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Across the dinner table in Straff Venture's tent, Elend watches his alliance pitch fall apart. Straff tells him there is no reason to keep him alive: he believes the next leader of Luthadel will be more accommodating, and besides, he and Cett have already exchanged pleasantries — Cett gets the west, he gets the east, and they will split the atium when the city falls. Elend is reasonably sure that part is a bluff — his father does not ally with near-equals — but the trump card he has saved, the koloss army moving south through the Central Dominance, only makes Straff pause, not turn. He demands Luthadel; he wants it because it was the Lord Ruler's capital and his own keep is in it, and because the son who took the throne he walked away from must be made to pay for it. Elend's play-weak posture stops landing; he can see resolve closing in his father's eyes. He is going to die.

Cornered, Elend drops the script. He calls his father what he is — a sick pig, a selfish man who will end up dead from a knife in the back — and, as the guards rush in, smiles and tells him: kill me and you die too. He never came to negotiate. He came so that he could put a Mistborn in the heart of the camp.

Outside the tent in the mist, Vin hears him say it and stays her dagger. Through the canvas she watches the shadow-shapes of the arguing men, and when Elend starts naming emotions one by one — fear, passion, calmness — she Soothes and Riots Straff in turn through brass and zinc, deliberately heavy-handed so that he will know exactly who is doing it to him. Then she burns duralumin and wipes him flat — a single explosive Soothe that erases his capacity to feel — and his shadow stumbles inside the tent. Zane arrives at her shoulder out of the mist while she is doing it. He crouches with her, listens to Elend threaten his father with the slaughter of every general and captain and obligator in the camp, and asks her, softly, why it is that people like the two of them always have to be the knives. She answers that Elend is bluffing — that he would never use her that way — and as Zane turns up to the sky he visible in tin she sees the layered white scars on his forearm: the marks of the Pits of Hathsin, the same scars Kelsier bore. He covers them and bows away into the mist before she can say anything more.

Inside the tent Straff tells Elend to go. The carriage rolls away. Straff stands alone in the mist trying to understand what just happened. The kandra spy Zane keeps inside Luthadel had told him precisely what feint to expect, and he had still nearly fallen for it; he had felt that final Soothing as something close to death. Zane confirms, walking out of the mist to him, that there was no second Mistborn helping her — she really is that strong. Shaken, Straff gives the order he should have given before tonight: he tells Zane to kill her. He cannot move on the city while she lives. Zane asks for help and Straff grants it — the strike team will come from the untraceable Mistings he has bred from his many mistresses precisely so that he would have such tools when he needed them. Zane strolls off with that. Inside, Straff sends for Hoselle again, to remind himself he is in control of something tonight.

In the carriage back, Elend is still buzzing with the size of what he just got away with — he has not failed his people, he is still their king, the small crown does not feel as heavy as it did. He cannot quite work out why Vin will not share the elation. He talks too much. She huddles into the corner further when he praises her, and forces a smile she does not feel.

The carriage reaches Tin Gate in the full dark. Ham holds a lantern in the courtyard with Breeze, Dockson, Spook, and OreSeur padding out to meet Vin. Elend tells the story — the alliance feint failing, the threat that saved his life, the fact that he is alive at all. The crew cheers; Breeze proposes celebration back at the keep. They split into the carriages. Dockson, unusually, climbs in with Elend rather than the other vehicle. As the carriage starts moving he produces a sealed envelope from his satchel — letter from the Assembly, delivered while Elend was away. Vin leans over to read with him.

By majority vote — twenty-three signatures, every member of the Assembly — Elend has been deposed under the no-confidence clause he himself wrote into the kingdom's charter. The letter closes Part Two of the book; the celebration in the carriage does not survive it.