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Vin is finding it difficult to sleep.
This is a good thing, of course; she doesn’t want anyone coming in and stabbing her or Elend while they’re both asleep. But this is a bad thing, of course; Vin’s running herself ragged enough as-is, and she does not need an insomnia-fueled pewter drag piling itself atop the many, many problems she’s already contending with.
Vin finds it difficult to sleep, but this isn’t anything new. She’s been subsisting on catnaps and half-lucid trances since she was a kid. She’s only ever had a collection of months where she was able to actually sleep , and even then, she was often distrustful of that ease. So, in a way, it feels like coming home. Not that she came from a particularly great ‘home’ in the first place, though. So.
A typical night goes like this: Vin curls up in Elend’s arms, and he presses a few kisses to the back of her neck, and she smiles, letting warmth unfurl in her chest like one of those flowers she’s heard so much about. She’s never really gotten out of the habit of sleeping in a shirt and trousers (though sometimes Elend convinces her to go without), but she keeps all knives and coins and metals very decidedly off the bed. More for Elend’s comfort than her own, really. Mists know he’d never be able to sleep if a clip found its way under his bedroll.
A typical night goes like this: Vin feels Elend’s chest rise and fall against her back, feels his breathing deepen, feels his hands on her skin, feels safe and loved. She lays there, and it takes a while, sure, but eventually, she falls asleep.
Tonight is different. Tonight, her brain is deciding to screw her over, and is not letting her relax. Thoughts crowd her head like soldiers in a barrack, like couples on a dance floor, and she cannot seem to clear the fog between her ears.
She shifts, trying to get comfortable, twisting around. And behind her, Elend murmurs, “You, too?”
“Damn,” she says. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It’s okay. I was up before,” he assures her. “Just can’t get to bed tonight.”
Vin flips around to face him. He smiles, slow and easy, and she can’t resist pressing a soft kiss to his jawline.
“I’m restless,” she says. “I’m not a sleep-loving creature.”
“You’re not a creature at all,” Elend says. “But, yes, I know. I’ve had my fair share of sleepless nights too, I’ll say.”
“What, you?”
He nods. “I would always– well, if I couldn’t sleep, I’d read,” he tells her, as if she couldn’t have easily intuited that herself.
“Shocking,” is her flat response.
Elend sticks his tongue out at her like he’s a kid, and their faces are close enough that he grazes the tip of her nose. “Rude,” he mumbles around his tongue.
“Put that thing away,” Vin instructs him, and he complies.
“I read,” Elend says. “Though, naturally that’s not a salve I can apply to this wound, now, is it?”
Vin tries her best to shake her head while lying down. “It’s not.”
“Then, what did you do to cure it?”
“Sleeplessness was a boon for me, Elend, not a burden.”
“Right,” he says, sounding a bit embarrassed. “Apologies.”
“But once it wasn’t,” Vin continues, “once I was staying in places like the shop with the crew in Luthadel or the Keep in Fellise, I just… moved about, I suppose. Tired myself out physically.”
“Imagine that,” Elend says wistfully. “Being Mistborn in a big city. Using your powers for fun .”
Vin laughs. “Never thought you’d be yearning for my life.”
“I’m not at all trying to underplay what you’ve been through,” Elend is quick to assure her. “I just mean– wow. I really do love being Mistborn, and I wish I could have been able to leap around rooftops, or I don’t know, rescue fair maidens who were getting their things stolen at a bar with my physical prowess, or—”
Vin bursts out laughing at that, a squawking sound that tears its way from her chest with reckless abandon. She’s five feet of buzzing hilarity. “Elend Venture!”
“What!” he says defensively. “Is there something so wrong about wanting to help my fellow man?”
“ Wo man,” she says, “is a whole different story.”
He gives her a lopsided grin. “Anyway, I just mean I appreciate the powers that I have, of course, but I just wish I could be able to experience the more… fun side of them.”
“Don’t worry,” Vin assures him. “When all this is over, we’ll go rooftop hopping above Luthadel together. We could bring some food, make a picnic of it…”
“Sounds fantastic,” Elend says dreamily. He adjusts the arm that’s pinned under her, his fingers skating across the sharp planes of her shoulder blades. “Is that how we’ll beat back our sleep problems tonight, then? Planning for our future?”
