THE SILVER KNIFE
The report that brought her to The Black Vial was not the report she had been expecting.
She had been expecting, eventually, a report that connected the Vance Blood Alchemy signature she had found in the courtyard creature's tissue to either the notebook that had gone missing from Cutter's Row, which she knew about through channels she maintained separately from the official investigation record, or to one of the three active incidents she was tracking in the Veins district. Instead, the report that arrived was a forensic analysis of a compound found at a crime scene two nights ago, a compound that shared certain markers with Vance-line alchemy and that the analyst had flagged as potentially relevant to the Hollowed case.
She read the report twice. The markers were not definitive. They were consistent with a Vance compound that had been significantly modified, the kind of modification that could be produced by someone with a partial understanding of the original formula working from documentation rather than from training. If she was reading the analysis correctly, someone had taken a Vance formula and adapted it for a purpose it had not been designed for.
She thought about the missing notebook.
She thought about timing. The notebook had been taken approximately six days ago. The compound at the crime scene had been used approximately three days ago. If the notebook had been taken to access formulations, three days was a tight window in which to develop a modified compound, but it was not impossible for someone who already had a foundational understanding of the technique.
She did not know yet if this was what had happened. She needed more information. She needed to go to The Black Vial.
She brought two officers, because that was standard procedure for a formal inspection, and because she did not trust herself to do this alone, and the officers would function as a form of constraint on the things she might otherwise say or do in a room with her sister.
Evelyn opened the door. She always opened the door herself, Rosamund noted. She had never used a secondary staff member to receive formal visitors, which meant she preferred to be present at every point of entry to her space, which was the behavior of someone who controlled their environment carefully.
Evelyn looked at her. Looked at the officers. Looked at her again.
She stepped back and let them in.
The inspection was formal and routine, which Rosamund maintained deliberately. She did not have sufficient evidence to justify anything beyond a routine inspection. She needed to be here, needed to see the space, needed to look at what was present and what was not, and she could do that under the cover of a routine inquiry without it constituting an accusation.
She was walking through the back preparation area when she saw the knife.
It was on the worktable, in the cleaning rack with the other instruments. A silver knife, blade length approximately the span of a hand, handle worn smooth with extensive use. She recognized the handle from before she recognized anything else about it, from a memory she had not lost yet: the handle wrapped in a specific material that she had seen a hundred times, that her brother had bought at a specific market in the merchant district the year he turned nineteen, that he had carried for two years before the night he died.
She looked at it for two seconds, which was longer than she meant to look.
She looked away.
She heard movement from the front room, the specific quality of footstep she associated with Julian Sterling, which she had learned over the past several weeks of background investigation, and then he was in the doorway, in the way he moved through spaces as though he was an authorized presence in all of them.
He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at Evelyn, and then back at her, and in the three seconds they all occupied the same room, she was aware of being assessed with the same care she used to assess others.
He said, to no one in particular and to Evelyn specifically: "Your sister and the Night Watch. I had the impression this was routine."
She said: "It is."
"The Night Watch sends captains on routine inspections in the Lower Veins."
"When they have reason to," she said. She looked at Evelyn. "We found a compound at a scene. The analysis suggested some markers in common with your work. I'm required to follow up."
Evelyn looked at her. Her face was the same face it had always been and it told Rosamund, as it always told Rosamund, nothing she was not supposed to know.
Julian Sterling said something that implied a version of Evelyn's relationship with him that was not accurate and that was designed to imply a different kind of connection than the professional one they actually had. She watched Evelyn's reaction to this and noted that Evelyn was furious, specifically and precisely furious, which meant the implication was not accurate and had been made anyway and Evelyn knew exactly why it had been made.
She looked at Julian Sterling and he looked back at her and they spent a moment in mutual professional assessment that resolved, she thought, in roughly equal conclusions about the other's capabilities.
She completed the inspection. She found nothing that required further investigation. The modified compound did not originate here, or if it had, there was nothing currently present that could confirm it. She noted what she had found, which was the knife, which she was not going to put in the report.
She left. She stopped at the top of the steps and did not go back in. She did not know what she would say if she went back in.
She walked back toward Blackthorn Keep.
She thought about the knife. She thought about the specific quality of recognition she had felt when she saw it, the way certain things bypassed the careful management she maintained and arrived unfiltered. She had not expected to see it. She had not thought about where it had gone after that night.
