“I was only taking a stone,” I said, in the slow, gentle tones I’d use to calm a nervous animal.

“Thief! Trespasser!” she snapped back. “Hand her over, I say.” She nudged my hand – still curled around the stone – with her rifle. The rifle shook like a leaf in the wind. In fact, all eighty or so pounds of the frail, elderly woman were shaking like aspen leaves. One good shove …

What was I thinking? She was an old woman and she was right. I was trespassing and the stone – no matter how much it felt like it belonged to me – actually didn’t.

I held out my arm, the stone heavy in my hand, and started to step toward her so that she wouldn’t have to move closer to me. I didn’t like the idea of her tripping and shooting me by accident. Only when I stepped forward my foot landed on a slick surface below the water. My balance wavered, my arms pin-wheeled in the air, and then the sky was wheeling above me. My last thought was that I really ought to use my arms to brace my fall, but that would mean letting go of the stone, and I wasn’t willing to do that.

When I came to, I was lying on damp green moss, looking up into a kaleidoscope of waving lights. Bright flashes of light darted over my head. Fish, I thought, strangely bright tropical fish for an inland river. I must be in Faerie.

But then my vision cleared and I noticed that the bright flashing lights were pieces of tin and glass hanging from strings. The damp green moss was an ancient settee, which smelled like cat pee. I tried to sit up and my head began to pound. I touched the back of my head and found a hard knot the size and shape of a goose egg …

Or of the Aelvesgold stone.

“It’s here,” a voice said. “You held onto it when you went down. Damned thing would have gotten you drowned if I hadn’t dragged you out of the river. That’s what it does to you, the Aelvesgold. You only had it in your hand a minute and you’d have been willing to crack your head open and drown in the river rather than let it go. Here, put this on your fool head.”

She handed me a piece of flannel wrapped around a chunk of ice. I placed it gingerly against the bump and looked at the woman. She sat in a rocking chair in front of a woodstove, limned in murky light that turned her silver hair greenish gold. In the shadowy light, her face looked younger than it had outside. She was wearing a red wool cardigan appliquéd with snowmen over a plaid flannel shirt over red long johns and a long wool skirt. A heavy outfit for a summer day, but then old people were often cold. Plastic sheeting was taped over most of the windows to keep out drafts and a fire was roaring in the woodstove. The room itself looked like it was melting. Long strips of wallpaper hung from the walls revealing multiple layers of floral patterns, plaster was curling off the ceiling, and the wide plank floorboards were buckled and wavy. There was a scrabbling noise coming from the ceiling, which I suspected might be mice.