POV: vin
Summary
Vin holds her seat next to Breeze and Ham and scans the audience for the soldiers Cett must have brought with him: perhaps thirty men, dressed as skaa, in a loose cordon around his chair. The warlord himself does not rise — Breeze reminds her, while the chamber sits frozen, that Cett has been crippled since childhood, that the beard and the worn jacket and the open contempt for Luthadel fashion are simply what Western noblemen are like. His soldiers carry his chair up onto the Assembly dais. Penrod grants him ten minutes.
Cett makes his pitch in the open and without softening it: he has forty thousand soldiers on Luthadel's doorstep, twice the city garrison; the Assembly should give him the throne and save the killing. When one of the noblemen muses about taking him hostage, he laughs and confirms that his army has standing orders to raze the city if he is not back in camp by nightfall. He invites the chamber to consider that, with his forty thousand added to their twenty, the walls could be held against Straff and even against the koloss army — and lets slip, on hearing the assemblymen's silence, that Elend Venture has not yet mentioned the koloss to them. When Elend tries to call him on his honor, Cett turns the question back, asking whether any of Elend's Allomancers have been Soothing the Assembly this entire meeting. Elend admits, in front of the whole room, that they have; Tindwyl groans quietly behind Vin.
Cett lays out his terms: if the Assembly hands him the crown his titled men keep their titles, the merchants gain titles they never had, everyone keeps their head — and the skaa go back to work the way they did under the Lord Ruler, no pay, no emancipation. To buy himself the time to bribe the chamber in private, he asks to move into the city with five thousand troops. Elend reminds him that nothing can be done at this meeting short of a unanimous vote — which means Elend's own one vote can deny it — and Penrod dilutes the request to a thousand. The chamber passes it nineteen to one; Elend is the one. The Assembly adjourns for two weeks.
Elend catches Penrod on the way off the dais and tries to call the vote what he believes it is — selling the city to a tyrant. Penrod tells him, more coldly than Elend has ever heard him, that Elend is an idealist who has spent his life with books; he has spent his with people. The audience out there are terrified, and freedom and justice will not feed them when two armies are at the walls. The Lord Ruler's system was not perfect but it kept them alive, and given the choice he would take Cett over Straff without flinching; they would have surrendered already if Elend had not stopped them. He leaves. Elend stands on the dais remembering a passage he once read about rebellions that overthrow their own freedom because the chaos of transition is worse for people than the tyranny they knew.
Vin and the crew join him. She tells him, quietly, that she has decided Cett must be Mistborn — the cripple act is the perfect cover. Breeze tells her flatly that he is not. Elend just smiles. Gneorndin — Cett's son, the young man who sat at his side — crosses the floor with his father's invitation. He frames it as a discussion of his sister, Allrianne, whom Elend is supposedly holding hostage, and shoots Breeze a hard look. Elend catches himself before refusing on principle: he needs whatever information that meeting might give him. He accepts dinner in a week.