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Left alone with Elend once the crew has cleared the council room, the captured Terriswoman snaps her bound wrists in a quiet display of Feruchemical strength — Vin is not actually at the window, she says; she left for her rounds a few minutes ago, which is why the Terriswoman let herself be caught. She circles Elend like a buyer at a market, sets her hand on his shoulder to push his back straight, tells him to stop slouching, to stop hedging when he speaks, and to stop softening every sentence with "excuse me." When he protests, she cuts him off again: his Assembly ignores his authority, his skaa doubt he can protect them, his own inner council made tonight's plans in his absence. He has royal ideas; he is not yet a king, because a man only leads when the people he is leading agree to it.

Then she names herself. She is Tindwyl, a Keeper of Terris — an acquaintance of Sazed's from his own people. Each Keeper takes one slice of the common archive to study deeply; Sazed's is religion, hers is the biographies of generals, kings, and emperors no one in Luthadel has heard of. Theories of governance are not the same as the lived patterns of those who governed. She is here because Sazed wrote to her months ago about Elend's predicament and she came north on her own to do something about it. Will he take her instruction? He thinks for a moment and says yes. Her first instruction is to stop saying "um."

Vin then arrives — through the side window, drawing mist into the room — and asks what Tindwyl wants. Tindwyl smiles and observes that Elend took several minutes to get to that question and Vin took several seconds — they are an interesting couple. She says they two will need to talk privately at some point as well, then withdraws. Ham re-enters the moment she opens the door, sees the cut bonds without comment, and is asked to find the new arrival quarters as a friend of Sazed's.

Alone with Elend, Vin settles beside him on the council table and tells him she does not like Tindwyl. He smiles; she does not like anyone she has just met. He is distracted, and slowly admits it: he is not sure his own plan is the right one. The crew's suggestion — alliance with Cett, Luthadel held as a vassal — was the safer answer, and his plan to play the two armies off each other is by his own count more daring than the crew's, and the crew's was already daring. Vin reminds him they fought the Lord Ruler together; this is not the moment to fold. He smiles, and presses her on a memory: in the thieving crews, when everyone was bigger than her, did she stand up to the leaders? She didn't, then. But she does now, and she will not let him give up the city. He yields.

They drift onto her older worry. Vin presses Elend for what the Ministry taught nobles about the Deepness and the Well of Ascension. Elend has only the official line — that the Lord Ruler travelled to the Well, was given the power to defeat the Deepness, and unified mankind. He has no idea what the Deepness actually looked like; the statues depict it as a lump at the Lord Ruler's feet. Vin is quietly working a different line. The Terris prophecies said the Hero of Ages should release the Well's power rather than take it; Rashek took it. The Deepness, by her arithmetic, may never have been properly defeated — and the red sun and the brown plants and the falling ash that Kelsier and Sazed both say are not how the world started may be the proof. She does not tell Elend about the mist spirit. He teases her gently for adding the fate of the world to her list of worries.

The conversation comes back to the impostor. Vin tells Elend she has a couple of tests now and can clear at least Ham and Spook with them. The thief in her itches to use Allomancy on Elend himself, and she stops it; she realises, briefly, that she finally understands what Kelsier had with Mare and means not to repeat his particular mistake. Elend kisses her and goes off to do his late rounds, trusting the palace search to Ham and Demoux; Vin sits on the table a moment longer, watching mist creep through the side window. "I will not fear you," she tells the mist, "and I will find your secret." Then she goes back out into it.