Pippin Copperwick's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Pippin Copperwick had been chasing a rumor for six years, and tonight the rumor had a name and a shelf. She crouched in the reeds at the edge of the Dormant Bog, watching a hedge witch's stilt-house tilt on its pilings above the black water. The witch inside owned the only known copy of the Everliving Formula, the recipe for a potion said to grant true immortality. Pippin had no coin left, no mentor, and no other lead. Her mother had died coughing peat-smoke into a rag last winter, and Pippin had promised herself she would never watch another person she loved go that way. She had a knife, a stub of candle, and a satchel of empty jars waiting to be filled. She waded across when the witch's lantern went dark. The ladder creaked under her boots. Inside, the house smelled of wet wool and juniper. Pippin found the recipe in a tin box beneath the floorboards, three pages stitched with sinew, the ink brown and precise. She read fast. The first ingredient stopped her cold: one pint of milk drawn from a Glowhorn Sheep during the new moon. She had seen one of the creatures only once, at a distance, a woolly shape with antlers like a stag and green stripes that lit the fog. They lived deep in the bog and killed anything that came close to their lambs. Pippin folded the pages into her shirt and climbed down. She had the recipe. Now she had to milk a monster before the moon turned, and the moon was already thinning.