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Vin walks across the stage of the Luthadel Assembly hall — the old Canton of Finance lecture chamber, benches fanning out before a low stage — to her seat in the bodyguard row at the back, behind the tier of twenty-four Assemblymen. Stares follow her. Some are gossip about the king and his assassin lover; some are politics; some are the growing legend of the girl who killed the Lord Ruler. She slides into her seat beside Ham — shirtless-vested as usual — and trades a whispered observation that the room is packed because frightened people pay attention. Down on the audience benches the city's new social geometry is on display: noblemen in suits, the new skaa merchant class in suits they have learned very fast to wear, ordinary skaa in trousers still dirty from the day's work but sitting straighter than they used to, and at the back a clutch of obligators whom Vin cannot understand Elend for tolerating.

Elend stands, well-dressed for once, and asks the Assemblymen for leave to depart from the day's agenda. The situation, he says, is dire — siege from outside, a kingdom of unfinished traditions inside — and one year of freedom is not enough to taste. He asks for a vote of solidarity: that they bind themselves, publicly, not to hand the city over to a foreign power without due consideration, and that any final word on the city's fate wait until the king has been allowed to meet Straff Venture in person. He yields the floor and waits.

The chamber dissolves. Philen the merchant accuses him of asking the Assembly to surrender all decisions to him; a noble counters that they should be begging Straff Venture not to attack rather than offering to chat with him; a skaa accuses the nobles of having little to lose; another nobleman points out that he and his whole house could be executed for backing Elend against his father; a merchant growls that they should have hired mercenaries months ago and finds no funds to do it with. Elend tries twice to bring them back to the question and is twice almost successful. Vin watches the room rather than the king. The proposal, she realizes, will lose.

Then Lord Penrod — the senior nobleman of the Assembly, the one most statesman and least demagogue — speaks. He addresses Elend not as a king but as the boy he has known, and tells him plainly that he watched Straff Venture govern in Luthadel for years; that Straff will take the city if he wants it, and the only real decision the Assembly has is how to give it up well. Philen tries to leverage the moment into immediate surrender. Penrod cuts him off — surrendering now plays the city's hand too early; meeting Straff first is how you find out what can be bought. With Penrod on side the rest of the chamber follows; the vote scrapes through with the two- thirds Elend needs. Vin is uneasy. The motion passed for the king's proposal, but on a sentence that took the king out of Penrod's mouth.

Elend yields the lectern; the next proposal — Philen trying to hand the city's grain stockpiles to the merchants — degenerates the same way, and Elend himself helps filibuster it past the lunch bell. During the recess he goes to Penrod to thank him. Penrod, polite and unsentimental, tells him not to mistake the favour: he voted to keep Philen from giving the city away before the nobles had wrung guarantees about their titles out of Straff, not to please the king. Elend swallows it, slips a Kelsier quotation, and remembers too late that Penrod is a traditionalist for whom the Survivor's memory is a threat.

Vin waves him over. She has fixed on a tall middle-aged Terriswoman standing in the back of the chamber in bright blue and red — too much jewelry, the wrong colours for anything but Terris dress, a waist-length braid — quietly watching Elend through the recess. Every Terris-person to have reached Luthadel since the Lord Ruler's death has come to thank Vin first. This one has not. Elend dismisses the worry as paranoia, turns her physically away from the woman, tells her she is gorgeous, and admits the deflection. It works just enough for Vin's eye to drift past the Terriswoman to something else moving in the audience.

Soldiers. Clubs's runners are pushing through the crowd toward the stage, and people at the back of the chamber have begun to leave in a hurry. Elend rushes to meet them, certain Straff has attacked; certain they have run out of the time the vote was meant to buy. The runner shakes his head. It is not Straff. A second army has just arrived outside Luthadel.