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Vin Steelpushes herself off the ingot at the foot of Luthadel's city wall and shoots up into the mist, terrified, slowing only when the blue line below her thins almost to nothing. She hovers at the top of the wall until Kelsier yanks her over by her metal-weighted belt. He demonstrates the way back down — fall, Push to slow, fall again — and then steps off into the dark. A guard patrol's lantern bobs along the walltop. She jumps. She lands badly, panics, Pulls instead of Pushes, and would have died but for Kelsier catching her belt at the last second. The earring she still wears, he tells her on the soft earth outside the wall, is safe — metal inside a body cannot be pushed or pulled, which is also how the Inquisitors walk around with spikes through their skulls without dropping dead.

He walks her out into the scrubland beyond the city. She gradually becomes aware of something following them. Kelsier tells her, casually, that it is a mistwraith, and takes her up a low hill so she can see one. Flaring tin, she watches the thing drag itself through the brush on an ill-fitting tangle of legs and arms, a half-translucent skin wrapping rib cages and skulls from a half-dozen different animals — and one human head. Kelsier tells her mistwraiths envelop corpses, digest the soft tissue, and re-use the bones as their own; they are scavengers, not hunters of grown adults, and the high nobility have found uses for them he does not detail. She watches the thing with a kind of horrified fascination and is unsettled the rest of the walk.

Past the scrub they reach the imperial highroad, where a Terrisman steward named Sazed is waiting with a carriage. He is taller than Kelsier, thin and long-armed, in the embroidered robes and ear-studs of a steward sworn to a high lord. Sazed takes the reins and the carriage rolls for Fellise. Inside the carriage, Kelsier watches Vin huddle herself into her cloak across the seat and tries to read the quiet, suspicious girl across from him. She asks about him and his brother and assumes the answer to whether Marsh used to beat him must be yes. He tells her plainly that it was not. Then he presses her on what she wants from him. She is free to walk away with the last two metals taught and a bag of three thousand boxings out of Camon's till. He even has Sazed turn the carriage around when she balks. She takes the coins, and tells him she will stay — not because she trusts him, but because she wants to see what happens. He asks her about the Pits in return; she sees, in his refusal to meet the question, the place where his easy talk of trust still has a wound.

Fellise surprises her. It is full of villas and aspens, the bone-white bark of which somehow resists the staining of ash, and through the carriage window she finds Kelsier looking at the town with something close to disapproval — not at the waste, exactly, but because in his head everything should be a colour called green. Before they arrive he gives her two more rules for her Allomancy: burn off any unused metals before sleeping, because some are poisonous if digested raw, and never burn a metal that is not one of the ten, which can kill.

At Manor Renoux, the impostor "Lord Renoux" receives them at the head of a pale, immaculately kept stone staircase. He is thin, gray-mustached, and immediately distinguishable from Camon's style of fake nobleman by the calm self-confidence with which he carries himself — Vin has to resist looking away from him out of pure habit. Over food, he dismantles the plan to make her his named heir. A young, unmarried heir would draw far too much investigation — and become one of the most sought-after marriages in Luthadel overnight. Instead she will be Lady Valette, a low-status rural cousin from the Western Dominance he is hosting through her first season at court, low enough in standing to be politely tolerated and otherwise ignored. Kelsier hands her over to Sazed for the social training. Their private conversation afterwards he pointedly excludes her from, then apologises for it in the hallway: it was a personal matter of Renoux's and nothing to do with her part in the plan. She believes him, surprised at herself for doing so. As Sazed sees her to her room she asks him, very quietly, whether Kelsier is a good man. He tells her one of the best he has known.