POV: vin
Summary
Vin sits in the mists on the roof of Keep Venture turning Sazed's reports over in her head, with OreSeur lying quietly beside her. Sazed is not a man given to embellishment, she reminds herself — careful in everything from his cleanliness to his sentences — so what he says about the mist killing people during daylight has to be considered seriously. She wonders whether the mist spirit she keeps catching at the edge of her bronze could account for Sazed's deaths — but he has not described any figures in the mist.
Eyes closed, she burns bronze. The spirit is watching from a rooftop nearby, as it has been. And underneath it she can again hear — far away, slow, faint — the same thumping pulse from somewhere to the north. She unfolds a page she has been carrying from the logbook, reads it by the spill of light from Elend's balcony, and finds the journeying writer of the logbook describing exactly what she is hearing — a pulsing from the mountains, drawing him north. She has had one of Elend's hired Seekers burn bronze in the same room; he heard nothing. Either he is the kandra impostor lying about his metals, or the pulse can only be heard by certain ears — by hers and by the man everyone had taken to be the Hero of Ages a thousand years dead.
Across the city Zane stands in the mist on top of Keep Hasting, where the two of them last fought. Vin has stopped meeting him there. He admits to himself the layered reasons it matters: he expects he will be ordered to kill her one day; he is more afraid of his growing reluctance than of her skill; he hopes she might be the someone he could rely on enough to finally leave Straff. Tired of waiting, he bounds across the city, finds her atop Keep Venture, circles wide so even tin-augmented eyes will not see him, and drops quietly onto the back of the roof.
She senses him anyway. He strolls forward to the edge of the roof, looks down at Elend's lit balcony, and tells her again, quietly, that the king uses her. She refuses the bait. He turns to a different question: as a child on the streets did she dream of having the power to free herself? Of course she had. He notes — pointedly — that she has the power now and is still subservient to another's will. Vin tells him she is a different person from the child who wanted that power.
He asks what she would do if there were no constraints, no consequences. She nearly says go north and find the thumping; she keeps that to herself. He turns away. Stung that she has wasted the chance, she calls after him with the truth: she would protect her king. She would kill Straff and Cett, make sure nobody could threaten him. Zane nods, eyes respectful, and asks why she does not. Because there would be consequences. Because diplomacy might still work. Because Elend does not work that way.
Zane reframes the answer for her: she may not act at her king's order, but she certainly refrains at it; she is his toy as much as Zane is his father's. The coin she dropped to test him snaps off the rooftop and into his waiting hand. He turns it over in his fingers and observes that Mistborn stop seeing the value of coins because they get used so often — it becomes convenient to forget what a tool was once worth. He flips it away, says he must go, and is gone. She watches him leave, and lets him.