POV: breeze
Summary
Breeze stands on the Luthadel wall in the cold morning watching what looks like a small mercy: Cett's army folding its tents and beginning to march out of the valley. Clubs stands beside him, sneering as usual, and his finger taps the stone of the wall. Breeze knows Clubs well enough to read it: the squat general is not relieved. Asked, he explains. Straff will eventually work out that he can pull back, let the koloss go to work on the city, and then walk in afterwards to take the atium off the rubble. One weakened enemy instead of two strong ones. Breeze pulls his cloak tighter. Clubs reminds him, flatly, that they were dead from the moment the first army arrived; they have only been good at stalling.
In his study back at Keep Venture, Elend takes the count with Ham and Spook. Of Cett's thousand men in the city, three hundred are dead. The figure makes Ham flinch — most armies break at thirty or forty percent in a full day, and Vin and the second Mistborn did it in ten minutes. Nobody has seen Vin since. Spook tosses a koloss coin onto the desk with the gold paint scraped off; it is hardwood underneath, as Elend had guessed. He explains that the koloss are taking the counterfeit because they have decided they want to be paid — that they are changing in ways nobody understands, or in ways the Lord Ruler had suppressed.
Ham is rattled. He says aloud what he has been thinking for weeks: there is something not right with Vin. She is hiding things; she fought beside a second Mistborn last night and never mentioned him; and the Thug's full-on staff blow at the Assembly should have laid her up for weeks, not a few days — two flared pewters would have cancelled each other and she still weighs half what a grown soldier does. Elend insists she is more capable than any of them and stable, and says the right things; Ham and Spook exchange a look. Spook reminisces about Kelsier — about being able to fail under him and still feel like the loss was part of the plan. Elend tells them the Survivor never gave in to despair and neither will they. Ham and Spook leave for the wall to check on Breeze and Clubs; in the hallway OreSeur is waiting in his wolfhound's body and tells Elend quietly that he has found her.
The kandra leads him to a section of the city the firewood crews have not reached, into a ransacked building knee-deep in ash, up to a hallway where one of the panels has been slid back to reveal a hidden cubby behind the wall. Elend crawls in. Vin is on the far side, knees drawn up, looking through a peephole at the street below — not a shop, he realises, but an old Camon-era thieving hide.
She speaks first, and twists her bronze earring between her fingers as she does. She had thought Camon a terrible man — a brutal man, even by the standards of street crewleaders. She is fairly sure she killed more people last night than Camon did in his whole life. She tells him for the first time the story of the earring: that Reen had told her her mother heard voices, killed her infant sister, and the same day pressed her own earring on her as though picking her over the dead one. Her entire life, she says, has been death. Then last night she did what she did to Cett's men. She wanted to scare them. She wanted to make them leave him alone. She is afraid she is becoming Kelsier.
Elend does not have a good answer; he holds her and tells her she has bought the city time, and that he trusts her, and that he cannot give her the words she needs because he does not have them. She tells him she has to leave Luthadel. She has to go north to Terris. Decisions she has to make. Will he go with her? He cannot. The city rejected him and he will not abandon it. She nods — it was the answer she had expected — and they sit a long moment in the ash. On the way out she hands him the bead of atium Zane gave her, says he can spend it if he wants. He hands it back; she cannot fight the other Mistborn without it. She gives it to OreSeur instead, who swallows it back into his shoulder, and the three of them walk down to where the guards are waiting.