POV: vin
Summary
Vin surfaces from a long, drug-thick sleep in a bed at Clubs's shop and her first muddled thought is that Reen has beaten her — she has been too friendly, too loud, drawn attention. The pain is too deep for one of his beatings, though, and the boy at her bedside is no one from Camon's crew. It is Lestibournes, handing her water and telling her, in plain words for once, that she has been asleep for two weeks. Kelsier has renamed him in that time, he adds shyly — he is "Spook" now. She checks the bandage on her side and remembers the obsidian-toothed axe and the rain on the spires.
Dockson comes up next, sits on the stool, and gently confirms that Kelsier is alive and recovered. He tells her something Kelsier has been turning over since the chamber — that the Inquisitors sent two of their three after her and only one after him, as if she were the actual prize. She has no answer. She drains the rest of the water — drugged for the pain — and goes back to sleep.
Kelsier is at her bedside when she wakes again, by lantern. The job has moved forward in her absence: Renoux is buying weapons; the army in the caves is growing; Theron's Ministry contact has paid out, and Marsh himself is going in as a planted acolyte. He apologises for nearly killing her. She brushes it off — she made him take her. He tells her flatly that the right answer would have been to send her away anyway, and that she should accept the apology. There is something subtly different about him now: less swagger, more weight. He banned her from physical Allomancy until Sazed says her wound is closed enough. When she asks, halting, whether they are invincible, he tells her quietly that they are far from it.
Three days later she rides the Renoux carriage back to Fellise with the shades up, Lady Valette seen alive again to put down the rumours that she has taken ill. The trip itself is uncomfortable in her bruised body, but the part of it she finds harder than the pain is the memory of Clubs's shop coddling her through the recovery — a thief's crew does not nurse the wounded, it leaves them, and her room and her care had been weeks of unpaid kindness from people not blood to her. Lestibournes in particular had sat with her hours through the coma. Reen's voice in the back of her head calls them fools and warns her again to leave. She ignores him for the first time in a long time. At the mansion door Lord Renoux himself is waiting in full uncle-and-niece performance, asks after her ride, never breaks character to ask after the gut wound. She wonders quietly whether the man is sane.
Climbing the northern stairs on a careful flare of pewter — Kelsier has warned her about leaning on it, but her legs cannot do it alone — she finds Sazed in the small library translating the book she brought out of the palace. He is wearing reading spectacles she has never seen him wear before. She presses him on what he is. He is not an Allomancer — he was clear about that the night he saved her, and he holds to it now, even when she points out the things he did at the palace and the speed with which he got there. He is a Keeper, a Terris memorizer of religions and languages and lore. He carries one hundred and seventy-two languages alone, most of them dead since the Lord Ruler's unification of the fifth century — and the Khlenni of the logbook is one of them. The work he does, he tells her, is similar to Allomancy but not the same: where she draws power from metals, he uses them to create memories.
He will not say more about how, and passes over her question about why he was wearing spectacles, which she works out for herself a few sentences later. He had emptied a sight-store running through the palace to find her and had been refilling it ever since. He explains, mildly and in passing, that all Terris stewards are eunuchs under the Lord Ruler's standing breeding program — bred to obedience, never permitted families. Vin flushes deeply at having even asked.
She asks one last thing before she lets him go back to work: the question of who broke Kelsier into the Pits. He tells her the crew mostly believes it was Mare — that the Lord Ruler himself named her to Kelsier's face. She died at Hathsin beneath the slavemasters' lashes a year later, and Kelsier still does not know for certain whether the accusation was true. Vin tells him what Reen had always taught her — that anyone will betray you, given motive and chance — and Sazed replies, evenly, that he would refuse to spend his days believing it even were it so. She sits a long moment with that and then, exhausted by sitting at all, goes to bed.