Vin considers this for a moment—it seems, at first, like a pleasant enough way to drift off to bed—but decides against it. “That’s upsettingly idealistic,” she says. “Not exactly my cup of tea.”
Which was not the analogy she should have used, damn her, because now Elend’s eyes are lighting up like he’s about to delve into another opinionated ramble about which hot beverages he prefers (apparently some people have strong opinions on teas? Which seems ridiculous, but also Vin can faintly recall Kelsier getting into a fight with Breeze about something like this, so maybe it’s just a men thing), so now she has to think fast of something to say. She loves listening to him talk, she sincerely does, but there is only so much to say about hot beverages.
“How about we tire ourselves out, then?” she offers.
“ Oh ,” Elend says, semi-breathlessly.
“That is not what I meant,” Vin backtracks quickly.
“Oh,” Elend says again.
Vin wriggles out of his arms, somewhat reluctantly pulling herself to standing. She grabs two vials of metal and attaches them to her hip. Her heart twists in her chest at the sleepy, mournful sound Elend makes at the loss of her warmth against him.
“What’re you doing? Don’t leave me,” he says, sounding every bit a complaining, spoiled noble.
There must be something seriously wrong with Vin that she finds it adorable. “We’re going to go have some fun with Allomancy. And we’re going to tire ourselves out. And then we are going to go to sleep and have a good day tomorrow. Sound good?”
Elend gets up, stretching languidly. His sleep shirt rides up, exposing a bit of scarred stomach that Vin’s mapped thoroughly with her hands and her mouth. She resists the urge to put her hand on his waist and knock him down to the floor and tire herself out the way he was initially suggesting.
“And what might that entail?” Elend asks.
“Put on something you can move in and that you don’t mind getting a bit messy, potentially,” Vin instructs. “So change if you don’t want to go back to bed in sweaty clothes.”
“I can change when I get back if I want to,” Elend says, and that’s acceptable to Vin. She nods and takes his hand, pulling him towards the exit of the tent.
“Whoa,” Elend laughs, nearly stumbling over the ground. “Vin, let me get my shoes on first, please.”
She waits, tapping her fingers against her elbows impatiently as he steps into his shoes. The second he’s done, she grabs his wrist and tugs again, pressing a finger over her lips to shush him as they fall out of the tent together.
Camp is silent. Peaceful. Most everyone is asleep, and the guards who are awake and on duty are chatting quietly in the distance, close enough that Vin would easily be able to make out what they’re saying were she to burn tin.
The sky’s a mess of gray and blue and purple. Vin knows about the stars sheltered away behind that blanket of mist, though, and the knowledge of their winking lights sends a spark of energy down her spine, which doubles in intensity when Elend slips his hand into hers and squeezes.
They creep out to the edge of camp. Elend gives a nod to the guards stationed at the end they’re leaving from to let the two of them pass, and it’s likely not a nod that is that becoming of an emperor, considering his hair is an absolute mess and he’s wearing a wrinkled shirt and just about the most plain pants Vin’s ever seen, but it’s a good try at one nonetheless.
By the time they’re far enough away from the camp to speak at normal levels—Vin doesn’t want to stray too far, but she also doesn’t want any Tineyes eavesdropping on her and Elend, so she’s made the choice to take the risk of distance for a little bit tonight—Elend is laughing like the sort of kid that Vin never got to be. He’s bright, he’s bubbly and alive, and though Vin does not mourn the loss of the naive, boyish thing her husband once was, it’s nice to see Emperor Venture become Elend once more, if only for a passing moment, and if only in front of herself.
Elend stretches lazily. He rolls his shoulders; he kicks out his legs; he pulls an arm over his head and bends to the side. Even though Vin has put her hands on that exact spot a hundred times, put her mouth on it a hundred times, Vin indulges in stealing glances at the strip of tanned skin pulled over increasingly well-defined muscle as if she’s a blushing young lady with an unreciprocated crush. There’s something about Elend that makes her feel as if she’s falling in love all over again with every little thing he does.
