Work Text:
Straff Venture's tent was warm with the smell of seared beef and spiced wine.
Elend sat across from his father, hands folded carefully on the white tablecloth, suit pressed and straight, hair brushed back the way Tindwyl had taught him. Vin sat at his right in her blue gown, head turned slightly downward, eyes flicking up only when she thought no one was looking. She was playing the quiet young mistborn who was now the mistress of the king of Luthadel.
Straff watched them both over the rim of his cup. He was a tineye, Elend had told her that. Nothing else. He had no allomancy at all besides his enhanced senses.
He had grown a beard since Elend had last seen him. Iron-gray, trimmed close. The beard suited the lines of his face. Straff had always been a handsome man, all teeth and confidence and the bright clean coat of a thing that had never gone hungry.
A girl sat at Straff's side. She wore a red ball gown and could not have been more than fifteen. Her hair was very dark, her face very thin, her eyes very low. She looked a little like Vin.
The girl did not eat. She likely had been told how to behave.
"You came," Straff said.
"You sent for me," Elend said.
Straff cut a slow slice of beef and ate it off the knife. "I admit, I am surprised. Last we spoke I told you I would have you killed if you ever set foot in my camp."
"I'm the king of this city and I do what is best for my people," Elend said.
Straff laughed. He laughed like other men cleared their throats. The girl beside him flinched at the sound, then smoothed the flinch away.
Elend watched the small flinch and felt a cold place open up in his chest.
„Still the idealistic idiot, I wonder how they can take you seriously at all.“
"Father," Elend said. "I came here to talk about the city."
"Oh, the city. Yes." Straff cut another slice of beef. "Let us talk about the city. The city is mine. We can begin from there."
"The city has thirty-foot walls and twenty thousand soldiers and three mistborn. The city has the atium reserves of the Lord Ruler. The city has me, the only man who can give it to you with the gates open and the people quiet. I came here to find out the price you would pay for that."
"Will it be a high price?"
"It will. There is also another army on the way."
Straff paused with the knife above his plate.
"Cett," Elend said. "Ashweather Cett. Out of the Western Dominance. Forty thousand men. He has been moving for weeks. He will be at the city before the next ashfall."
The pause held. Vin was looking at Elend now.
"You are lying," Straff said.
"I am not."
"Cett is a coward who sits in his hills and counts his boxings or fights against his obligators."
"Cett decided that being too far from Luthadel will be too dangerous in the future. He marches, Father. Your scouts will confirm it within the next hours. I came here ahead of his arrival as a gesture of good will and because we are family."
Straff set the knife down very carefully on the edge of his plate.
"All right," he said. "Tell me your offer."
Elend felt Vin shift beside him, a small motion of her hand toward her sleeve.
"Together," Elend said, "We destroy Cett. You bring your army to bear on his flank when he arrives. My city holds the wall against him. He will be dead between us within a week. Then I open the gates for you. The city becomes the seat of your kingdom. I become your heir again, and I administrate the Central Dominance under you. We split the atium two parts to you, one part to me. I survive. You get what you came for. Cett dies in a field outside my wall."
Straff regarded him for a long moment.
Then he picked up the wine cup and drank.
"No," he said.
"No?"
"No. You have grown clever, boy. The clothes suit you. The beard suits you. The way you sit at a table is much improved. None of it changes the small fact that you are still in my tent, and I still have fifty thousand men outside it, and the only reason you came alone with this little mistborn instead of with an honor guard is that you knew an honor guard would have died at the wall. But I feel that you still came desperate and the only thing desperate men do is surrender."
"You are forgetting Cett."
"I will deal with Cett."
"Have you become insane?"
"I can deal with anyone alone, boy. I have been doing it for forty years." Straff turned the wine cup slowly in his fingers. "You will give me the gates of Luthadel tomorrow morning. You will ride beside me into the city. You will hand me your crown in front of the assembly and announce that I am the new king of the Central Dominance. You will then retire to your books and your foolish friends, and I will let you keep the rooms in Keep Venture you have come to enjoy. The mistborn beside you,of course, will be mine."
