POV: vin
Summary
Vin lies on her stomach in her room in Keep Venture going back through her notes on the Anticipation prophecies while OreSeur, front paws on the windowsill, watches Cett's procession finish moving into the city. The northern thumping under her bronze is louder than it was. She tries to talk herself out of thinking the Hero of Ages could be her — most of the supposed signs are vague enough to fit anyone, even half the skaa in the city — but she has burned the mist once and she has seen the figure walking in it.
She and OreSeur tease one another about his breath and his bones, and then, talking about prophecy as expression of hope, OreSeur lets slip something he did not mean to. Vin presses him: the kandra have a religion of their own, kept hidden from the Keepers and from any human master. The prophecies are framed in terms of Ruin and Preservation — humans belong to Ruin, the kandra to Preservation — and end in the day humans use the koloss to destroy the world. He insists none of it is literal, and asks her to keep it from her Keeper friends. She agrees.
Then she goes downstairs to do what she has been putting off: she is still looking for the kandra impostor on the crew.
Elend stands at the edge of one of the city wells with Ham and the skaa healer who came to find them. The healer reports an outbreak — severe, several already dead — concentrated in one neighborhood, all of it from this well or the next square's. Elend tells him to take over a vacant noble mansion for the sick; Ham sends twenty palace guards along. Standing alone afterwards, the two of them work the question of which side did it. The city will have to fall back on the river soon. Wells boarded, warnings posted, healers told to watch the others.
Vin eats a brief dinner, hears the same talk of sickness pass through the servants, looks in on Elend after his return from the well, and then goes with OreSeur to find Dockson. He is in the palace library, working ledgers at the desk that used to be Straff Venture's study — preparing the royal finances to be handed off to whoever the Assembly decides on. He sets down his pen for her.
She turns the conversation, by a sideways route, to a private memory she shared with him before the Collapse — a conversation only the two of them had. He knows it, takes the bait into it, even remembers the tangents. The relief washes through her until he turns it back on her: she is asking because of Elend, isn't she? He admits he cannot easily love any nobleman, Elend included, because to forgive a nobleman now would be to call himself a monster for what he and Kell did to nobles during the Final Empire's years — the deaths in alleyways, the coins lifted out of pockets, the long campaign of private vengeance. He carries it because Kelsier's mother and his own love both came out of the same world. He would do it all again. He sits ashamed in front of her. She tells him, silently, that this is not an impostor.
Out in the hall afterwards, OreSeur refuses to let her relax: his people are thorough. They interview their victims, talk to acquaintances, sometimes torture them; a private memory two years old that she once mentioned to Sazed or Elend is exactly the kind of detail a kandra would have prepared. Vin hates this work. She has cleared the inner crew off the list one at a time and each clearance brings her closer to knowing which friend is already dead, which is worse than not knowing.
She is standing at a hallway window looking out into the misted courtyard when she sees a single man cross it without a lantern. Not Ham, not Zane — too short for him and the wrong walk for Ham. She snaps the lamp shut beside her, Pushes off a coin, drops twenty-five feet into the courtyard with OreSeur in her arms, and shadows the figure across the grounds. He turns out to be Captain Demoux — one of Ham's second-rank officers, trained by him, familiar enough with the keep to come and go unchallenged. He moves as if he does not want to be seen, and when he reaches a servants' door he greets the guards posted there and goes inside. He has not snuck out; he was nervous about something else. Vin realises he is exactly the kind of person an enemy would replace — close to the crew but not on it, near every meeting but never trusted with a decision, of low enough Allomantic value that she would have never thought to bronze-test him. She decides he is the spy. She just does not yet know what to do about it.