A light breeze tugs its way through Elend’s curls. He glances at Vin sidelong through obscenely thick lashes—really, what is it with men and their predisposition towards having lashes that are utterly wasted on them? He’s pretty enough without that added bonus—and asks, “Well, are you going to throw me around already?”
Vin snorts. “You seem to have quite the confidence in yourself. You know you’re a more powerful Allomancer than I, don’t you?”
He tilts his head and chews on his lower lip for a second. “Mmm, perhaps, but you’re a more skilled one. Even the most intimidating of cudgels can be split in two by a masterfully used and wickedly sharp sword.”
“You of the weaponry metaphors,” Vin sighs, rolling her eyes with a level of melodrama that might have put her late father figure to shame. “You should know by now that your own two hands and the Allomantic power you command is far superior to that of any weapon.”
Elend shrugs. “Still, there’s something nice about the feel of a sword in your hand, I will admit.”
“Oh, men. You would say that.”
Elend shrugs again and flashes her a smile. He shakes out his wrists, twists his head from side to side, lets out a swift exhale. He says, “Shall we begin, then?”
Vin drops into a low seat, her weight resting easy in her stance. “Yes, let’s. Any particular rules you’d like to play by tonight?”
“How about catch me if you can ,” Elend says, before flicking a coin to the ground and bounding up into the night sky.
Vin stares after him fondly. “You’re a fool, Elend Venture,” she whispers to herself. She drops a clip herself and Pushes off of the ground.
From her vantage point above the treetops, she scans her surrounding with tin-enhanced eyes. It shouldn’t take long to find Elend; he’s not that great at moving with subtlety, and she’s a very good tracker.
A short ways away, she catches sight of a break in the monotony of the crisscrossed bare branches. She lowers herself to the ground gently, slowly reducing how much she’s Pushing on the clip beneath her, until her toes are just barely touching the ground. She stops burning steel and drops the two remaining inches to the earth, landing on her toes with a practiced silence.
Slinking towards where she’s almost sure Elend has fallen is easy. She keeps her tin flared, ears sharp to every whistle of the wind through her hair, eyes keen to the brightness of the stars above her. It’s an incredible thing, she thinks, to see the stars.
She’s expecting to be able to tackle Elend with ease, to jump him and surprise him with a kiss, to distract him enough that his sheer brute force while burning pewter isn’t enough to prevent her from pinning him to the ground and winning. (Well, she supposes that having him pinned to the ground would be a win for both of them, really.) Instead, though, she finds an empty clearing, bare for some tufts of grayish grass and encircled with the stiff-barked, near-dead trees she knows and does not really love.
Vin frowns, reaching up to fiddle with her earring a bit before crossing her arms over her bound chest. Either she’s missing something or Elend has, all of a sudden, gotten really good. And as much as she loves her husband—and as much as she has faith in herself—Vin would be willing to put ten of her coin pouches on this issue being the former.
Vin could burn bronze to try and locate him, try and pierce his coppercloud, but it feels a bit like cheating in this context, so she sticks to her tin. After another scan with her enhanced vision proves fruitless, Vin closes her eyes, letting her ears do the work. The feeling of ash falling on her skin—heightened by tin—is a frustratingly distracting one, but she tries her best to pay it no mind. With her tin flared, she can hear everything. The wind, fiercer now, sounds like the chatter of a packed street. Her thumb runs itself down the length of her jawline, calloused skin against sharp bone, the sound raspy as sandpaper. She lifts a foot, pointing her toe against the ground, and then sets it back down lightly. It makes a small thump against the packed soil. And up above, she can hear the creak of sturdy branches swaying slightly with the force of the wind.
Except… it’s not entirely right. It’s not even. There’s a place a bit to her left where the sounds are different. She wouldn’t have noticed it if not for her tin being flared and her eyes being closed, but she can hear a break in the comforting almost-patterns of nature.
Vin stops flaring her tin, letting it burn low and steady in her stomach. Elend must be in the trees.
She flicks a clip to the ground. Before she can Push off of it, however, a large mass drops from the sky, hurtling towards her.
