POV: kelsier
Summary
Kelsier receives his brother in the upper room at Clubs's shop. Three years apart have not softened Marsh: he tosses across the names of the eleven men Kelsier killed at Keep Venture the night before — soldiers, several of them skaa — and accuses him of hijacking the rebellion to dress up another of his thieving jobs. Kelsier tosses the list into the hearth. The two of them argue, in the half-shorthand of brothers who have had this fight before, over Yeden's contract, over atium, over whether Kelsier can ever care about anything but his own revenge. They circle, without naming her, around the woman they both loved and lost in Kelsier's arrest, and around the betrayal that sent the two of them to the Pits. Marsh tells him bluntly that he sometimes wishes Kelsier had not been the one to walk out of them. Kelsier tells him he wishes that too. Marsh studies him for a long while with his Seeker's eyes and agrees to come back and hear the plan. As Marsh reaches the door, Kelsier burns iron and finds — by the metal latch on her belt — the small figure who has been listening from the hall scampering away.
He fetches his pack from the kitchen, where Dockson, Ham, Breeze, and Clubs are at a table over baywraps and quiet laughter she is not going to join, and pulls Vin out of her bedroom with a folded Mistborn cloak under his arm. She has no time to pretend she was asleep before he knocks. The cloak is a gift. So is a pair of vials of metals. Her first lesson, he says, is not about Allomancy but about attitude: the mist, the night, belong to the Mistborn. The street patrols ignore them; no noble house wants the bad manners of acknowledging that the figure on the rooftop is one of theirs.
He walks her through the basic metals on the dark, mist-damp streets one at a time. Pewter makes her body solid and tireless and a little too eager — the Thug's metal. Tin strips the haze off the night until she can hear creaks she had been ignoring and see, far above, the smudged lights of stars she had not known were there. The next pair of reserves she skips at his warning; she leaves them for later. The next gives off pulses she can feel coming out of Kelsier himself: bronze, the Seeker's metal — and the Steel Inquisitors all have it. Its companion, copper, throws a bubble that hides her Allomancy from a Seeker and, on her person, makes her immune to having her emotions touched. That last part is what holds her attention. She has nothing yet to say about the two emotion metals, zinc and brass — those are for another night.
She is suspicious of the metal he has been putting off — the one with the threads — and finally, walking beside him, burns it on her own. She tugs at one of the threads. A rusty nail flies out of the dark at her face. Kelsier catches it mid-flight, throws it back into the night, and uses the moment to teach: iron and steel let you Pull and Push on metal at a distance, but the line of force runs straight between you and the anchor, and your own weight is in the equation. The lighter party is the one that moves. Every action has a consequence. These two metals, he tells her, will turn out to be the most versatile of her abilities once she learns to read the weights and angles fast enough.
They walk to the foot of Luthadel's city wall under the night mist. He drops a steel ingot on the cobbles, has her stand with feet either side of it, and goes over the wall himself. She is expected to follow. She takes a long breath, listens for a second to her brother Reen's voice warning her never to trust a man this open with his secrets, and pushes off the ingot into the dark.