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Vin attends the Keep Hasting ball as Milen Davenpleu's guest, Dockson's words about the Luthadel nobility still circling in her head. She has worn the black gown this evening, a quiet rebuke to the other women in their colours, and she finds Milen's arm at her waist unpleasant in a way it would not have been a week ago. Lady Kliss holds the conversation with her latest theory on the running Tekiel-Geffenry feud — a tit-for-tat assassination chain culminating in the Geffenry brothers turning up dead on the streets, an outcome Vin notes privately is exactly what Kelsier meant to provoke when he dumped Lord Entrone's corpse in the Tekiel gardens. Kliss also drops, less interestedly, that the Inquisitors hit another skaa thieving den that very afternoon, not far from Clubs's shop.

Milen calls over an obligator of the Canton of Orthodoxy to formally witness a petty wager between the men about a game appointment. The obligator palms the coins as smoothly as a thief, witnesses the bet, and walks off without sparing Vin a glance. She realises how completely the Ministry sits inside court life: no wedding without an obligator to seal it, no land sale, no shelldry appointment between three drunken lords. If they did not witness it, it did not happen.

Shan Elariel arrives at the circle uninvited, neatly drives Milen away with a single barbed sentence about the lady who took ill so he had to take her for the evening, and walks Vin off into a corner. The steady Soothing Vin can feel even through her own copper starts the moment they are alone. Shan tells her this is the only chance she will ever have to make herself useful — that no important man in the court will pay her any further attention without Elend's eye on her, and that she had better make use of her present moment by getting inside Elend's library, memorising the titles of his books, reading the first pages, and reporting back. She does not need to explain what plot she is enacting. The threat of betraying her is implicit.

Vin retreats and finds Elend across the ballroom — a level of Valette-side confidence she did not know she had walking her across the floor toward him. Not for Shan, she tells herself. Because Dockson must be exaggerating. She confronts him almost immediately with Dockson's claim — that every Luthadel nobleman has at one point or another slept with a skaa woman he then had killed. Elend's face goes still. He walks her out onto a balcony in the cold mist and tells her, sitting beside her, about the night his father Straff sent him at thirteen to such a woman; he had not known, he says, that she would be killed afterward, and has not done it since. He puts the figure at maybe a third of the men of the court, the loud third, and not the men he keeps company with. She finds, looking at his face in the lantern light, that for the first time in her life she completely believes someone. The handkerchief from Spook is ruined with weeping makeup, and Elend gives her his own and refuses to take it back. By court custom that makes him her second suitor in one evening.

They talk longer than they should. She asks him what she does not have to ask, why he has been avoiding her, and he shrugs and says he assumed her new friends had crowded him out — that he does not trust what court life does to people. She tells him crisply that it is easy not to play politics when one is already at the top of them. He concedes. Then she does the thing she did not plan: she tells him, in Valette's cover, about a man she had known on her plantation who lost a woman to a passing lord — a man whose love was as strong as any nobleman's, who taught her the skaa were every bit as intelligent as she was. Elend leans in. He says he wishes he could meet one of the skaa thieves who hide so well from the Lord Ruler's eyes, and she nearly answers him before she stops herself.

He leaves to meet his friends. She catches Sazed in the ballroom, ash-and-makeup-smudged in her black gown, and gets his permission to use Allomancy again. Her wound is healed; Kelsier had been meaning to resume her training. She steps off another balcony into the mist — the first time in months — coin-Pushes herself along the wall-walkway to the side tower Elend disappeared into, and climbs the outside of it window ledge by window ledge until she finds the right shuttered window.

Inside, five young heirs — Elend, Jastes, Telden, and two others — pass around banned books and argue. Two are house heirs, the other three second sons; Elend tries to make the case that the men in this circle will inherit and can, between them, lean on the Lord Ruler toward something like a real government. The others want more drinking and less reading. None of them are sure they can change anything. Then she nearly loses her grip: hanging from the ledge above her own is Kelsier, back from the caves that afternoon, who has already spied on this group three times. He drops down beside her on the walkway and tells her the boys are harmless — gentleman anarchists with banned books, no more — and that she should not let her hopes for Elend outpace his actual nature. He notes the wrecked makeup on her face but does not press; he tells her to fetch a cloak from Sazed to cover the ash on her dress and to have the carriage drop them at Clubs's shop before continuing on out of the city to keep up appearances. Then he is over the wall into the mists.