Vin's head came up.
Straff smiled at her for the first time.
"I will keep her as my newest pet," he said to Elend, as if Vin were not there. "Hoselle here is getting tired and I have always wanted to see what a skaa mistborn looks like under a dress. She is very small. I imagine she fights well and is fun to break."
Vin's hand moved another half-inch toward her sleeve.
Elend felt his pulse begin to hammer in his ears, slow and very loud. Tindwyl's lessons fell out of his head one by one. He looked at his father across the table and felt fear for the first time this evening.
"No," Elend said quietly.
"No to which part."
"No to all of it. You will not have my city. You will not have my crown. You will certainly not have her."
Straff set down the cup.
"Boy," he said, "I am going to teach you a lesson tonight. The world does not run on what you want." He raised one hand and made a small gesture toward the tent flap. "I have asked some men to join us. After dinner I will turn you over to them, and they will explain to you the rules of the real world, outside of your books. I will have your mistborn skaa-girl scrubbed and brought to my tent, where I will take her, and you will hear her screams the whole night."
Two men stepped through the tent flap. Hazekillers. Wooden shields, glass-edged staves, leather harnesses, no metal on them anywhere that Vin could push. A third man came in behind them in obligator robes. The tattoos around his eyes were the wide, branching pattern of a Canton of Inquisition obligator. A Smoker.
Of course, Vin thought. The Smoker had been masking Straff's allomancer guards from her bronze all night. She had not even sensed them in the next tent.
Straff looked at her. He still wore the small, appreciative smile.
"My dear," he said. "I have been told you are quite something. I am very much looking forward to finding out."
Vin set down her fork.
She set it down precisely, at a right angle to her knife, on the side of her plate, exactly how a noblewoman would set a fork to indicate she was finished with her dinner.
Then she burned zinc.
She did not riot Straff. She rioted the girl. The fifteen-year-old in red, who had spent every minute of this dinner trying to be invisible. Vin burned duralumin alongside the zinc and dumped everything she had into the girl at once. Every memory of every cruelty Hoselle had ever known, every hit she had ever swallowed, every night she had been brought into this tent against her will. Fury. Pure fury, amplified beyond what any human being could refuse.
The girl looked up.
The girl picked up Straff's wine cup and threw it in his face.
Straff jerked back, hand to his eyes, swearing. The two hazekillers turned toward Straff and the girl. The Smoker's coppercloud rippled, the smallest gap in his concentration.
Vin moved.
Her glass dagger was in the throat of the nearer hazekiller before the wine had finished running off Straff's beard.
She kicked him backward into his partner. Both went down. The Smoker dropped his cloud as he scrambled for the tent flap, and a wave of allomantic pulses rolled in from the camp outside, dozens of them, hidden until now. Vin felt where every one of them stood.
Vin caught Elend's wrist and hauled him out of his chair.
"Out of the tent," she said. "Go."
"Vin, I'm not leaving you."
"I know that, but right now you have to let me become your weapon and I can't guarantee your safety while fighting them all. Go. I'll come to you."
Elend went out through the slit at the back of the tent, where Vin had cut the tent earlier with a flick of pewter-aided fingernail while pretending to fuss with her sleeve.
Vin turned back to the table.
Straff stood beside it now, the girl shaking against the wall behind him, the dead hazekiller at his feet. Straff's hand had come up holding a glass knife that had been hidden under the table. The Smoker had vanished out the front. Outside the tent, men were shouting.
"You," Straff said, looking at Vin with eyes that were finally taking her seriously, "are going to be an interesting decoration in my collection."
Vin burned steel and pushed his belt buckle.
Straff flew backward into the tent pole. The pole cracked and the tent began to sag. Straff scrambled to his feet, drew breath to shout and Vin walked toward him through the tilting tent with both daggers out.
A voice spoke from the open tent flap behind her.