Instinctively, she burns pewter and drops to roll out of the way—she knows Elend has no metals on his person other than his coins, and even with her skill, she’d be hard-pressed to evenly Push him back up into the air—but she’s a split second too late. Elend caught her by surprise.
He Pushes off of her own clip as he falls, slowing his descent, so that when he hits her, neither of them are hurt in any real way. Vin’s wrist gets a bit of a beating as it hits the ground under his grasp, but since her pewter’s on it’s nothing more than a slight irritation. She doubt’s she’ll even really be bruised in the morning.
“Hey,” Elend says, grinning.
She turns her head to the side, feeling her earring press lightly against her neck as it gets pressed between her skin and the ground, and she spits unflatteringly onto the ash-dusted earth.
“You could have concussed me,” she says.
“I didn’t hit your head,” he responds. “And said head was already on the ground when I fell on you, so I didn't smash it against the ground, either.”
“Still, you could’ve,” Vin says petulantly.
“Do I win?” Elend asks in a way that would likely be charming if Vin wasn’t so terribly pissed at him for getting the jump on her at the moment.
Vin says nothing. Instead, she takes quick stock of the positioning of their bodies. Elend has one hand wrapped around one wrist, holding it firmly to the ground above her head. His other hand is on the ground next to her, leaving her other arm free. He’s on one knee, holding a leg of hers down with a loosely hooked foot, his knee next to her waist, and his other foot pressed flat against the ground between her hip and her pinned-up arm.
So she’s really only held in place by one point, because the foot around her leg isn’t doing much to keep her on the ground. Elend’s hips hover above her own, but since he’s not applying any weight, she could easily buck up and buck him off if she wanted to.
Most importantly, based on the strength of his grip on her wrist, she doesn’t think he’s burning pewter. He needs to learn to do that even when he thinks he’s won. He hasn’t won until his enemy is dead, and he can’t let his guard drop in the interim.
Vin sneaks her free leg up and kicks her husband in the chest. She makes sure to keep it soft enough that she won’t crack or bruise any ribs, but it still effectively does the trick. He lets out an oof of pain and staggers sideways, and when his grip loosens up on her wrist, she pulls herself out from under him entirely.
Elend is still on his knees, one hand bracing himself up and the other clutching at his side. Vin knees him in the shoulder, flipping him onto his back. She steps on his shoulder with enough force to hold him down, and they both know that if she pressed harder, she could easily dislocate it.
Elend falls still. Vin knows that he’s immobile less from his limbs being pinned—most of the rest of them are still free, and now that he’s burning pewter (hopefully), he and his superior strength could easily get the upper hand—and more from Vin’s presence above him.
“Catch me if you can,” she says, tossing him an Elend-like wink. She drops a clip to the ground, mere inches from his head, and Pushes off into the sky.
Just as she passes by some of the lower-hanging branches, she feels her balance get pulled wildly to the side. She manages to latch onto a branch as she falls, swinging herself around it and landing nimbly on a branch above it. When she looks down to the ground she sees Elend holding the clip, flipping it through his knuckles, grinning slyly.
“You dog,” she calls down. “You absolute hound.”
“You flatter me!” he returns. He Pushes off the ground to hover right next to her (a bit unsteady, he’s still working on his balance), and though Vin knows she could easily tackle him, or tip him over, or Push or Pull him from the coin pouch attached to his waist, she doesn’t do any of those things. Instead, she grasps him by the front of his shirt and presses a kiss to his mouth mid-air. His beard scratches at her cheeks, and his hands scramble for purchase on her shoulders, and it’s altogether a rather terrible kiss, but her heart swells to near-bursting at the feeling of his lips on hers.
A second later, though, and she’s bounding away from him, Pushing off of clip after clip, Pulling up coins behind her as she goes. Elend is in hot pursuit, but his balance is still not steady enough for him to move as swiftly as she moves, so she begins to gain relatively easily.
All of a sudden, her brain goes totally flat. She stops feeling– stops feeling– well, anything. Why try? she thinks, giving in to sheer hopelessness, and thankfully she’s close enough to the ground that when she stops Pushing, she doesn’t hit the ground hard.
