POV: vin
Summary
Vin stands before a mirror at Manor Renoux in her first noblewoman's gown — pale blue silk, sapphire barrettes set to draw the eye to her too-short hair, a single ruby bracelet for contrast — and thinks again about the three thousand boxings sitting in her room that would let her vanish for a decade. She does not vanish. What keeps her at the manor is not the wealth or the work or even fear of leaving; it is the unlikely possibility that the people Kelsier has gathered actually do place faith in each other, and she has to know whether that is real.
She rides toward Luthadel with Sazed on the driver's seat, the carriage rocking through the autumn mist. Kelsier drops onto the footman's rest mid-trip and ducks inside through the window in his mistcloak to coach her one last time. Her job tonight is to be seen as Lady Valette Renoux and to mark which houses pay close attention to her — those will be the ones angling for Lord Renoux's weapons contracts, and those are the ones Kelsier means to play against one another into the next war among the Great Houses. He admits a second, longer-term use for her: a skaa Mistborn quietly settled inside the nobility may one day prove useful against the Lord Ruler himself. Then he is gone again into the mist.
Keep Venture is lit from outside by eight limelights burning steady on its stained glass, drowning the keep's spires in white. Vin enters the foyer in panic, certain every eye in the room is reading her as a fraud, and then realises that none of the nobles in the foyer are seeing her at all — they are seeing the gown, the jewelry, the hair, Lady Valette — and that the mask is itself a kind of hiding place. She steadies. Sazed seats her at a solitary table at the edge of the dance floor and slips away to the stewards' dinner. She politely turns away four young men who ask her to dance, because she does not know how. She listens with tin under copper to a nearby noble paying an obligator to record an engagement; she notes how the obligators drift through the hall as quiet chaperones and witnesses to every contract on the floor; she recognises, with a jolt, the imperious obligator that Reen had once pointed out at a forge as her father.
Bored and conspicuous at her own table, she climbs the staircase to a hidden upper balcony where she hopes to watch the windows and the dancers from above without being seen herself. She finds the only good reading lamp on the balcony already claimed by a loose-suited young man with a book in his coat pocket. He gives ground politely, then takes the railing beside her and tries to go back to his reading. When she will not let him return to his book, he introduces himself only as Lord Elend, offers her a dance he plainly does not mean, and grumbles about how his own house runs its servants ragged for parties like this one. He is the first nobleman who has talked to her at all instead of around her. She is not sure what to make of him.
Sazed reappears below looking for her, alarm in his face; she flees the balcony at his glance, and only at the door does he go pale and tell her she has just been chatting unattended with Elend Venture, heir to House Venture. As Sazed hurries her out to the carriage, she burns tin for one more look up at the balcony and finds Elend still watching her go.