"Don't."
Vin turned.
A man stood in the entrance. Tall in his mistcloak. Two long obsidian knives held low.
"Zane," Straff said, and there was relief in his voice.
Zane. Of course. The mistborn she had crossed knives with on a half-dozen rooftops in Luthadel over the past month. He looked at her now with the same curious, quiet attention he had worn on those rooftops.
"Vin," he said softly. He smiled when he said it.
" And father," Zane said, not taking his eyes off her, "you should run."
"I should what?"
"Run. Out the back. There are horses at the picket two tents east. Take one and ride for the Northern Dominance. Right now."
"Zane, stop talking and kill her."
"I am going to try, Father." Zane's eyes did not move from Vin. "But you should run. Now."
Straff looked at his son for a long second. Vin could see him calculating, weighing his pride against the look on Zane's face. His pride lost. Straff bolted for the back of the tent.
Vin started after him.
Zane stepped into her path.
"No," he said. "Not yet. We have not finished talking."
But she did not slow. She came at him with both daggers, low and fast. He moved also incredible fast. Her right-hand dagger spun out of her grip and into the wall of the tent. Her left-hand strike slid off his forearm. He caught her wrist, turned, and threw her into the dinner table.
Plates shattered. Vin rolled off the table, came up on her feet, and a small voice in her head said the thing she had been worried about."
Atium. He's burning atium.
Her own last bead was gone. She had used it last week.
He could see every move she would make. The world for him was a long unspooling thread of her future, and she had no atium to counter it.
So Vin did the only thing that made sense. She left.
She flared steel and pushed off the iron base of an oil lamp, shooting backward through the front of the tent, tearing the tent open as she went. She tumbled, came up running, and was out into the avenue between the rows of tents before Zane had finished turning.
A part of Straff's personal guard stood in the avenue. Twenty men. Crossbows up.
Vin did not stop.
She burned duralumin and steel together and pushed every metal weapon on their bodys at once.
Crossbows ripped from grips. Swords tore from belts. Helmets snapped off heads on their iron rivets. Every piece of metal in the twenty men's gear was pushed away from them, away from her, in a single explosive instant. The men stood for one half-second in a sudden cloud of their own equipment, and then Vin burned iron and pulled.
Twenty crossbows, twenty swords, twenty helmets came back at twenty men.
Vin was already past them before the last body fell.
She kept running.
She ran through the camp while burning every metal at once. Tents collapsed behind her where she had snapped their iron poles loose with a backward pull. Soldiers running in complete rioted fear at her from side avenues and went down with every available piece of metal she could shoot at them.
She did not feel tired, but something far worse than just tired. Pewter and duralumin and zinc and steel and iron all burning together in her made her something other than herself for these minutes. A force and a weapon, the thing she never wanted to become.
A squad of hazekillers came out of a pavilion to her right, ten of them, shields locked, no metal on them. They were trained to fight mistborn, but not mistborn like her with duralium.
Vin flared iron and pulled the belt buckle off a corpse at her feet, snatching it from the air. Then she burned steel and duralium and pushed it through the formation. The buckle went through the first shield, the man behind it, the next shield, the next man, and lodged in the wood of a third. Four men dead with one piece of metal. She closed with the remaining six and finished them with her one remaining dagger and the heel of her hand and the snapping force of duralumin-pewter strength.
She broke through into the next avenue and saw Straff.
He was twenty feet ahead of her, already on his horse and riding hard. He had not waited for a saddle and was galloping for the edge of the camp and the open mist beyond.
Vin smiled.
She did not chase him or push him, or pull him, or throw a dagger after him, but she did something simpler.
She burned iron, then burned duralumin alongside it, and pulled the iron horseshoes off his horse's hooves.
All four at once.
The horse stumbled, screamed, went down on its side. Straff went over the head of the horse and hit the ground hard. He rolled to his hands and knees and reached for the glass knife at his belt.
Vin walked toward him.
