(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Sazed reads a passage from the Kwaan plate aloud to Tindwyl in his rooms — the lines in which Kwaan confesses, in his own voice, that he is afraid; afraid that Alendi will come back from the Well and have him killed, afraid for the world the Deepness is about to break, and afraid that all of this will go uncomemorated. The desk between them is buried in their notes; a bowl from their lunch sits cooling by the door and Sazed keeps wanting to take it down to the kitchens and not quite managing to make himself leave the table.

Tindwyl keeps stopping him. Why, she asks, would Kwaan fear that Alendi — climbing Terris to put down the very Deepness both men dreaded — would take the Well's power for himself? And why, having decided that Alendi could not be trusted with it, would he send the youthful, envy-driven Rashek of all people to dispose of him? Sazed reads the relevant passages out — the instructions to Rashek to mislead Alendi in the mountains and to kill him if misdirection failed — and admits that Kwaan also writes that Alendi is fundamentally a good man, hurt by what conquest has made of him. The pieces simply do not fit. Kwaan is careful and deliberate elsewhere in the record; something must have happened that flipped him so hard against his own discovery that he was willing to risk opposing the most powerful man alive — and risk handing the Well to a nephew whose temperament he knew was worse.

Sazed suggests a break. Tindwyl will not allow it. They both feel the same thing in the room around them: the city is about to fall. The armies, the koloss, the fractured Assembly, the cold — she has studied what conquerors do when they take a city and she is blunt that it will be worse than the revolution that put Elend in the keep to begin with. They settle back over the notes; this is a scholar's lifework crammed into the days a siege might allow them. Keepers, he reflects, are accustomed to beginning tasks they will not be the ones to finish.

On a balcony of Keep Venture, Elend Venture counts smoking chimneys against silent ones across Luthadel and finds the proportions worse than he can fix. The koloss sit unmoving to the northeast, indifferent to the cold; Jastes is somehow holding them pointed at the city rather than at Straff or Cett. Captain Demoux, assigned to him as bodyguard since the Assembly Hall attack, coaxes him back inside out of the wind and reminds him of a Survivor rally that night, which the dethroned king still means to attend.

Elend cannot settle. He stops himself from peering in on Vin yet again, then walks the back corridors of his childhood keep instead. He turns over her strangeness toward him since the Assembly fight, the way she had killed the last Thug with her own forehead, and the suspicion he cannot quite put down: that she is reacting, even unconsciously, to the fact that he is no longer king. He decides to stop pacing and to do what he thinks she would have done in his place — go ask the people whose advice he can still get.

He finds Sazed and Tindwyl in his rooms with her hand resting on his on the desk and pretends politely not to have seen it. Tindwyl greets him with her usual unkindness and he warns her, mildly, that insult is now a privilege not a habit. Sat down, he puts his question: he lost the throne, he says, because at the decisive moment he would not lie to the Assembly. Was he a fool? Tindwyl answers yes — and then answers no. The single moment of honesty was too small to credit with the loss; he lost the throne because he would not turn his armies on his own city to secure it, because he gave the Assembly too much rope, because he employed no assassins. He lost the throne, in short, because he is a good man.

Sazed tells him another man, differently made, might have rightly told the lie; Elend should not have, because cohesion with one's own life is itself an accomplishment. The conversation drifts to Sazed's three hundred religions and to the question of whether the wisdom of Tindwyl's storied past kings is even applicable to him: they would not, she points out tartly, have ended up where he is in the first place. The exchange resolves something for him that none of the participants quite see at the time. He stands, thanks her, and leaves. Sazed meets his eye, smiles, and tells Tindwyl His Majesty has work to do. Elend walks back to his rooms, opens his closet, and looks at the white uniform Tindwyl had once picked out for him as king.