POV: vin
Summary
Vin takes a luncheon on the garden balcony of Mansion Renoux, her wound still healing and her every want anticipated by attentive servants. Four weeks of recovery have left her bored to the point of insolence. Sazed is shut up in the library translating the Khlenni tome, her Allomancy practice has shrunk to small ground-level Pushes until the gash in her side closes, and Lord Renoux treats lunch as another item to dictate while she sits beside him in character. The garden itself is the only part of the morning she does not actively resent — colour like she had never seen on a plant before her time here, yellow and red leaves arranged in patterns, exotic trees that catch the ashfall before it can reach the balcony.
A carriage from Luthadel interrupts. The crew has driven out to hold the week's meeting where she can sit in. Kelsier, Breeze, Yeden, and Dockson take the balcony with Renoux; Sazed joins partway through. The servants are sent off and posted as a privacy screen. Recruitment is climbing but still too slow; Ham reports the troops are coming along (with Breeze's caveat that Hammond would praise the balance of a one-legged army); Marsh should be inside the Steel Ministry within the month, which they all hope will give them a way to face Steel Inquisitors when the time comes. Sazed explains the book she brought out of the palace: it is not scripture, but a personal travel journal written before the Ascension by the man who became the Lord Ruler, and worth reading for what it shows of him. Even before Vin reaches for it Dockson speaks up for her, telling Kelsier she has to start going back to balls — both to keep up Valette's face and to feed them the kind of plotting no servant-spy gets to hear. There is a ball at Keep Elariel this weekend, and over Kelsier's worry she lays claim to it. Yeden, she notices, has begun to dress like a gentleman.
That evening she stands in her room looking over the four gowns Dockson has had brought up — black, yellow, white, red — and finds, slightly to her own dismay, that she cares which one she wears. She still thinks of the layers and lace as frivolous; she also remembers the music and the crystalline windows of the Venture ball, and catches herself wondering whether Elend Venture will be at Elariel. The scented bathwater she no longer notices, the cut of her hair, the regular meals that have filled her out — she is not Lady Valette and she is not Vin the urchin either. She is Mistborn.
Through the window she catches sight of Kelsier out on the balcony again as the sun begins to set, and she goes to him. He looks west into the dry hills and asks whether the world ever looks wrong to her — the angry sun, the soot-black sky, the brittle plants. She tells him these things just are, and he tells her that her thinking it is part of the wrongness. Then he unfolds a brittle, much-creased scrap of paper and presses it into her hands: a faded drawing of a flower, a kind of plant no one alive has seen. It belonged to Mare, he says — she collected pre-Ascension lore the way a Keeper would, was a Tineye in the underground before he ever met her, and was the reason Sazed had been a name in his ear long before he had any use for a Keeper in his crew. Dockson kept the picture for him while he was in the Pits; he carries it still.
Vin asks how he can keep it after what she did, and Kelsier tells her he is not even certain she did it. He tells her, slowly, the part he carries — that the Lord Ruler himself had spoken his thanks to Mare aloud, to his face, the night they were caught, with no theatrics about it. She was sent to Hathsin anyway, joined him there weeks later, and was beaten to death before him a year on. That same night, alone with his bleeding arms in the rock, he Snapped into his Mistborn powers. The philosophers have a saying for it, he tells her: that the gift opens only to someone who has met death and chosen otherwise. He chose, that night, to make Mare's dream the rest of his life — a sky with no ash, plants that grow green again, flowers that bloom on them. He admits it sounds mad. She tells him it is the first thing about him that has actually made sense to her. The mists begin to rise on the gardens as he speaks of a daughter she had once wanted and he had refused.
He asks her, gently, to be careful. She promises she will, and admits that, for what it is worth, she would like a chance to lay eyes on one of those flowers herself.