POV: vin
Summary
Vin walks Kenton Street in her usual trousers and buttoned shirt, watching the city tighten. The arrival of Straff's army has turned the Luthadel market into a last-minute rush of buying and selling; the eight city gates are barred, so anyone still in the streets is staying through whatever comes. Kenton Street itself is the most visible piece of what Elend has done to the country in the year since the Lord Ruler died — a row of tailoring shops a year ago, now a wild bazaar of skaa-run pushcarts and criers serving newly waged skaa workers. She does not enjoy crowds. She never has. She also knows, watching herself walk past a shop window full of ball gowns, that the girl who once wore those things is no use to anyone now; she pulls herself away. Valette cannot bodyguard a king.
A balding man in an ash-stained smock starts following her, badly. She recognises the smock and her stomach drops. Within a block the crowd around him has gathered into a small reverent cluster — the new Church of the Survivor has found her. The priest goes to his knees in the dust and asks her, as Lady Heir, what they should do now. A woman steps forward with a child. A young man asks if she really can hold the army out of the city by being inside the walls. Vin has no doctrine to give them. Kelsier never left one. She gets clear of them as quickly as she can and stands in an alley shaking, knowing she cannot be the light these people are asking for.
She makes the rest of the walk to the livestock pens, where a cheerful half-bald merchant tries to sell her a sweet runt wolfhound pup and is gently overruled. She points instead at the largest, meanest beast in the back — a black-and-grey watchbeast chained to a post — pays for it, walks into the pen, and flares pewter to knock the thing cold with a single punch. She ties its legs and carries it home over her shoulders. The guards at the keep have stopped giving her strange looks.
OreSeur is waiting in her rooms in the wrecked body the assassins' coins left him, still in last night's bloodstained clothes. She drops the hound on the floor and tells him this is his next body. He is not delighted. The kandra can imitate flesh and muscle but not fur — he will use the beast's own — and he will only consent to walking on four legs by virtue of the Contract. She compels him. Her notion is that nobody listens around a dog; that as a hound he can sit through conversations a steward could not; and that she has been quietly telling people for months that she was about to dismiss her steward anyway. On her desk is a small package from Terion, her metallurgist — the fifth candidate alloy of aluminum, a four-percent copper mix he calls duralumin. OreSeur has not told her about it because she had not commanded him to.
She pockets the dust and goes looking for Elend. She finds him in his study with Dockson, freshly back from Terris, the two of them working through the ledgers with the careful, slightly forced cheer of men who do not naturally like each other but have decided the kingdom matters more. Dockson leaves for other business. Vin curls into the oversized chair with Elend and they spend a few minutes being a couple instead of a king and a bodyguard. Elend worries — to her face, gently — that she walks the city at night without anyone watching her back, and asks her to take OreSeur with her even though she does not like him. She admits why she does not like him: he ate Kelsier. Elend says it even more gently: Kelsier himself gave the order. She agrees, reluctantly.
They circle to the Assembly, Dockson, and the long shadow the Survivor is still throwing on Elend's reign — every man in the city accepts him as king and most of them quietly wish they had Kelsier instead. Vin cuts that off as best she can, kisses him, and tells him she did not love Kelsier the way she loves him. Elend surprises her, finally, with a story he has not told her before: on the morning of the Lord Ruler's death, with the square in a riot and an Inquisitor coming at his head, Kelsier threw himself at the creature on purpose to save him. The man who hated nobles had looked Elend in the eye and chosen him.
Ham pokes his head in to fetch Vin for sparring. She is not quite ready. She pulls the duralumin dust from her pocket and, against Elend's worried hovering, swallows a pinch. None of the four earlier alloys had spared her the blinding headache that came of burning the wrong thing. This one does not give her one. A new Allomantic reserve appears inside her; she reaches for it and burns it; she feels the familiar warmth and absolutely nothing else. Ham points out, correctly, that since it did not make her sick they have found the right alloy — each metal has only one valid pair. They have no idea yet what this one does. Vin resolves to practice. The pair of them go to spar with the staff; Elend pleads royal dignity and a heavy schedule and comes along to watch.