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“That bit I inferred.”

Her face was flushed. She’d left her straw hat in the boat, and her hair was loose, flying in the sudden wind.

“Do you remember that spring the river flooded? It ran over the lane. It made lakes in the park. Imagine how many times it must have flooded over the past thousand years.” She stopped and turned to them, eyes radiant. “If there’s a cave, the river buried it in settlings, mud and sand.”

“If.” Georgie’s fatigue hit them all at once. They couldn’t prevent a doubtful sigh.

Elf’s gaze darkened. She hurried again uphill.

They called after her. “So, the plan is to dig through a thousand years of mud and sand?” They rubbed their forehead with the heel of their hand.

Of course. Of course that was the plan.

They enlisted their longer legs to catch up.

“It makes sense that the nuns would have hidden the gold as quickly as possible, which means near to where they found it. But a cave open to the river, right where the Northmen would have landed those dragon boats…” They shook their head. “That makes less sense.”

She gave an impatient shrug. “They would have disguised the entrance. With large rocks, perhaps.”

“The plan is to dig through a thousand years of mud and sand, and also large rocks?”

Of course. Of course it was.

An eternity later, Georgie was collapsed on the cool ground, wheezing next to a modestly sized pit.

“I’ll continue,” they promised. “As soon as I reattach my arms.”

They listened for a time to Elf digging, the rhythmic thunk of the shovel, the thud of the displaced earth. Clouds had stacked in the sky.

The next thunk thinned into a raspy screech. Metal on rock.

They sat up.

Elf scraped sideways with the shovel, clearing dirt from a perpendicular surface.

“Limestone.” She pushed back her hair with a trembling hand and left a muddy streak above her brow. “It’s all limestone, a wall of it.”

She scraped, and dug, and scraped, and dug, and scraped.

“I hear that with my molars,” remarked Georgie, through gritted teeth.

She didn’t seem to hear anything, not the horrible scraping noise, not their voice. Her concentration was absolute. Admirable. A bit frightening.

She’d dig to the center of the Earth.

“My turn,” they said when her arms began to wobble with each upward swing.

They pulled the shovel from her hands and took her place in the pit.

They dug, and then she dug again, and then they dug. The shovel’s blade skittered off something unyielding, reverberations traveling up to their elbow. It wasn’t a protuberance of the limestone wall itself, but a separate rock. They worked at it with the shovel until they could wiggle it like a loose tooth.

Slowly, they pried the rock free, tipped it toward them, slid it out of the way.

Behind the rock—nothing.

A black gap.

They extended their hand, felt the cold air rush over them, and yanked their hand back, whooping. Elf tumbled into the pit, bumping them, hugging them, and she was laughing, and so were they, hilarious with exhaustion.