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Vin wakes in her room in Keep Venture to find Elend reading at her bedside by candlelight. He has changed back into a nobleman's old suit; the white uniform is gone, the crown is gone, and with them the part of him that had been holding the city together. She is in a nightgown — she had told the maids not to bother but Sazed's sleep draught had outlasted her resolve — and reaches for the cup of water at her bed. He smiles. She searches his eyes for the look she saw at the end of the fight and cannot find it.

He tells her Penrod is king now, that he himself is unsure how the merchants flipped to Penrod rather than Cett but that the result is, in retrospect, fairer than the one he had wanted for himself: he had been so busy keeping the throne away from Cett that he had never considered handing his weight to Penrod to do the same. He sounds relieved. She lays a hand on his arm and he flinches before he can stop himself. He covers it; she pretends not to notice. Inside, the part of her that Reen had trained still tells her he will leave first if she does not leave him.

He tells her that he never imagined the Assembly would dethrone him a second time; that he must either give up his faith in the people he gave the vote to, or trust their judgment. He talks himself into trusting it while she watches. He is, she realises, the only nobleman who would. She catches herself starting up at the thought of OreSeur, remembers that a kandra does not die of cracked bones, and lies back. Elend tells her the kandra is digesting a new body and is genuinely amused to see her so concerned for him.

They talk about the besieging armies. Cett sits silent in Keep Hasting now, trapped in the city he came to conquer, and Straff has gone strangely quiet too. The assassins, Elend says, were unrecognisable to anyone in the city; nobody could put a name to a single one of them. Vin is sure she has seen the last one — the Thug whose face she smashed — somewhere before, but cannot place him. Elend tells her she was extraordinary and that she saved more than him; she saved the Central Dominance. She remembers Zane's line — that the king only ever sees her as a knife — and says nothing. Elend fetches her a cold bowl of broth which Sazed has loaded with enough sedative to put a man to sleep for a month, kisses her forehead, and leaves.

She wakes again in the dark. The shutters of her window have been opened from outside. Zane is standing in the corner. She finds her dagger under the pillow without giving herself away. He has come, he says, to set her straight: Straff is too afraid of her to risk sending blatant assassins — and besides, why would he use a kit of Mistings in a crowded room when he has a Mistborn who could simply use atium in the dark? He saw the dead being carried out and recognised some of them from Keep Hasting. The Thug who choked her was one of the servants who had peered at her over a serving tray while she sat with Elend and Cett at the dinner.

He lays out the rest: Penrod made a private deal with Straff; Straff outbid Cett for the merchants; Cett caught wind of the flip and saw no way out except to murder both other candidates while a second team staged a survivable attack on himself for cover. Vin sits with the dagger shaking in her hand and considers, for a long moment, going out and ending both Cett and Straff in their tents. She will not. That was Kelsier's way. It is not hers. It is not Elend's way.

Zane tells her, almost gently, that he has no wish to see Elend dead — Elend is pure, he is not, and it is better the brother who has the privileges never knows about the brother who does not. He saw the look on Elend's face standing over her at the end of the fight, and he knows she saw it too. He cannot be Elend. She does not want him to be. He drops a small bead onto her bedstand — a fortune in atium, enough for two minutes of burning — tells her to be ready when Cett's next try comes, and launches out the window.

In the morning OreSeur comes through her door in another wolfhound's body, bigger and blacker than the first. She is moved that he has chosen a dog over a human and thanks him for the Assembly Hall. He corrects her: he did not break the Contract, because the Contract only forbids the kill — most of his people read the words more strictly, but the words themselves are what they are. He had judged the man he tackled unlikely to die of it; had the man died, OreSeur would have walked back to his own kind for execution.

She presses him on the wider question: why does the Contract exist at all, if kandra are unkillable by sword or staff? It does not exist because of swords. It exists because of Allomancy — and the kandra did not exist before the Lord Ruler Ascended. Father made them, perhaps originally as his own spies, and their theology around him is still complicated. He had built in some means of controlling them, and humankind learned of it after they tried briefly to be free; the kandra chose voluntary servitude rather than wait to be enslaved.

Vin follows the implication out loud and onto him. The Lord Ruler could pierce copperclouds and touch metals inside a body — things ordinary Allomancers cannot do. Vin can do enough of the same things that she might do this one too. She tries a light Soothing on him — nothing. A flared Soothing — nothing. Then she burns duralumin on top of it, and OreSeur lets out a noise no dog can make and collapses shaking onto her bed.

She catches his head in her arms in horror. He pulls free, tells her flatly never to do it again, climbs off the bed, says she should not even have been able to do it — that she is like the Allomancers of the far past, before generations dulled the line — and leaves to rest. The story under his Contract is older and worse than she had thought. She lies back, alone, and begins to put together what the Lord Ruler must have done with the Well of Ascension's power — pushed back the mist, blackened the sun, made the kandra and probably the koloss, maybe even shaped Allomancers themselves — before the burst ran out and left him only with the long, ordinary life of an immensely powerful man.