POV: vin
Summary
Vin stands in front of her mirror in Keep Venture in a maroon gown cut for movement and finds she has, against her own expectations, missed the dress. She lets herself try on the older daydream — turning up to a real ball as herself, neither Valette nor the thief, confident in being both the Mistborn who killed the Lord Ruler and the woman the king loves — and finds it does not quite collapse this time. Tindwyl tells her she is beautiful, declines to come along to the dinner, and tells her, in almost the same breath, that the king is approaching the point where he no longer needs her instruction either.
In the courtyard Elend has mustered an escort that any reading must call deliberately heavy — two hundred soldiers, Ham in full kit as personal bodyguard, Spook driving, all of it under Demoux's command. Breeze takes the first excuse not to come; Elend lets him out of it. Vin takes Elend's arm. In the carriage rolling toward Keep Hasting he tells her, almost apologetically, that they never actually attended a ball together — he never picked her up in his carriage and let everyone watch them arrive together. They circle, quietly, around whether the city will ever have balls again with refugees from Suisna huddled in a warehouse.
Hasting's yard is lit and lined with Cett's soldiers — a deliberate display of layered force, two hundred swallowed by a thousand swallowed in turn by the besieging armies outside. Elend's soldiers wait in the entry hall under Demoux. Vin keeps her face composed in front of him; she is convinced he is the kandra spy and intends to follow him out of the city one day to find out which enemy he answers to.
A guide leads them up two flights of stairs to a glass-walled upper room where Cett is already eating. His son stands beside him; his own bodyguard ranges along the far wall, deliberately fewer than Ham's men. Elend and Vin sit across the table from him.
Cett runs the conversation. His daughter is not what brought him — he is, he says with delight, free of her; Elend is welcome to her. Elend is also too honest to harm her, and that, Cett tells him, is exactly why he cannot be king — Cett has spent weeks studying him through one of his own friends. Elend absorbs this; then Cett explains the friend. Breeze did not flee Cett's camp because he was caught with Allrianne; Cett recognised him as one of the Survivor's crew from the start, let him stay because the man was useful, then tried to kill him when Breeze refused to be turned. Elend realises that Breeze had also been running Cett from inside — spreading the atium rumours that drew the warlord to Luthadel in the first place to keep Straff from taking the city alone.
Cett gives Elend the rules of the world to come. If he wins the vote, Elend will be assassinated; if Elend withdraws, Cett will let him leave the city alive. The Assembly will be dissolved; freedom and safety cannot both be had once two armies are at the walls. Elend tells him — calmly, on his feet — that the skaa will not vote themselves back into slavery, that he makes his own choice and leaves others to make theirs, and that Cett is wrong about which way the vote will go. Cett tells him to sit; they have one more thing to discuss. Atium. The city is starving, the new refugees will starve it further, and Cett has a stockpile of long-keeping canned goods packed in the Lord Ruler's method which he is happy to trade for the atium stash he still half-believes the city holds.
Elend laughs and tells him there is none. They have searched the city a dozen times — turned out the statues to check whether the metal had been melted down inside them, inspected the palace spires (only iron), sent Allomancers through the keep looking for hidden metal pools, considered tunnels — and found nothing. Cett sits back at last convinced, sighs, and concedes that holding Elend for ransom would only hurt his chances at the throne. He will let him go. As Elend eats, Vin catches the thought that, again, the Lord Ruler had clearly known what the Deepness really was and had tried, in the end, to warn them. She makes herself watch the room instead of chasing it.
Vin spends the dinner turning her copper off and her bronze on, flaring the latter to push past any concealing Coppercloud Cett might be hiding behind. She finds two open Pewterarms disguised among the serving staff, a Tineye listening from an adjoining room, and — through the cloud — no Soothers, no Rioters, and no metal burning at all in Cett or his son. She is left thinking, again, about how much of an advantage piercing Copperclouds gives her, and about how many other Lord Ruler tricks must have died with him.