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Vin is reading her copy of Sazed's translation of the Lord Ruler's logbook in Renoux's lower garden when she hears soft footsteps. She turns to find Spook, red to the ears, holding out a pink-and-white lace handkerchief. He presses it into her hand and bolts before she can decide what to make of him. She tucks it into her sleeve, baffled, and goes inside to learn that Dockson has come up from Luthadel with a weapons drop and is in conference with Renoux under one of his merchant covers. Lady Valette has no business inviting herself in, so she takes herself to the upper library to look for Sazed instead, partway through her resentment at how absent the crew always assumes she wants to be. The book she carries with her is, she has decided, the whinging of a god, and the Lord Ruler in it is more whiny than any god has a right to be — but Sazed has told her to read every page and she is reading every page.

She finds him in the upper library, finishing the last pages of the logbook himself with quiet excitement. The chapter she has just read describes the Terris packmen the narrator picks up at the foot of the Terris mountains — men who grow weak overnight in order to wake at twice their strength the next morning, by way of their bracelets and earrings. She presses Sazed on what is so secret about that, and on his own quietly worn earrings, and the spectacles he had needed only for a few weeks after he saved her, and finally just on threatening to overlook every secret in the logbook by missing the part everyone keeps hiding from her. He gives in.

He rolls back his sleeve to show iron bracers strapped under his robe and tells her the name of the art: Feruchemy. Feruchemists do not burn metals away. They use metals as storage — give up an attribute for a time, store it inside the metal, then draw on the reserve later. Strength, sight, memory. He is a Keeper; the copper bracer on his right arm holds songs and stories, prayers, languages, every fragment of every history the order has been able to recover. The order itself was founded after the Lord Ruler spent two centuries trying to wipe the Terris out entirely; what could not be saved by force was saved by remembering against him, in defiance of him, for the world after he is dead. He carries one hundred and seventy-two languages alone. The one religion they have never been able to find is their own.

She presses him further on what else Feruchemists can store. He politely closes that door. She turns next to the handkerchief, and he tells her that in noble society the handkerchief is the traditional first gift a young man gives a lady he wishes to court. Vin looks at it again with mortification.

Sideways, she asks if Ham is married. Sazed tells her that he is, and so is Yeden — that the crew's underground life forces them to keep their families in other cities and visit only in stretches. Dockson, he thinks, has something painful in his own past on that score. The realisation that the people around her have lives outside the crew lands strangely on her. Sazed sends her off — he is almost finished with the translation — and she goes looking for Dockson in the guest study, drapes drawn against the early evening light.

She asks him, almost lightly, what it had been like growing up plantation skaa. The answer is not light. He tells her about a girl named Kareien he had loved on Lord Devinshae's plantation — the way the entire hovel community had hidden them, told the taskmasters nothing, encouraged the romance because the romance gave them something to hope at; the morning her body came back after Devinshae decided to have her. The next evening he walked off the plantation and did not go back. Devinshae is wintering in Luthadel this season between planting cycles; she has very probably already danced with him. His reputation among the nobility is impeccable. They are all like that, Dockson tells her flatly — not just the bad ones, all of them. The kindest plantation lord he ever knew was his own. Skaa whores in city brothels are killed as a matter of routine, both to keep the bloodlines clean and to keep the Inquisitors satisfied; a noticeable share of the noblemen she dances with have at one point or another paid for an evening with a woman whose death they had paid for in advance. Vin thinks she has seen the nobility's cruelty plainly enough at the balls, and tries to argue. He answers, quietly, that the gentlemen she dances with hide it well, and that none of them think of it as cheating. She has no answer for him. She thinks of Elend, and the question she will not be able to leave alone.