Her chest feels tight, like something’s pressing down on it, and there are tears pricking at the corner of her eyes. She wipes at them with heavy hands, her whole body feeling as if it weighs a hundred tons.
Elend’s gotten good. Elend has gotten good, and Vin will never catch him. She lays down in the dirt and places an arm over her face. She doesn’t even have it in her to throw it over her face properly, quasi-dramatically. She simply lifts it up and sets it back down.
It hits her. He Soothed her. Oh, Mists. Elend has gotten good, hasn’t he.
Vin pushes herself up so that she’s sitting with her legs outstretched. She twists her earring, making sure it didn’t manage to pull itself off of her in her fall. “Elend,” she calls. “I should hope you weren’t burning anything other than brass when you burned duralumin.”
“Damnation,” comes a soft swear from somewhere behind her. Vin turns to see her husband stumbling out from behind a tree, tripping on a stray twig in the process. She hides a laugh behind her hand in the delicate way she was taught about back when she was training to be Valette, granting him a bit of decency.
“Elend,” she says again, fondly. “Are you all out?”
“Not all out,” Elend protests. “I still have—” he pauses a moment, eyes closed, mentally reaching inwards towards the metal reserves in his stomach “—iron, bronze, and copper,” he finishes weakly. “Less than fifty percent. That’s a pretty poor showing.”
“No zinc?”
“You had just a bit of hopelessness in you that I Rioted,” Elend tells her.
Vin feels her expression twist into a frown. I don’t think I was feeling that I’d be unable to beat Elend tonight. It must be that even in moments of love and levity, war is on my mind .
“Don’t suppose you’d give me one of those?” Elend asks, interrupting Vin’s train of thought—by the Lord Ruler, she hopes that it’s the remaining effects of his Allomancy on her emotions that’s causing her to wallow, and not that it’s her natural state of being—and gesturing to the two vials she has at her waist.
“I don’t want to waste any metal,” Vin says, frown deepening. “But we
are
supposed to be training right now. But if you get to restock your metals and mine are partially burnt out, that’s an unfair match.”
“We can split it and save the other one for the days ahead,” Elend offers, so they do.
Elend wipes the back of his wrist across his mouth in a most undignified way when he’s done downing his half of the vial of metals. “Are you ready to go again?” he asks.
“Let’s fight now,” Vin says. “You’ve had some practice evading me—not that I think you’ll ever truly be able to do it, but that’s only since I’m the one tracking you; you’d have a fantastic chance against anyone else. And you managed to get me good,” she admits. “But, of course, you still need to be conscientious about what metals you’re burning, and when.”
Elend nods eagerly, the perfect student. Of course he’d be loving this whole learning thing. Vin wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up asking her if there’s books by other Mistborn written on the subject that he might study.
That’s less Vin’s style. She still doesn’t exactly see the appeal—or, quite frankly, necessity—of reading and writing. She has advisors and trusted members of the court, and besides that, she has Elend. They can do it for her.
Vin realizes, in a flash, that she’s Elend’s mentor. She’s teaching him the ins and outs of being Mistborn. She has to impart onto Elend the knowledge that Kelsier imparted onto her, and she is, for a moment, terrified.
She really cannot afford to fuck this up.
And for a moment, she feels inadequate. There is a whole world around her, a world of Mistborn and Mistings who would probably be a lot better qualified to teach the Emperor how to use Allomancy. Vin does not have the most subtle of touches; Vin is not great at explaining things in a properly digestible way, sometimes.
But Elend loves her. And Elend gets her. And Elend has been improving, his technical skills sharpening, which means she must be a decent enough whetstone, mustn’t she?
Vin takes Elend’s hand and squeezes it lightly before letting go and scattering a few coins about the ground around them. “Alright,” she says.
“Alright,” Elend says back, and then he springs at her.
Vin drops and rolls out of the way with ease. “Be mindful!” she tells him. “Don’t trust the pewter to compensate entirely for you blindly throwing your full weight around.”
Elend catches himself on one foot and spins gracefully as a dancer in her direction. He bows sarcastically low, showing off, and Vin takes advantage of his half-prone position to Push herself up and over him and sweep a leg out to knock him off balance in time.
