the stones were gray, others paler. The one in Georgie’s hands was streaked with dark brown and darker red.