POV: elend-venture
Summary
Elend and Ham are waiting in the palace atrium when Captain Demoux's visitor from Lord Cett's camp is finally shown in. She is barely eighteen, in light red silk with a shawl and lace sleeves, and she scampers across the white room and throws her arms around Breeze's neck before anyone can introduce her. Floor-to-ceiling windows light the scene; a row of servants waits at the back. For perhaps the first time in his life Breeze looks actually mortified — he blushes deeply and prompts the girl to present herself. She steps back, curtsies, and is introduced as Allrianne Cett, daughter to Lord Ashweather Cett, king of the Western Dominance.
Elend hopefully asks if her father sent her as an ambassador. He did not. She begs asylum instead: her father is manipulative, he drove Breezy away, she could not stand another day of being leered at in a war camp and bouncing in carriages, and she had to follow him to Luthadel. As a sweetener she volunteers a small intelligence — her father is being supplied through the cannery at Haverfrex — and her hope that the king will take her in. He grants her sanctuary "for a time," signals to the steward Cadon, and sends her off to prepared rooms and a late dinner.
The instant she is out the door Ham starts laughing, and despite the danger Elend laughs with him until he can barely sit upright; even Dockson, who has walked in mid-scene and taken the girl's vacated seat, cracks a smile. Breeze huffs that the daughter of the man besieging them just demanded asylum and that Cett will certainly want them dead now, but Ham cannot stop ribbing him about being hugged by a "courtly fluffcake," and Dockson notes drily that he is unused to Breeze being the source of an unplanned female attachment around here.
Vin then appears in the doorway — silent as ever, no shoes that click, no skirts that rustle, nothing metal on her — and asks what the pink thing she just passed in the hallway was. Informed that Breeze is apparently "something of an item" with the girl, she wrinkles her nose, calls the arrangement disgusting, and presses Breeze on whether anything actually happened. He concedes there was nothing real, then needles her in return about a younger Vin supposedly pining for Kelsier back at the beginning, which she furiously denies. Elend — borrowing one of Tindwyl's lessons — cuts the line of discussion off and reaches for the room.
They settle to the real question. Dockson floats taking the girl hostage; Vin glares, and Ham points out that since she came of her own will simply keeping her amounts to the same leverage. Holding her, Elend observes, risks antagonising Cett just when they need him to believe they are his ally; returning her later could itself become a negotiating concession; Breeze, speaking for the girl, asks that her own wishes at least be considered. The eyes settle on Elend, who notes — startled — that a few weeks ago they would simply have kept arguing past him. He rules: she stays. The Cett army can spend a few days sweating about the king's daughter inside Luthadel's walls, and that buys the city more time. The crew nod; Breeze looks relieved. He resolves privately to make the decisions as he sees them and live with the consequences.