POV: vin
Summary
Vin has decided that the best way to fool a careful man is to give him what he expects, so the next time the guards come to take her to Yomen she attacks them. The plan is to lose loudly. She has unscrewed a leg from her cot — silver, useless to her — and uses it as a club, dropping the first guard and disarming a third for his staff. Ham trained her with the staff and made her practise without Allomancy; without pewter her blows feel weak, but she takes down four men before letting herself be subdued. She does it because the soldiers expect a viper from the hazekillers' briefings and she needs them to believe they were right — they manacle her without searching her, and they do not notice that she has soaked the inside of her shirt with greasy gruel from her bowls. She is even hit by a knee and slumps to the floor of the audience chamber long enough to oil her wrists and hands with it.
Yomen stands at the dark window with his back to her, mist curling against the glass. He compliments her and asks, mildly, whether she really thought she could escape without metals. Vin does not let him finish. She slips the manacles off her oiled hands, snatches the silver screws she has been hoarding from her cot, throws them at the soldiers — they yell and dive away from her presumed Steelpush, even though she has no steel — and she is on Yomen before any guard can stand. She lunges for the bead of atium he wears stuck to his forehead. He steps casually out of the way. She lunges again. He sidesteps again. Hands still folded behind his back, with no warrior's training of any kind, he reads her every move.
He is burning atium. The bead, she now understands, is there for emergencies, and the emergency has come. She stops, and he gestures to the bench, and she sits. She has to think. He claims, when she names what he just did, that he is not Mistborn — that he does not need to lie, particularly now, when the world is in chaos and people need truth from those they follow. She does not believe him. She files it.
He has obligators brought in to witness, then begins her "defense." He asks why she came to Fadrex. She tells him the truth — they had found another cache elsewhere with directions to this one — and he nods at the answer while clearly knitting connections she does not see. He asks if Elend was being honest about his diplomacy; Vin says, of Elend, that he genuinely is, even when his interpretation of events would baffle her or Yomen. He compliments the quickness of her answer.
She talks. Around them, only she can see Ruin in Reen's body, circling Yomen in a slow leisurely orbit. Ruin calls the obligator king a disappointment — a believer whose obedience could have made marvellous destruction, had he ever struck out instead of huddling in his city praying to a dead god. The earthquake Ruin noted last chapter has finished; Vin tries to keep her eyes off the apparition.
Yomen asks about the Church of the Survivor. Vin tells him she is not one of its heads — they revere her, but she has never properly fit. He frowns at the idea of worshipping a dead man; she points out, mildly, that he is worshipping the Lord Ruler. He answers: *he is not gone.* Yomen puts no credence in reports of the Lord Ruler's death. He asks her to tell him, in her own words, what happened that night.
She does. She tells him about the cell, about Sazed freeing her, about the Eleventh Metal, about Sazed's theory that the Lord Ruler had been immortal through coupling his Feruchemy with Allomancy. She leaves out only her power-of-the-mists trick. Yomen does not interrupt her — a quality she has not expected and grudgingly respects. He listens, then, when she is done, tells her quietly what he is really trying to figure out: not whether she killed his god, but *why the Lord Ruler wanted her to think she had.* He believes Rashek is still out there, watching, and that her supposed murder is part of a plan. Vin sees it all snap into place. He has kept her alive because his theology will not let him kill her until he understands her place in it.
Ruin uses the silence to push at her. *Why do you not want them to worship you? All those happy skaa, all that hope, you cannot offer them. Survivor is a word of Preservation, you know.* Vin tries to hold her head, fails to keep her face still. *They are wrong about me,* she finally snaps aloud — startling Yomen mid-theory. *They worship what they think I should be. I am not the Heir of the Survivor. Kelsier freed them; I conquered them.*
The thought she has been refusing for two books arrives. Elend used to worry that he was becoming another Lord Ruler, and to her the worry had always seemed misplaced — because the conqueror in their marriage is her. She killed the Lord Ruler and took the same power he had taken at the Well, and even though she released it, she filled his role afterwards. The skaa revere her as their savior and she has been recoiling from it the entire time because at some level she has always known what she actually is. *I'm not the Survivor's Heir, Yomen,* she tells him, sick. *I'm the Lord Ruler's.*
He shrugs the claim off, but she keeps going. She lays out what she has just seen: he never intended to execute her, because killing her would interfere with his god's plan, and that is why he risks the audiences. He needs her testimony. He needs the reassurance that his god still lives. She steps forward to drive it home — and Yomen moves. Without warrior grace, with no pewter, he simply moves *right*, the way someone does when atium tells him where her elbow is about to be, and pins her face-down on the cold stone with a knee on her back.
He has, he tells her, not said she is in no danger. He wants something more from her. He wants her to instruct Elend to withdraw the army from outside the city. The food in the cache is the real prize, and he will not be conquered for what he is willing to trade for. She argues — the Central Dominance gets enough light to plant, Fadrex does not — and that is the wrong tack, because Yomen suggests, mildly, that he would happily trade her the seed stock she needs if her husband would talk to him. She switches grounds. There is more in those caches than food. The Lord Ruler left clues across the group of them; together they may have what could save the world.
Yomen laughs. They read the plaque, did they not? Then they know that the Lord Ruler said there was nothing more to find. Why, then, has she invaded his dominance at all? *The atium,* she says. He laughs harder. *Worthless.* He explains why, and she — who has spent her adult life thinking of the metal as the single most valuable thing in the world — has no immediate answer. There are no Mistborn left to burn it. There are no Great Houses left to vie for it. The reserve system and the upper class that gave it implied worth are gone. A starving man would not trade a loaf of bread for a jarful. The food in the cache was the real wealth the Lord Ruler had left him; the atium he keeps mostly to keep her in check.
He waves for his guards. Ruin watches them haul her out. Yomen turns back to his window, talking to himself about what his god might want from him next.