POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits on a Luthadel rooftop with the kandra wolfhound in the early evening, and notices something that has been bothering her at the edge of her attention all autumn — the mist is gathering before the sun is properly down. OreSeur is no help: yes, mistress; if you tell me it's strange, mistress, I shall find it strange. She gives up on the weather and turns him toward the kandra she actually needs to think about — the impostor in the palace.
She works him for everything the Contract will let him say. No, a kandra could never have entered human society without a Contract — there are no rogue kandra. No, cutting one would not betray him; the body is a perfect copy. Yes, OreSeur thinks his own skill at acting a part is roughly average for his kind. The most useful answers come slowly: mental Allomancy does not touch a kandra — Soothing or Rioting one produces no reaction at all, the way it produces no reaction on someone burning copper — and a kandra who eats an Allomancer does not inherit Allomancy. So Vin now has two tests she can quietly run on the inner crew: any Misting she catches burning a metal is cleared, and any oddly unmoved face under a Soothing might be a suspect. Her one more pointed question — why Kelsier had insisted on keeping OreSeur clear of the Lord Ruler and the Inquisitors — bounces off the Contract. OreSeur is permitted to refuse to discuss kandra secrets, even from his own master, and he does.
They drift onto less practical ground. Vin tells OreSeur what she loves (the mist, the power, the freedom) and what she hates (being afraid) — and as she says it she becomes aware again of the soft, foreign pulse she keeps catching with bronze. The same pulse she felt above Keep Venture some nights ago and was not brave enough to chase. She is going to chase it now. She drops off the roof, lands bronze-first on the source — a darkened third-storey window across the street — and Pushes her way up to it. Inside the pitch-dark room the spirit she has only glimpsed before is fully formed, watching out across the rooftop where she and OreSeur had been talking. She demands to know why it has been watching her. It steps forward. It is gone. Then something invisible takes her arm with a cold she will not lose for hours, and drives a long needle of pain out from behind her ear and into her head; she falls backward out of the window, just remembering pewter and tin in time to land instead of breaking. The hound dashes out to her and offers to fetch aid. She refuses, walks away from the building, and tells herself, fiercely, that she does not get to be afraid of the night again — but she walks quickly.
On the other side of the keep, Elend is two hours late to his own council. Breeze is amused; Ham is up an entire month's earnings against Spook at stones; Dockson is doing accounts; Clubs is glaring at the chair he is sitting in. The crew has used the two hours, and they break the news gently: they think there is one plan and only one. Accept an alliance with Cett — who would let Elend keep Luthadel as a provisional governorship in exchange for the crown — before the city starves, since the two armies will starve it out regardless. The bargaining leverage Breeze bought them by bringing in a second besieger is meant for exactly this: trade the kingdom well rather than badly. They are also unanimous, and Elend understands at once that they have already had the conversation without him.
He pushes back. He cannot give the western skaa over to a man whose treatment of his own skaa Breeze admits is bad; he cannot give up after a year. He proposes the opposite plan. Three armies, not two; Breeze said the smallest party in a three-way standoff is the one whose allegiance picks the winner. So Luthadel makes both Cett and his father each believe the city is on their side, sabotages the canal supply lines that feed both armies, drags out the siege through the winter, and waits for either of the two besiegers to weaken enough that what is left can be fought. The Assembly's vote of solidarity means the city cannot be opened to either lord until Elend has parlayed with Straff in person; the breathing room is real. The crew object — the plan turns on Elend's ability to lie convincingly to two warlords at once, which is not a thing he has any track record at — but they like its shape, and they say yes.
The meeting is on its way to "draft specifics in a few days" when Captain Demoux knocks. The guards have caught someone listening in from the next room. The prisoner is a tall Terriswoman in her fifties in bright blue and red, ears stretched downward by a Terris weight of earrings — the same woman Vin had marked at the back of the Assembly hall two days before. Her wrists are bound. She is unrattled. She asks the room to leave so she can speak with the king alone, and cites as her guarantee the young Mistborn she knows is crouching outside the ventilation window: she does not need to see Vin there, only to know that Vin is. Elend asks her, cautiously, whether Sazed sent her. She tells him she is here because of Sazed, but no one sent her. He nods the others out.