POV: vin
Summary
Vin works the Keep Lekal ball in a white gown — a colour she could not have imagined for herself a year ago, when ash and soot were close to the only things she had ever worn. The keep's ballroom is a pyramid: dining tiers ringing a central dance platform, four balconies stepping inward toward the point, each one lined with the small, exquisitely detailed stained-glass alcoves the Lekal are famous for. Among the usual exotic landscapes and noble portraits she now recognises a sequence she has read about in the logbook — emerald hills, mountains striped with faint wave-marks at their peaks, a deep dark lake, and, finally, a chaotic blackness she takes for the Deepness. She wonders again what that thing actually was, and moves on; tonight is not for windows.
She hunts down Lady Kliss on the second balcony, lets her exhaust the gossip she came armed with, then drops the seeded line: an overheard scrap from her uncle about House Hasting quietly relocating its assets to its southern plantations. Kliss practically buzzes off to spread it. The rumour is a lie — Dockson is back at the shop forging the documents that will dovetail with it — but if it takes, Hasting will look indecisive at the worst possible moment, and a strong but over-extended mercantile house may snap. She thinks down the rest of the ledger as she walks: a few keeps are this exposed, but Venture is not one of them; Venture is rich in a way the crew cannot touch, and so long as that holds the plan can run around it.
Elend is waiting for her late in an alcove. The flirting is light — a stolen, half-serious moment in which he says, plainly, that he is going to kiss her, and she turns him aside because there are things about her he does not yet know — and then he steers them onto the balcony and the conversation goes serious. He wants her to leave Luthadel. The city is becoming dangerous in a way her uncle is not equipped to survive; the Tekiel slaughter was not bandits, it was Hasting, and there will be more. When she protests that surely House Venture at least is safe, he says, quietly, that they are more exposed than the rest of them — that the Venture fortune is not the visible mercantile front, but the atium the family secretly mines for the Lord Ruler from the Pits of Hathsin, and that the Pits have been falling short of quota for several years. Her instincts go bright — this is the leverage Kelsier needs — even as she warns him to be more wary of Shan Elariel, whom he still insists is harmless.
They circle one another a little longer. He notices her noticing his gold ring, and they trade theories about why the Lord Ruler insists on metal jewellery for his nobility — he thinks it is arrogance dressed as ritual, the empire's god flaunting how unthreatened he is. Then his clock tells him he is late for the drinking-and-philosophy meeting he keeps with a small circle of friends. She lets him go.
She uses the gap to walk down to the main floor and approach Shan's table directly, intending to wedge her way back into Shan's confidence enough to spoil whatever Shan is planning for Elend. Shan's Terrisman watches her come with the flat, carved-stone composure that is everything Sazed is not. Shan does not let her finish: country girl, no longer required, do not bother me. Vin retreats. Shan, she realises, has worked out that this is no longer a game — Vin cares for Elend, and Shan will not trust her with the plan after that.
The POV slides to Elend, who has retired to the Keep Lekal gentlemen's lounge with Jastes and Telden after his political circle's meeting. Telden lounges, well-styled and easy with the serving girls; Jastes tugs nervously at his thinning hair. Both of them, in their different ways, tell him the same thing: he has been spending too much time with the Renoux girl, she fell into his orbit too quickly, and the timing — a small unknown house turning up just as the keeps started bleeding each other — is too tidy to ignore. He defends her. They share a look. Conversation drifts to the meeting itself, which has unsettled him: some of his friends may end up heads of houses sooner than they expected, and he is not sure any of them are ready. Telden tells him to stop being melodramatic. Elend does not say it aloud, but Kale Tekiel is not going to look back at any of this.
Back at Keep Venture in the small hours, he tries to slip past his father's open study door and fails: Straff is a Tineye and heard the carriage from the gate. Inside, Straff is finishing a quiet conversation with TenSoon, the Venture kandra, who has put on the bones of a Hasting servant and still unsettles Elend every time he looks at it. The kandra bows out. Straff tells Elend he is to attend a luncheon courtship with Lord Tegas's daughter to build a Hasting-killing alliance, and is not amused when his son dodges. Elend takes the scolding for being a useless heir — a tired rhythm both of them know — but cannot help dropping the seeded Hasting withdrawal rumour into the conversation on the way out, just to watch his father chase the bait. Straff reminds him, with the brothel jab he always reaches for, exactly what he thinks of him. Elend retreats.
He has barely reached his rooms when a servant tells him Jastes is downstairs in the sitting room, waiting. Jastes has had men watching Valette's carriage at the Fellise gates; the carriage left town empty, her Terrisman producing papers at the gate while no one rode inside. She is being dropped somewhere in Luthadel every night. Coincidence, he reminds Elend, that she found his quiet reading spot? Elend cannot rule it out, and remembers with a sick jolt the atium secret he just handed her. He cannot quite believe it, and he is not willing to risk it. He sends down to his father agreeing to the luncheon — in exchange for the loan of a pair of Venture spies, whom he sets to follow her.