POV: vin
Summary
Vin is at the writing desk in her quarters, sitting on the floor with the logbook heaps around her and a sheet of paper she has decided she will have to take notes on — the first sustained writing she has done since Reen taught her enough to imitate a contract. She is on a couple of sentences when Elend knocks and walks in. Vin's instincts flare pewter before her brain catches up: the man in the doorway is Elend only if you look twice. The new white uniform, the cut cape, the short hair, the bearing — she walks around him studying him, decides she approves, and asks whether she can cut her hair too. (Stay long, Elend says. She drops it.) Elend notices her notes, says her penmanship is beautiful, and tells her his father's messenger has arrived.
They go down with OreSeur to the third- floor Venture atrium and Vin stops in the doorway. The man is the Watcher — the Mistborn who has stalked her across Luthadel rooftops for months — standing quietly in black, unarmed, in the middle of the palace. She grabs Elend's arm; he is Mistborn, and if he carries atium, Elend is dead in the next breath. Then she lets it go: if he had wanted to kill them he could have done so already. The Watcher names himself Zane and calls himself Straff's ambassador, brings Elend the one demand — any parley will be inside the Venture camp, because the king fears assassins — and uses most of the audience to look at Vin and identify her aloud as the woman who killed the Lord Ruler and was trained by the Survivor himself. Elend sends him away with no date set.
Vin returns to the city wall in early evening to wait for him. She is rationalising — she is on patrol, she is worried about assassins — and OreSeur does not bother to pretend to believe her. Why, he asks, has she not told the king she has been sparring with this Zane? The king has enough troubles, she says, and assassins and Allomancers are her concern. She feels Zane's pulse before she sees him and drops off the wall to follow him through the city.
They spar through the Keep Hasting towers, a long chase of coin Pushes and Pulls between two angled walls, ending when Vin lands a kick on Zane that should have ended the bout. Instead, falling above the wall walk, he produces a coin out of his mouth and catches himself in midair — metal carried inside a body cannot be Pushed or Pulled by another Allomancer, a trick so simple Vin is angry at herself and at Kelsier for never having thought of it. Then he gives her something he has no tactical reason to show her: he hangs in the air, Pushing only slightly against the coin on the ground, rotating slowly with his hand outstretched, a precision of control she has never seen another Mistborn achieve. Allomancy, he reminds her, is also beautiful.
He lands, helps her up in his eyes if not his hands, and tells her quietly that they do not belong in Elend's world. They belong in the mists. He asks her whether her king understands her, and whether a man can love a thing he does not understand, and waits. When she does not answer he nods to her, drops his coin, and is gone. Vin stands on the abandoned wall walk a long moment. She decides she has to keep sparring with him.