A line of crossbowmen along the camp's outer berm saw what was happening and raised their weapons to defend their lord. Forty of them, maybe. The last of Straff's personal guard, posted as a last defense.
Vin did not stop walking.
She burned duralumin and steel as the bolts left the crossbows. Forty bolts hung for the briefest instant in the air between her and the berm. Then she pushed. Forty bolts reversed midflight and snapped back into the men who had fired them. They went silent.
She walked up to Straff and stood over him.
He looked up at her from the dirt. There was blood on his face from a cut over his eye where the horse had fallen, and blood on his lip from where he had bitten through it. He was no longer smiling.
The expression he wore now was probably one he had worn rarely in his life.
Straff was afraid.
"Wait," he said.
Vin waited.
"You are stronger than I thought," he said. He was breathing hard. "I underestimated you. We can still talk. The camp, you can have it. I will leave the Central Dominance. I will ride to Urteau and you will never hear my name again. I give you my word."
Vin looked at him.
"Your word," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?" Vin said. "I came here ready to make you an ally. I came here in a dress, ready to spend an hour being polite to a man who runs an army the size of a small country. Why did you do it? Why did you sit at that table and tell my fiancé you were going to rape me? I have never in my entire life heard anything so pathetic. The monster you are to the girls you rape, that is what I am to you."
Straff looked up at her with a primal fear. Blood was still running down into his beard.
Vin looked at him for a long moment longer.
Then she put her glass dagger through his throat.
He fell on his side and did not move again. The blood from his throat ran into the dust of his own camp, and Vin stood over him and did not feel anything.
The camp burned behind her. Tents had caught fire from the lamps she had pulled apart at the start of her run. A horse screamed somewhere to the east. Men shouted orders that no one was listening to.
She turned away from Straff's body and walked back into the camp to find Zane.
xxx
He was waiting for her in the avenue between the burning tents.
He had not chased her. He had not tried to defend his father. He had stood in one place while Vin tore through the camp, and now he stood with his back to a burning tent, mistcloak unburnt, the two long obsidian knives held loose at his sides.
He was smiling.
He had been smiling like that on the rooftop above Keep Hasting the first night they had fought, when Vin had thought they could have been allies.
"Vin," he said. "Hello again."
"Zane."
"You came back to me. I knew you would."
"I came back to kill you."
"That is not really what you came back for." He shrugged, an oddly graceful motion. "I have been telling you for weeks. We are the only two people in this city who are real. The rest of them are pictures of people. They eat and they sleep, but they are not real. You are real. I am real. We are the same thing, Vin."
"We are not the same thing."
"You just killed a hundred men in twelve minutes." Zane tilted his head tot he burning camp. He looked genuinely interested. "I watched you, from the burning tent. You walked through them and you took their lives the way a plantation skaa takes crops, and you were singing inside while you did it. I could feel it. I could feel you singing. Do not tell me we are not the same thing. Tell me something true."
"You are insane," Vin whispered.
"Yes." He said it gently, without heat. "I am. The voice in my head tells me I am. It has been telling me for years. But fort he first time in years the voice in my head was silent, this only happens when you are in my presence.“ He took a step toward her.
"Come with me," he said.
"No."
"Vin." He smiled, very softly. "Come with me. We will leave tonight. The army is broken. My father is dead. Cett is to weak to take the city.“
"I will not leave Elend and city alone and unprotected."
"He is a man who reads books, Vin. He is kind and he is brave, but next to you he is nothing. There is nobody else in this empire who can stand beside you for the rest of your life except me. You know it. You felt it on the rooftop. You felt it when we pushed the same coin together. You feel it now."
"Zane, you were trying to kill me."
"Yes." He took another step. "And you tried to kill me. And neither of us did. Doesn't that mean something to you?"
It did. That was the worst part. It did mean something to her. The rooftops, the small strange conversations in the mist, the moment a month ago when she had stood on the spire of Keep Venture and he had stood ten feet away and neither of them had moved for a long time. It meant something, but she could never trust him.
