POV: vin
Summary
Vin wakes in metal manacles, which is more interesting to her than the manacles themselves. Before she opens her eyes she reaches for her metals. They are gone — long enough drugged, she realises with a sinking inevitability, that whatever she had been burning down in the cache has long since passed through her body. It is one of the two clean ways to defang a Mistborn (the other being aluminum), and someone competent has done it to her.
A voice tells her, dryly, that her breathing has changed and she is plainly awake. She opens her eyes and finds a sparsely furnished room: a hard bench, a hard pillow, a chain locking her cuffs to its base, two guards who jump and raise their staffs the instant she stirs. Across the room, a bald figure in robes stands silhouetted against a tall window, the setting sun a violent crimson around him. Yomen. He does not turn. He muses aloud that she presents a problem: a flake of steel and she could murder his guards with their own buttons; a taste of pewter and she could lever the bench through a wall. The sensible courses are to gag her, keep her drugged, or kill her.
She tries to answer and coughs instead. The pewter-craving, which is supposed not to exist, feels distinctly like an addiction. Yomen has a servant bring her water — gathered from rain, purified, kept only in wooden vessels, deliberately so she cannot scavenge trace metals from it the way she used to as a girl on the street. She drinks. He had thought of every angle.
He turns finally. The atium bead is still on his forehead; the sunset catches it. He tells her the manacles are silver — useless to her like lead, granting no Allomantic power at all. Then he has a servant offer her, on a small platter, her mother's earring. Silver-plated bronze, the gilding mostly worn off; he has had it tested. He wonders why she would bother wearing such an ornament. Why not steel or pewter, something useful?
She takes the earring and slides it back into her ear. She has, in fact, no trap planned for it: without steel to Push it she cannot use it as a weapon, and she only takes it back because she has worn it most of her life. Yomen watches her, wary, as if waiting for her to spring something. The street pattern is obvious — toss your enemy a knife to provoke the attack — and she suspects he is so calm because he is himself a Mistborn with atium ready to burn. She does nothing.
The reason for keeping her ungagged walks in next: one of Elend's men, unarmed, in white and brown livery. Yomen tells her to answer only what he indicates, on pain of the soldier's execution and a fresh courier from her husband. The man asks her, well chosen, what she had eaten the night before the Fadrex ball — exactly the sort of trivial question a kandra imitator would not have thought to interrogate her about. Eggs, she answers, after Yomen's nod. The soldier is sent away to tell his emperor his wife is still alive.
Vin points out that no matter how he prolongs this stall, Elend is a king first and a man second; he will eventually act even if it costs her. Yomen grants that, and tells her bluntly: he did not take her as leverage. He took her so that he could execute her. For Vin. For the Lord Ruler's death. The hatred is there, kept behind a calm face. She has murdered the only person who mattered to him.
She points out that this is war, and asks why he did not simply cut her throat while she slept. He answers that Fadrex is a place of law and does not kill indiscriminately. There will be no trial — he is the law in this city — but he will give her time to prepare her own defence, and decide. Ruin picks the moment to whisper in her head: kill him, take a guard's weapon and finish it. She ignores it; she does not know why Ruin would want her to attack the obligator who is presumably acting for Ruin in any case, and chained and metalless she would only get herself shot. Yomen orders her taken away, still without explaining the rest of his plan.