POV: elend-venture
Summary
Elend is at his desk late, drafting a letter to Jastes beside a wooden copy Clubs has whittled of a koloss coin — a small, quiet attempt to buy the city more weeks by flooding the koloss with counterfeits — when his door slams open and Vin runs in, bloody and crying. She buries her face in his chest and tells him she has killed his brother — Straff's Mistborn, Zane. He sets the brother-news aside and walks her down to Sazed's rooms; she teeters, sinks to the floor just inside the door, and asks him for help.
Sazed, pulled out of sleep in a white robe, cuts away her shoulder, then her shirt to expose the breast wound, then numbs and stitches in his methodical way. The shoulder cut, he tells Elend, glanced off bone and missed the major vessels; she is more exhausted than dying. She uses the stitching time to talk — about Kelsier, about the realisation that what made him great was not his fighting but his trust in the people around him, and that Elend does that better than Kell ever did, instinctively, even with weasels like Philen. Then, very casually, she asks Sazed if he knows any wedding ceremonies.
He knows roughly two hundred. The shortest belongs to the Larsta, a people whose entire marriage rite is a profession of love before a witness. Vin looks at Elend and says she loves him. He says it back. Sazed tries to slow them down — strong emotions, bloody floor — and she tells him calmly that she is the most clear-headed she has been in months. He gives them the blessing, warns that the Larsta love-oath admits no divorce, and goes back to her cheek. Elend kneels with a damp cloth and feels stunned, and she tells him she is sorry for taking so long.
Then Sazed offers them the Well of Ascension. He and Tindwyl are now convinced Rashek never completed the Hero's task — the Deepness is still here as the mists, killing people now. Something needs to be done. The events threatening Luthadel and the return of the Well are lock and key. He has, he says, derived the Well's location from his metalminds: atop a low peak in the Terris mountains called Deryatith. Vin can feel the Well's drumbeat but cannot place a direction; he will draw a map. She decides, between stitches, that she has to go. Sazed presses Elend to go with her — Straff will take the city bloodlessly if he leaves, execute him if he stays, and Vin will need help. Sazed himself will stay; Tindwyl is to travel north with them, carrying her research to the Keeper brethren, and Spook will go as their scout. Elend agrees. He has a sudden, unfamiliar sense that the world has simplified itself. He gathers her up — she is already half asleep against his shoulder — and carries her out.
Alone in his rooms, Sazed watches them go. He wonders what they will think of him when news of Luthadel's fall reaches them. His wedding blessing is the last gift he can give them; that, and their lives. The things he said about the Well were, of course, falsehoods. He has no idea where the Well is, nor what releasing it would do. How history judges the Terrisman who invented a mythology to save the lives of his friends will depend on what Vin and Elend do with those lives. He gathers his medical kit and retreats to fabricate the promised map.
The section closes opening Part Five, "Snow and Ash."