It had gone to Evelyn.
She thought about what it meant that Evelyn had been using Silas's knife for nine years without knowing it was his. She thought about what it would do to Evelyn, when she found out.
She thought about what it would mean to be the one to tell her.
She walked. The city moved around her, the ordinary sounds of the Lower Veins in the morning.
She thought about the knife and about all the things she had not said and about whether she was ever going to find a way to say them.
She walked into Blackthorn Keep.
She started the day.
She spent the morning on things that required her attention, which was all of her mornings. She reviewed the forensic analysis again, more carefully, and updated her notes on the compound signature. She sent a request to the medical examiner's office for additional tissue samples from two of the earlier incidents, the ones she had tagged as potentially linked to the Vance signature but had not been able to confirm. She wrote the request in the careful language that suggested routine follow-up rather than active investigation.
She thought about the knife.
She had not told anyone about the knife. She was not going to tell anyone about the knife. What she had seen in Evelyn's preparation room was a personal observation, not an evidentiary one, and she was not in the habit of putting personal observations into official records.
She was in the habit of carrying them.
She had been carrying them for nine years.
She thought about the specific way Evelyn had held the knife in the cleaning rack, with the casual familiarity of something used every day, the way she had not looked at it as anything other than an instrument. She had used it this morning, probably. She used it every day. She had used it for nine years.
She thought about when and how Silas's knife had come to be in Evelyn's possession.
She had not been paying attention to objects in the days after the ritual. She had been paying attention to other things, to the surviving, to the immediate consequences, to the specific series of decisions that had kept her and Evelyn both outside the formal record of what had happened that night. She had not tracked the objects. She had not thought about where the knife went.
It had gone to Evelyn.
She thought about that. She thought about whether Silas had intended it, in the time he had before the end, or whether it had been found and kept by someone who did not know whose it was, or whether Evelyn had been told it was his and had kept it, or whether she had no idea and had been using it all this time because it was simply a good knife.
She did not know which of these was true. She was not going to find out by asking. She was not, currently, in a position to have the conversation that would allow her to ask.
She updated the case file.
She thought about Julian Sterling and about what he was doing in The Black Vial's back room with the ease of someone who had been there before. She thought about the Emergency Covenant mark she had seen on Evelyn's wrist during the inspection, which she had recognized because she knew what those marks looked like. She had known Blood Alchemists over the years who had formed Emergency Covenants and she knew the quality of the mark.
She thought about what it meant that Evelyn had formed one with Julian Sterling.
She thought about the timing: Sterling showing up after the incidents began, connecting to Evelyn through a professional request that had escalated, the covenant forming under emergency conditions. She thought about whether this was coincidence.
She did not believe in coincidence, as a professional matter. She believed in patterns she had not yet identified.
She updated her personal notes.
She thought about Evelyn's face when Julian Sterling had made the implication about their relationship, the specific quality of her fury, which was not the fury of someone surprised by an accusation but of someone who had been used as a tool in someone else's interaction without being consulted. That kind of fury was specific. It required an established understanding between the two people of what their relationship actually was and a violation of that understanding.
She thought about what it implied about the relationship that the violation had produced that specific fury.
She put the notes away.
She had a briefing at noon. She went.
She was the Captain of the Night Watch for the rest of the day, which was what she was, which was what she had made herself, and which held, as it always held, for as long as she needed it to.
She thought about the knife when she was walking home.
She thought about Evelyn using it every day.
She thought about what she would say, if she ever managed to say anything.
She went inside.
She made tea.
She thought about it for a long time, the knife and the nine years and Evelyn's hands and all the ways she had tried and failed to find the opening that would let her say the things she needed to say.
She drank her tea.
She washed the cup.
She went to bed.
She woke in the night with the specific quality of wakefulness that meant she had been processing something in sleep and had not finished. She lay in the dark and let the processing continue.
She was thinking about what she knew and what she did not know and about the shape of the gap between them. She had spent nine years managing that gap, keeping what she knew in one category and what she could say in another and what she could not say in a third, and she had managed it well enough to survive. She was not sure she had managed it well enough to do what needed to be done.
The cases were escalating. The incidents were increasing in frequency. The compound from the crime scene was a modification of foundational Vance alchemy, which meant someone had access to the kind of information that only the notebook would have provided. The notebook had been taken from Evelyn.
