POV: vin
Summary
Vin rides back to Fellise from another Luthadel luncheon, sick of the same scraggy brown hills and the same towpath. After weeks of making the trip two and three times a day for balls and sitting parties she has, she admits, started to enjoy the nobility's company — the pretense of being Valette turns out to be less stressful than being a thief — but her frustrations have only grown smaller, not gone. She still cannot pull useful intelligence out of her dance partners, and she has noticed, with more sharpness than she would like, that Elend Venture has been distant for several balls running. On the way out of the city she watches skaa children shake ash out of the aspen trees so no nobleman's carriage will be dusted rolling past, and feels a familiar prick of guilt for living in this much comfort.
The carriage rolls into Mansion Renoux's courtyard to find it packed: skaa packmen, soot-dusted boxes, a caravan of carts loading up. She climbs out without waiting for Sazed and finds Kelsier and Renoux in the middle of it. The cover-shipment is finally rolling: weapons and food are ostensibly bound for a Renoux plantation in the west, in fact peeling off at the cave army before the barges continue on to keep up appearances; the canalmen do not know which load they are pulling. Kelsier is going north with the caravan to inspect the troops, Yeden going to take a turn in command so Ham can be rotated back, and Marsh dropped at his Ministry insertion point in Vennias along the way. She is not going. She is surprised by her own relief, and a little embarrassed by it. Kelsier reads it on her face and laughs.
Wandering the courtyard while Marsh is delayed, she finds the packmen whispering about Kelsier — the scars, the Eleventh Metal, "the Survivor of Hathsin" in awed quiet voices. The recruitment surge is not Yeden's rebellion finally gathering momentum; it is Kelsier gathering it. A rebellion promised to Yeden at the end of the job is supposed to be handed back to him at the end of the job. She wonders, watching it, whether Kelsier will be able to do so.
Marsh arrives unsmiling and points her to the fore-balcony to wait. He climbs up after her — lanky and pale-haired like his brother, but without the smile that makes the face — and informs her Kelsier has asked him to give her one last Allomancy lesson while the caravan finishes loading. He walks her through the value Mistborn usually neglect: not the flashy external metals but bronze and copper, the mental pair the Inquisitors and the Misting underground actually run on. Burning copper hides her, yes, but it blinds her in the same gesture. Burning bronze makes her see — not just that an Allomancer is in the room but which metals he is burning, by pulse length and Push-Pull signature, and even when his reserves run low. He has Kelsier burn iron from the courtyard below as a calibration pulse, and she correctly sorts the two — Pull from Push — on the first try. Marsh is briefly impressed.
Then she tests him. She quietly turns on her copper so her use vanishes from his sense and reaches out, the way Breeze has been teaching her, to Soothe him into talking. He starts in on how he Snapped young, then stops mid-sentence, recognising the touch. Where she expects fury she gets a flat order never to do it to him again. He tells her, since she has already done it twice and he wants her to know, that the first time was in his shop the day they met. He had known she was Mistborn then because she was pulling trace pewter and tin from her dining utensils without realising it — that was how she had survived the beatings and the cold streets, and that was why he had pointed Dockson at her.
They talk more openly than either expects. Marsh tells her he Snapped the day the obligators took his and Kelsier's mother; the rebellion and his role inside the Ministry are both built around making them pay. Vin tells him about her own mother — a woman who heard voices, who killed Vin's baby sister but left her untouched but for a single earring, babbling about her being some kind of queen, until Reen came home and took her away. The earring is still in her ear, and her hand strays to it as she speaks. About Kelsier, Marsh says he does not hate him — he is his brother — but Kelsier treats people like playthings and is letting the Eleventh Metal rumours run away with him. Under the words Vin hears something the words do not say outright — that some of the old hurt is about Mare too, more than a man should feel for a sister-in-law. He has not the gift of hiding it.
He tells her Kelsier is leaving in part because the legend of him is getting big enough that the city can no longer safely hide him. Then he tells her to practice and leaves without a farewell.