POV: vin
Summary
Vin and Sazed arrive back at Clubs's shop from the Hasting ball to find the kitchen full and warm — Kelsier back from the caves at last, Ham home in a vest he has cut out of his army uniform and visibly pleased about it, Clubs looming quietly by the wall, Spook determinedly looking anywhere except at her, Dockson and Breeze arriving after. The kind of late drink the crew has not been able to share in months. The conversation drifts into a long round of Eastern Street cant baiting at Breeze, with Kelsier, Ham, and Spook passing nonsense back and forth in the slang, until Dockson ends it with a perfectly straight-faced contribution of his own that means nothing in any language at all. The room collapses laughing.
For a moment Vin imagines the girl she had been six months ago, watching this same kitchen from the dark of the workroom doorway — short ragged hair, dirty shirt, suspicious of every voice that laughed. The girl who would not have stepped into the room. She is in the room now, drinking the wine Kelsier poured her. She does not pretend she has stopped hearing Reen entirely — she has not — but she understands at least a little why Kelsier works the way he does.
Kelsier turns the table to business. Vin reports House Tekiel's collapse — its allies gone, its keep on the block within the month, the family probably forced out to plantations to recover — and the wider picture of nine Great Houses beginning to kill each other in the dark. Ham is asked to re-open his old Luthadel Garrison contacts in the morning. Vin invites herself along on the excuse of wanting to learn pewter from a Thug — Ham is the one of the crew who has actually drilled with the metal, where Kelsier only burns it. Kelsier tells Breeze he wants him to go north and take Yeden's place at the head of the army when recruitment finishes; Breeze protests the absurdity of him as a general but agrees to think about it. Dockson is uneasy about how much mysticism is settling around Kelsier's name — the Eleventh Metal rumours have grown legs — and asks for a serious conversation about it. Kelsier turns the conversation.
In the morning Vin walks the Luthadel streets back in ordinary skaa clothing — trousers, a tucked shirt, a leather vest, cap over her growing hair — and finds, to her own surprise, that the disguise slips back over her as easily as the gowns do. The street ignores her again. She had almost forgotten what being invisible felt like. The old habits — eyes down, body small, shoulders rounded — come back like a tune she used to hum. She wonders quietly, walking beside Ham, which of the disguises is actually her: Vin the urchin, Valette the lady, or neither.
Ham walks beside her happily, glad to be back in the city he probably ought to hate, and tells her about the wife and children he keeps in a smaller town he has not even told Kelsier the name of — the Inquisitors hunt a Misting's children alongside him, and the only safety he can give his is distance. The hope, he tells her, is enough Misting-rate money to leave the Central Dominance entirely and find one of the outer corners of the Final Empire where a man with coin can live as a quiet lord. Kelsier used to talk that dream too, before the Pits and Mare and the one job too many. She files it away alongside her growing worry about what Kelsier might do if the throne came open to him.
He lectures her on the discipline of pewter on the walk: flare for the blow, not for the walk to it. Save your ceiling for the end of the fight. Practice without the metal so that when it runs out — and it always runs out — your body still knows what to do. Vary the burn. Pewter is not a substitute for skill. He will demonstrate sparring with the Garrison soldiers; she is to burn bronze and watch when he flares and when he does not.
They reach the Garrison gate. Ham passes her off as a niece. The guard at the gate steps back to fetch his captain, and instead of Ham's usual sparring partner the man who comes out is Captain Sertes, newly promoted, who walks him a few steps away. With Vin flaring tin to listen, Sertes tells him that a skaa rebellion has just struck the Holstep Garrison in the north, that the Valtroux Garrison is already moving on it, and that the Lord Ruler himself has authorised the Luthadel Garrison to march out and finish the work. Sertes offers him an officer's command on the spot. Ham accepts, then sends her home. The cave army has marched out of the caves without orders and put itself in front of the wrong garrison's wall.