She lay in the dark and thought about what was coming.
She thought about Evelyn in The Black Vial with Julian Sterling and with the covenant mark on her wrist and the knife she had been using for nine years without knowing whose it was. She thought about the knife and about what Evelyn was going to feel when she found out, and about whether finding out from the situation was better or worse than finding out from someone who told her.
She thought about whether she was ever going to be able to tell her.
She thought about all the things she had kept from Evelyn for nine years and about whether she had kept them as protection or whether she had kept them because she was afraid of what Evelyn would do with them, and about whether there was a meaningful difference between those two things.
She thought she had convinced herself there was a difference.
She was less sure, in the dark at three in the morning, with the city running its slow machinery outside, that the difference was as clear as she had needed it to be.
She got up. She made tea, because the tea was a way of doing something with the two in the morning quality of everything. She sat in the kitchen and drank it and thought about the knife and about Silas and about the nine years since and about what it would mean to start actually telling the truth.
She had told herself for nine years that she was waiting for the right moment.
She thought, at two in the morning with cold tea in her hands, that the right moment might be a category she had invented to avoid a different category entirely.
She washed the cup.
She went back to bed.
In the morning she would be the Captain again. She would make decisions and give orders and maintain the careful structure that kept everything she needed to keep in place.
Tonight she was just someone who had seen her brother's knife in her sister's cleaning rack and could not stop thinking about it.
She lay in the dark.
She waited for morning.
She had a good morning, professionally. The briefings were efficient, the follow-up reports were timely, the district liaison had found something relevant in the old case files and brought it to her attention promptly. She reviewed the new information and updated her assessment.
She did not think about the knife during any of this.
She thought about it in the fifteen minutes she had between the noon briefing and the afternoon patrol review. She sat in her office with the door closed and allowed herself fifteen minutes to think about it without management.
The knife had been Silas's. Evelyn had it. Evelyn had been using it daily for nine years. Evelyn did not know it was Silas's.
These were the facts.
The question she had been avoiding was: what was the right thing to do with them.
She had told herself for nine years that her job was to protect Evelyn, that keeping Evelyn outside the formal record was protection, that maintaining the silence that the oath required was protection. She believed all of this. She still believed it. Protection was real. The things she had done to provide it were real.
What she was less sure about, this morning, this afternoon, in the fifteen minutes she had given herself, was whether protection was the only thing she had been doing.
She thought about whether she had also been protecting herself. From the conversation. From the specific expression on Evelyn's face that she would have to see if she ever said the things she needed to say. From the possibility that Evelyn would hear everything and still not want her.
She thought about that.
She thought about whether the possibility was likely.
She thought about the fact that she had not given Evelyn the chance to decide.
The fifteen minutes ended. She went back to work.
She was the Captain of the Night Watch. She had things to do.
She did them.
She went home that evening the same way she went home every evening: efficiently, without lingering, the route between Blackthorn Keep and her apartment traveled enough times that she could walk it without thinking.
She thought about the knife the whole way.
She made tea. She sat at the kitchen table.
She thought about Evelyn holding the knife in the lamplight of The Black Vial, the way she had seen her do it during the inspection, the habitual ease of it, the way someone holds something they have used ten thousand times.
She thought about what Silas would think.
She thought about Silas with the specific quality she reserved for thinking about him now, the thoughts she could still have without the voice she had lost, the way the memory still had weight even when it no longer had sound. He had always wanted them to be close, the two of them. He had spent his life as the bridge between them, the person who could speak to both and translate between, who understood Rosamund's silence and Evelyn's precision and who used that understanding to keep them connected.
When he died, the bridge had gone.
She had told herself that keeping Evelyn safe was the continuation of what he would have wanted. She thought now, at the kitchen table with the cold tea, that maybe what he would have wanted was not the safety she had provided but the truth she had withheld.
She thought about that for a while.
She thought about what it would mean to try.
She drank the cold tea.
She washed the cup.
She thought: tomorrow. Not today.
She went to bed. She slept, because she had trained herself to sleep regardless of what she was thinking about, because the Night Watch required it and because she was the Night Watch Captain and the Night Watch required her to function.
She slept.
She thought, in the space just before sleep, that the knife was still out there, in The Black Vial, in Evelyn's cleaning rack, waiting with the patience of objects for the person who would eventually understand it.
