POV: zane
Summary
Zane hangs in the mist outside Elend Venture's balcony, looking at the brother he has never met, and the voice in his head — a quiet, constant companion he calls God — tells him to kill Elend. He ignores it. He drops out of the mist into the courtyard, pulls his three small steel anchors back into his palm, walks to the base of the outer keep wall and lifts a particular cobblestone to retrieve a folded message his spy in Elend's palace has left him; and is away before Vin gets back from the rooftops.
He does not sneak through his own father's army. He walks in past the firelit guard posts, where soldiers salute the Mistborn they recognise without quite knowing he is the king's son. He stops at the command tent, dictates his survey of Luthadel's night patrols to the nightwatch officer, then crosses to Straff Venture's lantern-bright tent and finds the king at his late dinner. The voice tells him to kill the man every other sentence. He digs the carving knife into his own forearm twice, shallowly, to bleed the prompting out of his head.
Father and son talk past each other in the way they always do. Does the girl trust him yet? She is starting to. Did Vin really use atium against Cett's assassins? Yes — Straff still does not believe she is what the Luthadel rumour holds her to be; if she were, Elend could not possibly have kept her loyalty. Zane reports the spy's message: no progress on where the atium is, fear that he is starting to be suspected. Straff tells Zane to keep working the girl, and to find out from her where the stash is — every plan in the camp turns on whether the Final Empire's atium is in the city or not.
Zane has laced the tea Straff has been sipping with birchbane in cinnamon. He has done it before. Straff, who is himself a Tineye and keeps four herbalists on retainer, smells it within two breaths and waves a hand for the serving girl to be dragged out and killed. Zane neither intervenes nor argues; this is part of the script. He thinks of the woman who had wanted the chance to kill the king herself and looks away. Straff holds up a single bead of atium he had meant to reward Zane with, and says they will have to wait until Zane outgrows these attempts on his life. Zane lets his father go on believing atium is the leash that keeps him in line — in fact Zane has his own personal stockpile his father knows nothing about — and admits aloud, when pressed, that even if he killed Straff he could not run the empire. He is mad. He knows he is. He goes.
The chapter pivots from Zane's head into Straff's once Zane is well away. Straff burns tin and feels the birchbane moving in his veins, deadening his nerves; he has at most an hour. He sends for Amaranta, an older mistress he no longer beds but keeps for her skill with the poison cabinet, and has her brew her general antidote on the spot — a fresh sweep of all the basic remedies, blunt and bitter, that will catch whatever Zane has used to mask the birchbane underneath. He drinks. He survives. Another trap avoided. He sits with the empty cup cooling in his hand and tells himself that as long as Zane keeps believing he is the weaker of them, the Mistborn will keep doing as he is told. Probably.