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Tindwyl meets Elend in the keep's covered departure way and tells him bluntly that he is a fool. He cannot leave the city now. The Terris errand Vin is on is, in her reading, a delusion in which she has decided she is the Hero of Ages and is chasing the Survivor's path to divinity. Elend, in his black-and-silver riding uniform, cuts her off — *do not speak of my wife in that manner* — and tells her plainly that he trusts Vin and that trust requires belief. He is going north. She tells him history will remember him as a coward, drops a wrapped, book-sized package on the supply table that Sazed wants delivered to the Keeper Synod in Tathingdwen, and stalks away. He turns to Vin — silent on her horse — and she thanks him. She warns him she may actually be mad. The mist spirit still watches her. The drumbeats in her head are constant now and she no longer needs bronze to hear them. He tells her he is trying very hard to believe her; she says that is enough.

Spook arrives in a soldier's uniform with saddlebags and a bag of pewter dust for her; he is nervous. Allrianne follows in a riding skirt, two servants in tow, and announces she is going with them. Vin tells her flatly that they don't trust or like her; she simply notes that they will come back to save her if she gets into trouble alone and so they may as well take her along, then mounts with practiced ease. They ride out through silent city streets while Elend meets eyes with skaa watching from windows. They expected him to flee; they are not even angry. At the Tin Gate Vin turns her horse, lowers her hood, and promises the watching crowd they will return. The guards salute. On the road a unit of Straff's horse moves to intercept; she empties their saddles with a single duralumin-flared spray of coins, flings the next volley of arrows aside without a gesture, and then drops off her horse to make a stand, scattering pewter dust behind her until a wall of dust, ash and metal slams over the archers. She rejoins them, and once they are out of bowshot Allrianne simply thanks them for the safe escort, veers off into the western hills toward her father's army, and goes.

Back on the wall of Luthadel, Breeze, Sazed, Ham, Clubs and Captain Demoux watch the riders disappear around a hill. To the east a thick, focussed column of black smoke is rising out of the koloss camp; nobody on the wall can explain it. Breeze notes, mostly to himself, that Allrianne could not be in a safer place than near Vin — Tindwyl, it turns out, stayed; Sazed does not know why. Demoux murmurs that the Survivor should protect them, and Clubs rounds on him publicly to stop preaching at his men; the captain flushes and goes. Clubs then turns on Sazed over the same fault — situational morality, believing everything so that he never has to choose. Sazed answers that inclusion is in fact the harder discipline; Clubs waves him off and limps for the stairs to prepare his soldiers to die. Ham tries the column of smoke again. None of them has an answer.

In Straff's pavilion the chills and sweats from the night Zane left have grown worse, not better. Straff takes the news that Elend's Mistborn has somehow escaped his encirclement with a rage that nearly knocks him over, then sends for Amaranta, certain he has finally been poisoned. She arrives and begins to prepare a different antidote than usual. He flares tin against the worsening dizziness and catches the wrongness; he pulls her around, rips her bodice open, and finds the old Zane-style knife scars of his son's lover. He demands the truth. He gets all of it. Years of Zane making him think he had been poisoned were rehearsals, not real poisonings — performed at Amaranta's request, so that each time he ran to her for the "antidote." The thing she gave him was the only addictive ingredient. The fits he kept thinking were attacks were withdrawal. She owns him. He strangles her on the floor of the pavilion. By the time he comes back to himself she is dead. Knowing neither which herb is the addictive one nor which of the others would kill him, he scoops random handfuls from the antidote drawers into a flagon of cold water, drinks the mixture, and lets himself collapse.