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Elend is up late in his narrowboat cabin — he is sleeping aboard rather than in a tent, preferring walls — when Vin returns from her scout and tells him she may have seen the mist spirit tailing her. He shivers, remembering being run through with an atium knife by the same thing a year ago. Vin argues it is no longer hostile, or no longer simply hostile: she still believes it once tried to stop her from releasing Ruin by killing Elend, and that it gave Sazed the lead about Ruin altering written text. That makes it at worst the enemy of their enemy; but it is faint, more memory than power, where Ruin is vast and everywhere. Elend privately catches himself wondering whether Sazed can quite be trusted these days, then suppresses the thought; whatever Sazed is going through after Tindwyl, he is still twice as reliable as the rest of them.

Vin tells him — almost in passing — that tonight she said out loud to a stranger that she would stop the ash and turn the sun yellow. That she is the Hero of Ages. Elend starts to argue. The prophecies were Ruin's forgeries; *destiny* is not what they need to be worried about. But the ashfall is getting denser; someone must care about it; she does. He looks across at her, dirty-faced and tired, and realises she does not need another worshipper. She needs a husband. He reverses the speech he gave in the last storage cavern about division of labour — empire for him, mists for her — and tells her instead that they will save the world together, whatever that takes.

Then they hit the obstacle. Vin has thoughts. She cannot tell him what they are. The second inscription on the cache plate at Vetitan warned her that Ruin hears anything spoken aloud and reads anything written. If they talk through her plans, Ruin knows the plans. They settle on something stranger: an explicit pact of trust without information. *I don't necessarily need your help; I need your trust. Your hope.* He gives it. Elend, who used to need to understand a thing to commit to it, agrees that he doesn't need to understand what she is doing to back her in it. She gives him one piece he is allowed to work on: the strange mist-sickness percentages — sixteen percent of every population, no matter how varied — that bothered her enough to flag in the first place. He may study the numbers; she does not want him to tell her what he finds.

The conversation lightens. Elend tries to tell her that in their three years she has somehow managed to kill his god, his father, his brother, and his fiancée — a homicidal hat trick of a romantic foundation — and adds that he is glad he has no other close relatives, except, of course, her. Vin rolls her eyes and says she is not about to drown herself. He turns back to the unfinished steel-foil letter on his desk to Yomen, frustrated. He came to Fadrex for diplomacy, but he brought the army because he expected the letter to be ignored. They need this city. Yomen has grain enough to outlast a siege if he has the cache; if they destroy the cache, his people starve; if the siege fails, Elend will only be able to break the fortifications by loosing the koloss — twenty thousand of them — on the same kind of people Jastes turned them loose on at Luthadel, for which Elend executed him.

Vin has a suggestion. Yomen attends every ball thrown by his subjects, and there is one tonight at Keep Orielle. They could go in. They are both Mistborn. Elend objects flatly that the emperor of the empire should not sneak into a city he is besieging to crash a party hosted by its king, then admits that the idea has charm: a room full of the nobility he is trying to intimidate, the king who refuses to meet him cornered into doing it in public, and no graceful way for Yomen to flee. He thinks about digging up some good reading to bring, for old time's sake. Vin suddenly goes pale, and tells him what is actually wrong: she did not pack a gown.