POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits on the cool floor of her unused palace quarters with the Lord Ruler's logbook unbound into sorted heaps around her — one heap for anything supernatural, one for the mist spirit, one (the largest and the least useful) for the Deepness — pursuing the figure she has been seeing in the mist back into the pages of a man she once thought was the Lord Ruler and now knows was the hero Rashek killed and replaced. OreSeur watches her from his paws and asks why she has dismantled a book; she explains, partly to him and partly to herself, that she is looking for ghosts in the mist.
She finds two passages she already half-remembered, in which the writer agonised over whether the figure was real, then a third tucked into a long stretch of complaint that gives her the answer she had been waiting for: the hero decided he could not let himself consider that the spirit was a delusion. He had seen it leave a knife in the chest of a companion called Fedik, and his packman Rashek had whispered to everyone afterward that the wound had been Vin's only confirmation, centuries late — somebody else's testimony that the figure could touch the world. She decides she will not let Elend's earlier gentle suggestion that she is imagining it stand. She is not imagining it. What that means for Luthadel is another question.
Out on the city wall in the meantime, Elend watches the two armies finish closing the city. Straff is digging in to the north, holding the canal route back to his capital of Urteau; Cett is digging in to the west, holding the Luth-Davn Canal back to his cannery at Haverfrex. Patrols are sealing the lesser canal routes, the bridges across the River Channerel, and the roads. The siege is real. Good, he tells himself — the bargaining only works if the kings believe him desperate. Clubs hobbles up to stand beside him with his usual gnarled approval ("you've made yourself the focal point") and asks whether this will be his Pits of Hathsin. Then he nods down toward the street, where a Terriswoman in colourful robes has told the garrison's gruff general to send the king down to her — and gotten obeyed.
Tindwyl has brought a seamstress and a set of trunks. By the end of the fitting Elend is out of his loose scholar's suits and into a stiff white military uniform — buttoned to a rigid collar, wooden buttons, a shieldlike spear device over the breast, white cape at the shoulders, polished black boots, dueling cane on his belt — six of them waiting in his rooms, to be worn from now on with only the cape changed for variety. His hair is cut short. A simple silver-painted wooden coronet is set on his head and he is told to wear it at all times, public or private, because the Lord Ruler did not need to remind people he was in charge and Elend does. When he sees himself in the mirror he does not look like a friendly young scholar with funny ideas any more. He looks like something to be taken seriously.
Tindwyl makes clear that the uniform is only the beginning. She intends to retrain his walk, his speech, and his weaponry — discreetly, by a dueling master, so the garrison never sees their king losing a sparring match — and to keep telling him to his face that he is, until the lessons take, still a fool playing at being king. When he asks her what actually makes a king she answers: trust, both given by the people and deserved by the king. He stops in the doorway long enough to acknowledge the answer, then leaves.
Captain Demoux knocks with news: a messenger has arrived, not from Lord Cett but from Elend's father. Demoux freezes for a moment at the sight of the new uniform, then composes himself enough to add that he likes it. Elend tells him to make the messenger comfortable, and goes to fetch Vin from her quarters, where she has stayed all day in a way she never stays.