(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

A week of siege has passed at Fadrex without Vin managing to sneak into the cache. The night of the next ball has come, and Elend and Vin are going. On the deck of the command narrowboat, Elend runs the objections by Ham and Cett — capture risk, both Mistborn in one room, publicly confirming that he is one — and finds neither man minded to argue. Ham reminds him it is no worse than walking into Straff's camp during the Luthadel siege, and that being in the same room with Vin is more dangerous for Yomen than for them. Cett insists the ball will end the moment they appear; Elend doesn't think so. Yomen is staking his rule on pretending nothing has changed, and he will read their arrival as willingness to pretend with him.

Elend settles the line of succession on the deck while they wait. Vin takes command if he dies. Sazed is third — currently in Urteau — and Cett, by accident of being the senior man left at the camp, is charged with returning to Luthadel to put Sazed on the throne if both of them die. Ham suggests Demoux; Elend tells him Cett has more experience and is, behind the facade, a better man than he pretends. The cabin door opens. Vin steps out in a sleek black-and-silver gown, her hair down to her collarbone, her mother's earring her only jewellery. Elend loses his sentence. Ham looks her up and down and tells her, fondly, that he can't quite believe she is the same frightened girl Kelsier dragged into the crew five years ago. Vin tells him he'll get back to his own children once this is over. Vin will not say where she got the dress — *we Mistborn are mysterious,* she tells Elend, who reminds her, deadpan, that he is also Mistborn. They jump. Behind them, Ham turns to Cett and observes, since the man cannot get up and leave, that he has been saving some philosophical puzzles.

Vin discovers fast that Allomantic jumping in a bell-skirted gown is loud and clumsy: the petticoats flare and beat like flags in a storm. She angles for a rooftop already swept of ash so as not to stain the white underskirt, and waits there for Elend in his white uniform. He lands harder than she does — he has only a year of practice — and dusts himself off. Vin explains the gown was made for her by a friend inside the city, with the makeup. They jump from anchor to anchor in the mist until the bubble of stained-glass colour of Keep Orielle resolves out of the dark.

This is not an evening for subtlety. Vin drops them straight onto the carpeted entrance steps, blowing ash off them in a clean circle. Elend holds out his arm. They climb the steps; one of the announcing servants runs for the guards, the other tries to bar the doors and gets gently moved aside with a pewter-fuelled push. Inside the antechamber, the waiting nobility freeze and whisper. Elend hands his name-card to the herald at the ballroom doors. The man reads it, pales, looks up; Elend gives him a small nod. The herald clears his throat and announces them into the white-marble hall: *High Emperor, Lord Elend Venture. And the Empress Vin Venture, Heir of the Survivor, Hero of Ages.*

The ballroom — low-ceilinged compared to Keep Venture's, its dance floor partitioned with freestanding stained-glass panels — goes unnaturally quiet. The musicians keep playing. The strings of Fadrex nobility, half lavender-and-gold and half dark suits, watch them cross the floor. Behind the glass panels they find Aradan Yomen at a high white-clothed table — younger than Vin expected, perhaps Elend's age, round-faced, his head shaved bare, a complicated ladder of obligator eye-tattoos around stunned eyes that mark him a senior Canton of Resource official. He stands. The guards begin to filter in behind them. Yomen raises a hand and waves the guards back. He sits down again, troubled, and does not return to his meal. The room exhales; the music and chatter resume.

Elend tells Vin he wants to give Yomen a little time to settle before approaching, and proposes they split up to mingle. The point of having walked in is to shatter Fadrex's sense of safety, Elend notes; spreading out covers more nobility, lets them flush out anyone willing to support a different king, and forces Yomen to have his eventual public conversation in front of his own court. Vin hesitates — she hates to leave him — but agrees. He kisses her cheek and walks off, and for a moment she stands alone in her gown and feels herself an outsider again, the way she felt at her first Luthadel ball pretending to be Valette.

Only she isn't. She watches the room and notices, calmly, that the insecurities are not there. She isn't a street girl, and she isn't a noblewoman; she is the person who climbed out of being one and decided not to be the other, and somewhere across the killing of an emperor and a marriage and a thousand small choices she has become someone she can live with. She picks a cup of wine off a passing tray and goes to work. There is always one woman who has set herself up as the most important; the way to break a clique-leader is the same way to break a thieving crewleader, by taking the followers. Vin finds her queen at a table of sycophants — dark hair, tan skin, the right kind of just-audible imperiousness — sits down opposite her without invitation, and tells the women around her, levelly, that their hostess is planning to slip out of the city before the assault and leave them behind.

The woman tries to dismiss her — *did I invite you to sit here?* — and Vin notices that one of the sycophants is using her name. Patresen. Vin places it: a cousin family of House Elariel. *I killed an Elariel once,* Vin tells her conversationally, sipping. With a soft Soothing push on the table for emphasis, she lays out her actual message: Patresen is a petty woman in an insignificant city, part of a doomed culture; the empire has forty thousand soldiers, twenty thousand koloss, an Allomantic bench and two Mistborn outside the city; Vin herself is not interested in Patresen's schemes, only here to warn. She is, she says, less temperate than her husband; he is the one trying diplomacy. She rises and walks off, certain only that being seen confronting the right woman will sort her into a side of Fadrex politics and make her useful to the people on the other one. Behind her, Patresen's sycophants are already scraping back their chairs. One of them catches up and asks, almost in a whisper, whether the empress would let some of them make her introductions. Vin blinks, then nods, and lets herself be led into the room.