Elaine’s blood into a silver bowl. We’re in a hospital so I’m sure I’ll be able to do it harmlessly”—getting a silver bowl might be a bit more of a challenge, now I thought of it, but that was a side issue—“and I am all about being safe, sane, and consensual so if she’s not up for it, that’s fine. We can find another way. I’m sure.” I wasn’t, particularly, but it felt like the thing to say.
Elaine was doing lamb’s eyes again. I couldn’t tell if the fact that she looked so young I genuinely couldn’t find her attractive was a sign that I was getting more responsible, or just getting old. “But she’s dying?”
“In a coma. But sort of a magic coma. And at the moment my options are you bleed in a bowl, or she stays like this forever and the nation unravels into mystical chaos, or she dies.”
Elaine blinked. “Then I’ll do it. Promise me it won’t hurt too badly.”
“It shouldn’t do. Then again I might be working off the wrong baseline here. I mean, I’ve been running around with a broken arm for, like, three days.” Thinking about it, maybe I ought to get that looked at sooner rather than later. Okay, later rather than much, much later.
Patrick seemed this close to being all no, I shall not allow it, but either he’d mellowed or I was being unfair to him.
“Right then,” I went on. “So … we have to find a silver bowl? Fuck I hate magic.”
After about twenty minutes of wandering aimlessly around the hospital hoping that the weird definitely-no-witch-queens-here spell that Nim’s unconscious body or detached spirit or whatever was laying over the place would stop us getting escorted off the premises by security, I decided our best plan would be to head upstairs and ask the mages. If anybody would know where something so pointlessly fucking weird and arbitrary was, it’d be a wizard.
Nimue was still lying in what I thought might technically have been in state, in an upstairs room with Michelle watching over her body. She eyed Patrick and Elaine suspiciously as we entered.
“The fuck are these?” she asked.
“He’s some dickhead from a long time ago. She’s the holy grail, don’t ask. Apparently we need to get her blood into a silver bowl.”
Michelle’s eyes darted from me to Elaine, back to Nim, and to me again. “And where do you expect to get one of them at this time of night?”
Okay, so maybe operation ask a magician wasn’t quite the flawless plan I thought it was. “Come on, a place this swanky they must be swimming in them.”
“Oh yes, first thing they come in and check on. IV bag, sheets, vital signs, have we made sure there’s a fucking great bowl made of pure silver in here.”
“Not helping, Michelle.”
“Wasn’t trying to. You’re supposed to be Galahad. Go rustle up a dish.”
Fine. There had to be a way to swing this. I refused to believe that destiny or the universe or Nim’s mystical will, or whatever was making this whole thing happen, would drag me all the way up the country and all the way back again with a terrified girl in tow only to have me fall down at the end for the want of a piece of tableware.
I set out back into the hospital. Come on, Nim, I found myself whispering—I hoped this didn’t count as prayer, I liked Nimue a lot but I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with her being my actual god—you must have a plan here. Okay, yeah, that was sounding distinctly prayerey. Trying not to dwell on the theological implications of my internal monologue, I meandered aimlessly through the hospital, trusting that some force or some chance would bring me to roughly the right place.
My possibly-guided-possibly-random wanderings led me to haematology. Perhaps I just had blood on the brain, but it seemed logical to me that if I was looking for an appropriate vessel to bleed a person into, I should probably look in the ward that was all about bleeding.
There was definitely something off about the place—every bed was occupied and all of them by young attractive women in various states of unconsciousness. A painting on the far wall showed a dead-looking woman being loaded onto a ship by what appeared to be a bunch of knights. I blanked it all out and looked around for anything appropriately silver and bowl-like.
On a low table I saw something that seemed to fit the