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Vin picks the red gown for her return to court — the boldest of the four, on the theory that the more visible the surface, the easier it is to hide what is underneath. She rides with Sazed to a ball at Keep Elariel, a smaller building than Venture's grand hall, designed for parties: a sunken dance floor lit from below, two ringed levels of tables around it, stained-glass skylights cut into the low roof and lit by lanterns set on top. Sazed has put her in slippers instead of heeled shoes she would only fall in. The other noblewomen, gliding past in their high heels and elaborate styling, take a little of her confidence — she reminds herself the court will see Lady Valette and not her, and that Valette is supposed to be new and uncertain. She makes the top of the stairs feeling more like Valette than the last time.

Elend Venture drops a stack of books on her table, drags up a chair, and reads at her instead of joining the partner his family arranged for him — a Lady Stase Blanches in a green dress on the lower tier across the room, who scowls openly up at them. He says she did not invite herself; the carriage informed him on the way over. Sazed warns Vin in a quiet voice that the young lord is using her as a way to needle his father — that he is a known annoyance to his house and that her foreign, low-ranked uncle's-niece situation is exactly the kind of pairing best calibrated to displease them. Yet his questions feel honest: where she came from, what the skaa on her plantation were like, whether she believes they are intelligent. She gives the answers Valette would give, and watches his face fall when she does. He retreats into his book.

A young, anxious Lord Melend Liese eventually crosses the floor and asks her to dance. He is more nervous than she is, palms damp on hers, focused so tight on his footwork he forgets to lead. She tells him to stop concentrating so hard. To peel him away from his fear of Elend she manufactures a cover — that Elend is a friend of the family asked by her uncle to watch over her, an older-brother sort of guardian — and Liese unwinds, dancing better and chattering more. He lets slip a name in passing, "Lady Shan," catches himself, blushes. She files it away. The other young lords ask her in turn once Liese has cleared the path, and she dances the rest of the evening, picks at the conversation, and quietly burns pewter against her sore feet between sets. From Elend she pries one fact: a tension is rising between the houses, and people are beginning to skip the balls thrown by their rivals.

A tall Terris steward in the same V-paneled robes as Sazed arrives at her table and summons her to his mistress: Lady Shan Elariel, Elend's former fiancée. Shan is statuesque and lethal, drives her own retinue away with a flick of the fingers, has Vin address her as Your Ladyship, informs her how fortunate she ought to feel that her superiors have found her even momentarily worth using, and probes — through a steady Soothing Vin can feel even through her own copper — what Elend has been saying. Out of the corner of her eye Vin watches the same Terris steward leave the kitchens, walk straight past Shan's table, and head for Elend's books. Vin bolts the interview with an excuse, gets back before the steward can finish, and waits him out by pretending to read.

The steward leaves. Curious, she works one of the volumes out from under another. It is a slim, untitled book disguised under the spine of a weather treatise, something openly critical of the Lord Ruler and the Final Empire — arguing, in language she can mostly follow, that an immortal ruler should have produced more than a thousand years of stagnation. Obligators move through the room only a few tables away, gray-robed and tattooed. She slides the book back in place just as Elend returns. He gathers his stack, slides the slim book deliberately into the middle without commenting on its position, teases her about pretending to read the same book she had spread open on her lap, and parts on softer terms than they began. She watches him cross the second tier and join two other young men, who clap him on the back and share the load of the books.

Sazed surfaces — he has spent the second half of the evening with the servants — and identifies the pair as a Lekal and a Hasting, both rival houses of Venture, and says quietly that Kelsier will want to know. On the carriage steps she stops, holding her shawl, as a soldier hauls a soot-stained skaa kitchen boy in out of the mists almost beside the queue of noblemen waiting for their rides. The boy had tried to beg from one of the lords as a carriage waited at the gate. The captain takes the report flatly. The soldier walks the boy a few yards further into the courtyard mist and cuts his throat with a knife, close enough that Vin hears the struggle stop, then drags the body off by a leg. None of the other noblemen in the queue pause their conversations — if anything they grow a touch brighter once the screaming ends. Sazed has to put a hand on her back to get her into the carriage. The contrast between the room she has just left — the music, the dresses, the candles in the stained-glass dark — and the body in the ash sits with her the whole way back to Fellise.