POV: vin
Summary
Back at Manor Renoux, Vin sits cross-legged in shirt and trousers while Sazed questions her in close detail about the balcony conversation with Lord Elend. Kelsier and Lord Renoux arrive together and weigh in: from now on she is to avoid Elend Venture entirely. Lady Valette is too low in standing to be publicly tied to the heir of a great house without setting the court against her, and the point of putting her at court is to gather information, not to make a scandal. Lord Renoux reassures her, in his polished way, that Elend is a known eccentric whose attention is most likely a passing performance for his own amusement. Vin deflects by mentioning that she also saw the obligator her brother once pointed out as her father at the ball. Kelsier takes the lead on that with mild interest and sends her off, telling her she looks worn out and should sleep.
She does not sleep. She throws on her mistcloak and follows the fading iron line of Kelsier's coins out into the autumn mist, copper burning to mask her, nothing on her person but the metals already inside her. He had not invited her. North of Fellise he suddenly speeds up and she loses his trail; landing where his anchors break, she casts about and finds a pair of bronze bars driven into the ground, then another pair further on, and another — an Allomantic highway aimed at Luthadel. She learns the rhythm: leap, Steelpush off the next pair, Ironpull on the side bars to correct course. She reaches the city wall in minutes — twice the speed of a hard rider — and lands on the rooftops.
Without Kelsier's coin trail to follow, she drifts across the dark roofs until she finds herself, almost by instinct, at Keep Venture — its limelights now extinguished. She spots Kelsier crouched a few rooftops away watching the keep. For a terrible second she is sure he means to assassinate Elend to put the Houses at each other's throats; instead he leaves the keep behind and moves toward the centre of the city, and she trails him. He catches her in the act. He had palmed his coin pouch out of his own trail knowing she might follow, and laid the setup as a trap for a Venture Mistborn who might have come hunting him after the prior raid. In passing he mentions that Elend Venture is not even a Misting.
Cornered, she pleads to come along. She is Mistborn; she is going to die fighting the Lord Ruler before the year is out anyway; he keeps telling the others two of them is a force, and he should let her be one of the two. Kelsier relents. He hands her a tiny silvery bead — atium, he says, the tenth and most powerful of the Allomantic metals, worth more than her bag of boxings — and tells her to swallow it and burn it. As he walks toward her, a translucent shadow of him steps a beat ahead of his body, mirroring his next move before he makes it: atium shows the next moment of what a person is about to do, and quickens the mind to act on what it shows. When he burns atium himself a thousand branching shadows leap from him at once and her sight dissolves into noise. The only counter to atium, he says, is atium. The body's juices spoil a swallowed bead within hours; it cannot be hoarded inside a person. He hands her a vial holding one more bead and another vial of refilled metals, and they go to retrieve his coin pouch and turn east toward Kredik Shaw.