You've reached the end of this chapter
THE SILVER KNIFE
The report that brought her to The Black Vial was not the report she had been expecting.
She had been expecting, eventually, a report that connected the Vance Blood Alchemy signature she had found in the courtyard creature's tissue to either the notebook that had gone missing from Cutter's Row, which she knew about through channels she maintained separately from the official investigation record, or to one of the three active incidents she was tracking in the Veins district. Instead, the report that arrived was a forensic analysis of a compound found at a crime scene two nights ago, a compound that shared certain markers with Vance-line alchemy and that the analyst had flagged as potentially relevant to the Hollowed case.
She read the report twice. The markers were not definitive. They were consistent with a Vance compound that had been significantly modified, the kind of modification that could be produced by someone with a partial understanding of the original formula working from documentation rather than from training. If she was reading the analysis correctly, someone had taken a Vance formula and adapted it for a purpose it had not been designed for.
She thought about the missing notebook.
She thought about timing. The notebook had been taken approximately six days ago. The compound at the crime scene had been used approximately three days ago. If the notebook had been taken to access formulations, three days was a tight window in which to develop a modified compound, but it was not impossible for someone who already had a foundational understanding of the technique.
She did not know yet if this was what had happened. She needed more information. She needed to go to The Black Vial.
She brought two officers, because that was standard procedure for a formal inspection, and because she did not trust herself to do this alone, and the officers would function as a form of constraint on the things she might otherwise say or do in a room with her sister.
Evelyn opened the door. She always opened the door herself, Rosamund noted. She had never used a secondary staff member to receive formal visitors, which meant she preferred to be present at every point of entry to her space, which was the behavior of someone who controlled their environment carefully.
Evelyn looked at her. Looked at the officers. Looked at her again.
She stepped back and let them in.
The inspection was formal and routine, which Rosamund maintained deliberately. She did not have sufficient evidence to justify anything beyond a routine inspection. She needed to be here, needed to see the space, needed to look at what was present and what was not, and she could do that under the cover of a routine inquiry without it constituting an accusation.
She was walking through the back preparation area when she saw the knife.
It was on the worktable, in the cleaning rack with the other instruments. A silver knife, blade length approximately the span of a hand, handle worn smooth with extensive use. She recognized the handle from before she recognized anything else about it, from a memory she had not lost yet: the handle wrapped in a specific material that she had seen a hundred times, that her brother had bought at a specific market in the merchant district the year he turned nineteen, that he had carried for two years before the night he died.
She looked at it for two seconds, which was longer than she meant to look.
She looked away.
She heard movement from the front room, the specific quality of footstep she associated with Julian Sterling, which she had learned over the past several weeks of background investigation, and then he was in the doorway, in the way he moved through spaces as though he was an authorized presence in all of them.
He looked at her. She looked at him. He looked at Evelyn, and then back at her, and in the three seconds they all occupied the same room, she was aware of being assessed with the same care she used to assess others.
He said, to no one in particular and to Evelyn specifically: "Your sister and the Night Watch. I had the impression this was routine."
She said: "It is."
"The Night Watch sends captains on routine inspections in the Lower Veins."
"When they have reason to," she said. She looked at Evelyn. "We found a compound at a scene. The analysis suggested some markers in common with your work. I'm required to follow up."
Evelyn looked at her. Her face was the same face it had always been and it told Rosamund, as it always told Rosamund, nothing she was not supposed to know.
Julian Sterling said something that implied a version of Evelyn's relationship with him that was not accurate and that was designed to imply a different kind of connection than the professional one they actually had. She watched Evelyn's reaction to this and noted that Evelyn was furious, specifically and precisely furious, which meant the implication was not accurate and had been made anyway and Evelyn knew exactly why it had been made.
She looked at Julian Sterling and he looked back at her and they spent a moment in mutual professional assessment that resolved, she thought, in roughly equal conclusions about the other's capabilities.
She completed the inspection. She found nothing that required further investigation. The modified compound did not originate here, or if it had, there was nothing currently present that could confirm it. She noted what she had found, which was the knife, which she was not going to put in the report.
She left. She stopped at the top of the steps and did not go back in. She did not know what she would say if she went back in.
She walked back toward Blackthorn Keep.
She thought about the knife. She thought about the specific quality of recognition she had felt when she saw it, the way certain things bypassed the careful management she maintained and arrived unfiltered. She had not expected to see it. She had not thought about where it had gone after that night.