She closed her hand around the glass dagger at her hip.
"Zane," she said. "I am going to ask you one time. Walk away."
"From you?"
"From me and all of it. Go south and do not come back to Luthadel. If you ever come back, I will kiill you."
He considered her for a long moment.
The smile did not leave his face, but something behind it shifted, very slightly. The interested-boy look went away. Something colder came in behind it, something Vin had not seen on him before.
"No," he said. "I am sorry, Vin. I came too far. The voice tells me I came too far."
He pushet himself at her.
He was faster than Lord Elariel had been. He was faster than Shan. He was almost faster than Kelsier. The atium showed him every move she would make, and his body, executed the response before her move was finished. Her first cut went wide. Her second slid off his forearm without drawing blood. He cut her on the cheek, on the shoulder, on the back of her hand. He did not cut deep. He was playing with her.
"You are still good," he murmured, slipping past her guard, opening a thin red line across her collarbone. "You are tired and you are wounded and you have no atium, and you are still good. Imagine us together. There would be no city in the empire that could hold against us, Vin. There would be no man who could stand in front of us. We would walk where we wanted. We would never be knives again. We would be the hand."
Vin let him cut and she remembered what Kelsier had told her once.
A man burning atium sees only the future you are about to give him. If you do something so unlike yourself that the future cannot have shown it to him, the future stutters. He hesitates. In that hesitation you have one strike.
Vin emptied her head of all thoughts.
She dropped her dagger.
Zane paused.
It was a very small pause, a tiny tilt of his head, the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth. His atium shown him a different attack and not that included Vin throwing her last weapon onto the dust at his feet.
"Vin?" he said. The interested-boy look came back. "What are you doing?"
In the pause she burned iron and pulled.
She pulled on the iron sconce on the burning tent post behind him. It came free with a long shriek of nails and with it came a wave of flaming oil from a burning lantern washed forward across Zane's back and shoulders.
He flinched.
His atium did not stop him from burning.
He screamend. Vin moved into him while he was distracted, caught his wrist as it came up to swing at her, drove her shoulder into his sternum, and flared pewter with duralumin. Every scrap of pewter she had left dumped into the heel of her right palm in one explosive instant.
The heel of her palm went up under his jaw with the force of a hammer.
His head snapped back, while he stumbled backwards.
Vin caught his own dropped dagger from the ground.
She drove it into his chest under the ribs.
Zane sagged against her.
He looked down at the knife in his chest and then up at her face. The fire on his cloak burned the cloak into his skin. He smiled, a real smile this time.
"Oh," he said. "That was good. That was very good."
He slid down her body to the ground.
Vin knelt beside him.
The camp around them was still burning and soldiers were shouting unorganized orders. Somewhere, far away, the horns of Luthadel had begun to sound, the alarm carrying across the mist. Someone on the wall probably finally understood what was happening in Straff's camp tonight.
Zane's hand moved up and caught hers.
"Vin," he said.
"Yes."
"The voice was wrong about you."
"What are you saying."
"It said you would come with me. It has been saying it for weeks. Every night, every time I saw you on the rooftops. It said you would come. It has been wrong about a lot of things lately. I should have stopped listening to it, but it promised I would have peace, if I would take you with me."
She did not know what to say to that.
The life had left his eyes.
Vin sat with him for a long minute. The fires burned. The shouting went on. Somewhere out in the mist, Elend was waiting for her.
Vin stood up.
She left both her daggers in the dust beside Zane. She did not want them anymore tonight. She walked through the broken avenue between the burning tents, past Straff Venture lying in the dirt with the blood of his throat in his beard.
Elend was waiting at the edge of the camp.
He looked at her. He did not ask anything.
"It's done," Vin said.
"All right."
He helped her onto the saddle. Then she collapsed into his arms, and tears streamed down her cheeks as he held her close.
Behind them, the camp of Straff Venture began falling apart in the dark.