POV: vin
Summary
Vin launches herself off coins into the Fellise mists and finds, for the first time, that flight feels like freedom rather than fear. She has been training for two months; the basic four metals are starting to feel native to her. Tonight's drill is a spar with Kelsier under the Mistborn cover, hunting each other across the manicured estates of Fellise by Steel-throwing coins and Iron-pulling on the latches of sleeping mansions. She fools him once by Pushing an empty coin pouch ahead of her as a decoy and catching his counter-spray out of the bushes from the other side; then she loses a head-on Push-shove against him through a flattening aspen — his weight is greater than hers, so the coin between them goes his way and she goes through the tree. He hands her the bent coin afterwards as a souvenir. His lesson is that she should not fight bigger people head on. Hers is a different one: stay in the corners and shadows, as she always has. She tracks down her pouch in a tree branch by its iron-line afterwards rather than leave it behind. She is not yet able to be wasteful with a coin.
Back at Manor Renoux she submits to a staff woman named Cosahn, who takes scissors to her ragged hair until it looks, to her own surprise in the mirror, like a girl's. Cosahn praises the colour and thickness of it and tells her many courtly women would die for hair like hers. Sazed sits patiently across from her through the cut and uses the captive audience to drill her courtly cover. She is Lady Valette, fourth cousin to Lord Teven Renoux, sent from a Western Dominance dye-trading family for her first season at the court in Luthadel. She can recite the ten high houses in order of power without hesitation. She knows what she is in the city to do: be noticed enough not to be suspect, and otherwise be ignored.
Sazed also offers her the fifth religion of his campaign — a faith called Trelagism, whose followers worshipped the stars as the eyes of a quiet northern god. She declines. He has, he tells her, five hundred and sixty-two of these to offer. He is a Keeper, one of a hunted Terris order that holds the religions and the lore of the dead nations in trust for the day the Final Empire ends — and on that day, he tells her, people will want their fathers' beliefs back. She listens, half-amused and half-unsettled, and wonders whether everyone associated with Kelsier is the same kind of quiet mad.
Kelsier arrives, compliments the haircut, and pulls Sazed into the hallway. They both know Vin cannot quite be ready in time, but the army gathering in the caves cannot wait either; the longer they wait, the more the Ministry may find. Sazed suggests she be cycled through the other Mistings on the crew to learn each metal from the master of it. Kelsier agrees — and grants Sazed something more: from this night on, Sazed will go with Vin to every court function as her steward, and stand between her and whatever wants to harm her. He has seen the Terrisman move in a fight, knows what a Keeper hides under that formal robe, and is more comfortable sending the girl into a roomful of noblemen with him at her side than without. Sazed gives him his word.
The two of them, Kelsier tells Sazed, have barely covered the first four metals — and a Mistborn of Vin's obvious instincts deserves a proper teacher's year, not a few snatched lessons on the road. He has neither year nor proper teacher to give her. He confesses that he feels guilt over it and that the guilt will not stop him from sending her into the aristocracy anyway. Lord Venture is throwing a ball at week's end, and Kelsier tells Sazed flatly that Vin, ready or not, will be at it.