It had gone to Evelyn.
She thought about what it meant that Evelyn had been using Silas's knife for nine years without knowing it was his. She thought about what it would do to Evelyn, when she found out.
She thought about what it would mean to be the one to tell her.
She walked. The city moved around her, the ordinary sounds of the Lower Veins in the morning.
She thought about the knife and about all the things she had not said and about whether she was ever going to find a way to say them.
She walked into Blackthorn Keep.
She started the day.
She spent the morning on things that required her attention, which was all of her mornings. She reviewed the forensic analysis again, more carefully, and updated her notes on the compound signature. She sent a request to the medical examiner's office for additional tissue samples from two of the earlier incidents, the ones she had tagged as potentially linked to the Vance signature but had not been able to confirm. She wrote the request in the careful language that suggested routine follow-up rather than active investigation.
She thought about the knife.
She had not told anyone about the knife. She was not going to tell anyone about the knife. What she had seen in Evelyn's preparation room was a personal observation, not an evidentiary one, and she was not in the habit of putting personal observations into official records.
She was in the habit of carrying them.
She had been carrying them for nine years.
She thought about the specific way Evelyn had held the knife in the cleaning rack, with the casual familiarity of something used every day, the way she had not looked at it as anything other than an instrument. She had used it this morning, probably. She used it every day. She had used it for nine years.
She thought about when and how Silas's knife had come to be in Evelyn's possession.
She had not been paying attention to objects in the days after the ritual. She had been paying attention to other things, to the surviving, to the immediate consequences, to the specific series of decisions that had kept her and Evelyn both outside the formal record of what had happened that night. She had not tracked the objects. She had not thought about where the knife went.
It had gone to Evelyn.
She thought about that. She thought about whether Silas had intended it, in the time he had before the end, or whether it had been found and kept by someone who did not know whose it was, or whether Evelyn had been told it was his and had kept it, or whether she had no idea and had been using it all this time because it was simply a good knife.
She did not know which of these was true. She was not going to find out by asking. She was not, currently, in a position to have the conversation that would allow her to ask.
She updated the case file.
She thought about Julian Sterling and about what he was doing in The Black Vial's back room with the ease of someone who had been there before. She thought about the Emergency Covenant mark she had seen on Evelyn's wrist during the inspection, which she had recognized because she knew what those marks looked like. She had known Blood Alchemists over the years who had formed Emergency Covenants and she knew the quality of the mark.
She thought about what it meant that Evelyn had formed one with Julian Sterling.
She thought about the timing: Sterling showing up after the incidents began, connecting to Evelyn through a professional request that had escalated, the covenant forming under emergency conditions. She thought about whether this was coincidence.
She did not believe in coincidence, as a professional matter. She believed in patterns she had not yet identified.
She updated her personal notes.
She thought about Evelyn's face when Julian Sterling had made the implication about their relationship, the specific quality of her fury, which was not the fury of someone surprised by an accusation but of someone who had been used as a tool in someone else's interaction without being consulted. That kind of fury was specific. It required an established understanding between the two people of what their relationship actually was and a violation of that understanding.
She thought about what it implied about the relationship that the violation had produced that specific fury.
She put the notes away.
She had a briefing at noon. She went.
She was the Captain of the Night Watch for the rest of the day, which was what she was, which was what she had made herself, and which held, as it always held, for as long as she needed it to.
She thought about the knife when she was walking home.
She thought about Evelyn using it every day.
She thought about what she would say, if she ever managed to say anything.
She went inside.
She made tea.
She thought about it for a long time, the knife and the nine years and Evelyn's hands and all the ways she had tried and failed to find the opening that would let her say the things she needed to say.
She drank her tea.
She washed the cup.
She went to bed.
She woke in the night with the specific quality of wakefulness that meant she had been processing something in sleep and had not finished. She lay in the dark and let the processing continue.
She was thinking about what she knew and what she did not know and about the shape of the gap between them. She had spent nine years managing that gap, keeping what she knew in one category and what she could say in another and what she could not say in a third, and she had managed it well enough to survive. She was not sure she had managed it well enough to do what needed to be done.
The cases were escalating. The incidents were increasing in frequency. The compound from the crime scene was a modification of foundational Vance alchemy, which meant someone had access to the kind of information that only the notebook would have provided. The notebook had been taken from Evelyn.
