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Allrianne rides side- saddle at the head of Hobart's toothless bandit crew, looking out over her father's army in the valley below. Hobart and his men were planning to rob and worse her when she came down the road; she Rioted their greed instead, promised them a reward, and turned the ambush into a paid escort home. She reflects, equally fond of and weary of them, on how cheap it is to manage simple men with money and to be dismissed as a silly girl — much more interesting to win over Breezy, who could read her Soothings back at her by the second day they spent talking. The captain of the army perimeter is appalled by the company she keeps but accepts her order to feed and quarter the bandits.

Cett greets her with a "you're back" pitched as an insult and a smile. The maps in the pavilion show what she expected: rebellions at home, brigands raiding his supply column. She proposes Hobart's crew be hired against the brigands, then makes the larger pitch: they cannot return to the Western Dominance without money or allies, and they have neither. They should ride back toward Luthadel, wait for the battle, and offer themselves to whichever side ends up winning. Cett sees the real reason — Breeze; she admits it only to herself. The city is going to lose. The best she can buy him is a chance her father will be in position to make a difference.

Three days north of Luthadel, Elend wakes in a canvas tent beside Vin, surprised by how rested he feels. Her stitches are out, her wounds nearly closed, her shoulder no longer favoured — pewter's quiet work on a body. She tells him he is a bad influence on her: she sleeps at night now, and not in her clothing. Outside, by the fire, Spook confides that around Vin he feels redundant — whatever he can sense, she can sense better, and she can fight whatever she finds. Elend reminds him he is here as a scout and Tineye; Spook tells him he keeps glimpsing someone behind them on the road but never gets a good look. Vin walks past with an armload of split wood, drops it by the fire, and tells them flatly that the figure is the mist spirit, following her north — dangerous, according to the logbook, if it gets close.

Straff wakes in his own bed three days after the fight with Amaranta. The young healer beside him tells him he should be dead. He calls for tin and for explanations. General Janarle has run the army in his absence; nobody dared move against him because nobody knows Zane is gone, and the Mistborn's reputation alone has kept his rivals still. Straff laughs out loud. Zane tried to kill him and instead saved him by sheer reputation. The scouts have followed Vin north toward Terris; the koloss camp is more restless, fighting internally. He orders the army to break camp at once and retreat — not against the city but exactly as Zane told him to, pulling back to wait the koloss attack out from the outside.

In Keep Venture's kitchen, Sazed sits with ten rings glittering on his fingers, filling metalminds — tin for the four senses, gold for health, pewter for strength, steel for speed, zinc for thought — and is correspondingly weak, half-blind, half-deaf, slow. Clubs limps in to report that Straff has withdrawn at last; Penrod's last messenger was executed at the koloss camp. Three days of bought delay are over. Sazed forces his thoughts together long enough to offer him a religion in return for his mockery at the wall: Dadradah, a faith in which artists held a higher calling than priests. He pushes a small wooden disk with a brush carved on it across the table — Clubs was a woodworker before he was a soldier, and Sazed has not forgotten. Clubs looks at the disk and does not pick it up; instead he tells him that his woman is looking for him.

Sazed releases the metalminds he can spare and walks to the grand ballroom restored to its full power as a body. Tindwyl is at the centre of the room with Dockson and a row of skaa scribes, working against a copy of Marsh's map of the city; Dockson, who looks more like a nobleman than any of them, is quietly placing one of the crew beside each nobleman Penrod has put in command of a gate. Sazed is assigned to Steel Gate. He pulls Tindwyl aside under a pillar and asks her again why she stayed. She tells him it was not stubbornness — that kept her alive through her years in the hands of the Breeders — and not hope, exactly, either. Leaders who accept the devotion of others must accept the dying with them. He sent Vin and Elend away to spare them; she will not. She tells him she loves him because he is strong like the wind, always there, willing to bend but never apologetic about being firm when he must. He releases his tinminds and lets the smell of her hair and the warmth of her body and the sound of her voice come back to him all at once, holds her, and curses her for staying. The wall-top warning drums begin to beat.