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Sazed wakes to morning light through the shutters of his palace study and realises he and Tindwyl have studied through the night without his tapping wakefulness once. Her bronzemind has carried her; the table is buried in notes drawn from both of their copperminds, including a passage she has just written out for him — a fragment of a biography of King Wednegon, one of the last pre-imperial rulers to put up a real fight against the man who would become the Lord Ruler. In his last weeks the king insisted his defeat was not the fault of his soldiers against the Conqueror's koloss but of food: the Deepness had so depleted Darrelnai's stores that his people could not both grow grain and resist.

Tindwyl tells Sazed she thinks Vin is right — that the Deepness was the mist — and he concedes she has the better of him, this time with his own rubbing as evidence. He admits that he had not wanted this to be true. The mist is already strengthening; the rumours of daylight mist and of people killed inside it may not be rumours much longer; if the Lord Ruler was the chain on whatever the mist truly is, then killing him may have begun setting it loose. Tindwyl rebukes him for never defending himself, never raising his voice in front of the Synod, for being the most contrite rebel she has ever known. The Keepers cast him out because he refused to argue back. Had he pushed harder, she says, he might be leading them now.

The room goes quiet. Tindwyl announces she will leave today — not to escape the city but to ride out to Straff's camp and Cett's camp and offer their leaders the same instruction she has given young Lord Venture. She doubts either will listen as he has; her fondness for Elend slips through. Then, suddenly hesitant, she undoes herself. She has had more than her fill of men and of childbearing for the Terris — the Breeders took thirty years of her life. She found, when she finally rejoined her people, one Keeper who had ever pushed the Synod toward acting rather than hiding. He went on to free them all. She takes Sazed's hand across the table and asks him, almost a whisper, to give her an excuse to stay. He does. She tells him he has persuaded her, and they go back to their notes.

Elend walks the top of the city wall in the cold morning with sword at his hip and crown still on his head. Ham climbs up to find him and reports that the soldiers along the wall stand a little taller when Elend passes their posts now — they have started to read him as a commander. Out on the plain, the third army has finally arrived: Jastes Lekal's koloss have settled in alongside Straff and Cett, waiting, and the refugees' story explains why they took so long — Jastes still has enough hold to keep them in check. Closer, Elend spots a small skirmish between Cett's men and Straff's, the kind of patrol clash that has been happening more and more. The two besieging armies are tightening against each other; if he shoves Straff right, Straff and Cett will collide. He needs only a little more time.

First, though, he needs his throne back. He admits it aloud to Ham — and is surprised, when he hears himself, by how plainly he wants the office. The position is his. The city is his. He will not hand it to Penrod or Cett or anyone else. Ham calls that self-confidence; Elend calls it the arrogance he has been missing for most of his reign. He has read every book of law he can find and refuses to twist the code Sazed helped him write. Studying other kings has not given him the answer either, because he is not one of them and never will be. He will rule as Elend Venture — the scholar-idealist the city already has — or not at all.

Walking on, sorting out what he actually is, he comes back to the skaa. Before the Collapse they had been his favourite philosophical puzzle — he had argued in parlours that they were no different from men of his own class — and after it they had become people he knew and would not abandon. That is what he is, then: a nobleman who loves the skaa, a melodramatic idealist who never quite made a good nobleman. He stops on the wall and tells Ham he has an idea.