She lay in the dark and thought about what was coming.
She thought about Evelyn in The Black Vial with Julian Sterling and with the covenant mark on her wrist and the knife she had been using for nine years without knowing whose it was. She thought about the knife and about what Evelyn was going to feel when she found out, and about whether finding out from the situation was better or worse than finding out from someone who told her.
She thought about whether she was ever going to be able to tell her.
She thought about all the things she had kept from Evelyn for nine years and about whether she had kept them as protection or whether she had kept them because she was afraid of what Evelyn would do with them, and about whether there was a meaningful difference between those two things.
She thought she had convinced herself there was a difference.
She was less sure, in the dark at three in the morning, with the city running its slow machinery outside, that the difference was as clear as she had needed it to be.
She got up. She made tea, because the tea was a way of doing something with the two in the morning quality of everything. She sat in the kitchen and drank it and thought about the knife and about Silas and about the nine years since and about what it would mean to start actually telling the truth.
She had told herself for nine years that she was waiting for the right moment.
She thought, at two in the morning with cold tea in her hands, that the right moment might be a category she had invented to avoid a different category entirely.
She washed the cup.
She went back to bed.
In the morning she would be the Captain again. She would make decisions and give orders and maintain the careful structure that kept everything she needed to keep in place.
Tonight she was just someone who had seen her brother's knife in her sister's cleaning rack and could not stop thinking about it.
She lay in the dark.
She waited for morning.
She had a good morning, professionally. The briefings were efficient, the follow-up reports were timely, the district liaison had found something relevant in the old case files and brought it to her attention promptly. She reviewed the new information and updated her assessment.
She did not think about the knife during any of this.
She thought about it in the fifteen minutes she had between the noon briefing and the afternoon patrol review. She sat in her office with the door closed and allowed herself fifteen minutes to think about it without management.
The knife had been Silas's. Evelyn had it. Evelyn had been using it daily for nine years. Evelyn did not know it was Silas's.
These were the facts.
The question she had been avoiding was: what was the right thing to do with them.
She had told herself for nine years that her job was to protect Evelyn, that keeping Evelyn outside the formal record was protection, that maintaining the silence that the oath required was protection. She believed all of this. She still believed it. Protection was real. The things she had done to provide it were real.
What she was less sure about, this morning, this afternoon, in the fifteen minutes she had given herself, was whether protection was the only thing she had been doing.
She thought about whether she had also been protecting herself. From the conversation. From the specific expression on Evelyn's face that she would have to see if she ever said the things she needed to say. From the possibility that Evelyn would hear everything and still not want her.
She thought about that.
She thought about whether the possibility was likely.
She thought about the fact that she had not given Evelyn the chance to decide.
The fifteen minutes ended. She went back to work.
She was the Captain of the Night Watch. She had things to do.
She did them.
She went home that evening the same way she went home every evening: efficiently, without lingering, the route between Blackthorn Keep and her apartment traveled enough times that she could walk it without thinking.
She thought about the knife the whole way.
She made tea. She sat at the kitchen table.
She thought about Evelyn holding the knife in the lamplight of The Black Vial, the way she had seen her do it during the inspection, the habitual ease of it, the way someone holds something they have used ten thousand times.
She thought about what Silas would think.
She thought about Silas with the specific quality she reserved for thinking about him now, the thoughts she could still have without the voice she had lost, the way the memory still had weight even when it no longer had sound. He had always wanted them to be close, the two of them. He had spent his life as the bridge between them, the person who could speak to both and translate between, who understood Rosamund's silence and Evelyn's precision and who used that understanding to keep them connected.
When he died, the bridge had gone.
She had told herself that keeping Evelyn safe was the continuation of what he would have wanted. She thought now, at the kitchen table with the cold tea, that maybe what he would have wanted was not the safety she had provided but the truth she had withheld.
She thought about that for a while.
She thought about what it would mean to try.
She drank the cold tea.
She washed the cup.
She thought: tomorrow. Not today.
She went to bed. She slept, because she had trained herself to sleep regardless of what she was thinking about, because the Night Watch required it and because she was the Night Watch Captain and the Night Watch required her to function.
She slept.
She thought, in the space just before sleep, that the knife was still out there, in The Black Vial, in Evelyn's cleaning rack, waiting with the patience of objects for the person who would eventually understand it.
You've reached the end of this chapter