He’s quick, though, astute and aware, his tin burning. He jumps, her leg missing his entirely, and when he lands, he does so with a smile. He takes a step forward, and Vin takes one back.
“Afraid?” he asks, cocking his head.
“You should wish you were able to have that effect on people who know you,” Vin scoffs. “I am no foolish Survivorist footsoldier.”
“Careful,” Elend teases. “That’s our army you’re insulting.”
“Oh, disabuse yourself of the notion that it’s ours ,” Vin says with a sigh. She Pulls a few coins towards her and then Pushes them at Elend, careful to make sure that they’re not flying at a speed fast enough to hurt him. “They’re really yours.”
“If we’re talking Survivorism, you’re the Heir, are you not?” Elend asks. He manages to deflect the majority of Vin’s coins, but one of them strikes him in the hand. He hisses sharply, shaking it out and wincing.
While his guard is down, Vin pounces like some rare mountain cat, barely scattering the ash on the ground in her wake as she leaves the ground with light feet. “Let’s simply not talk Survivorism altogether,” Vin decides.
Elend spins out of the way just in time. “Good idea,” Elend he breathes, windmilling his arms for balance. He looks silly enough that Vin drops her athletic stance for a moment and smiles softly. Quickly, though, she pulls herself back together, and Pushes herself off of the ground and into the sky.
Elend follows her quickly. For a second, the two of them are suspended in the air together above the treetops. Husband and wife, emperor and empress, reformed noble and child of the streets. Wind rushes in Vin’s ears as she starts to fall again, her hair flying about her like wild sprays of liquid from a broken bucket, and through the strands of dark brown crossing her eyes she can see Elend’s beautiful face.
Vin twists in the air, a fish to water. In a matter of seconds, she manages to position Elend beneath her, trusting him to Push against the coins littered on the floor.
He does, of course, because he values his life enough to not want to die splattered against the ground as a result of rolling about with his wife in the middle of the night. She does, too, though she also Pulls two coins towards her and catches one in each hand. Though he struggles under her grasp, he’s unable to flip them around in the very short amount of time it takes for them to fully fall, and when they hit the ground, Vin smirks.
She has him pinned in nearly the same way he had her pinned before. The difference now is that Vin is burning pewter. Elend is, too, and he’s stronger, but he also has less of it in him after their brief tussle; Vin is more frugal about everything, even burning her metals.
Vin sits firmly down on Elend’s stomach, her knees bracketing her waist and her lower legs wrapped around his upper legs, pressing them down to the ground. Her fingers are tangled up in his own, tangled in a way that’s familiar to her, tangled in the same way she likes to tangle them in his hair. She presses his hands down, too, keeps them up above his head.
The coins between their palms almost vibrate with the strain of being Pushed down by Vin and Pushed up by Elend. Vin’s on top, though, and despite Elend’s sheer power, she has the advantage of applied weight and the fact that she’s marginally better about keeping her head in the game in positions like this.
Elend, flushing slightly, seems to be doing less well in that regard.
“So?” Vin says.
Elend sighs. His head rolls to the side, and his eyes roll to the heavens. “You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you.”
“You know me well, husband of mine,” Vin says playfully.
Elend straightens out and looks her in the eye. “Alright,” he tells her. “But just know I’m not continuing to fight solely because I’m hopeful that we will end up tiring ourselves out in the way I was thinking of earlier.”
“Mhm,” Vin says. “I’m still not hearing it. Come on…”
“Alright, alright!” Elend concedes. “You win. You’ve beat me.”
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Vin asks.
Vin thinks Elend is quite valiant for not grasping at the fruit she has hung extremely low in front of him. Instead of making a joke, he simply sighs, and says, “Everything is easy when I’m with you.”
Vin’s heart flutters in her chest. She feels as if she’s known him her whole life, and at the same time, he manages to keep her on her toes with every passing day. She bends down, letting up on the coins between them, and presses a kiss to his forehead.
“I don’t think this is typically what happens after fights,” Elend jokes. “Unless I’ve been doing them wrong.”
“Shut up,” Vin says affectionately.
Elend seems to have decided that the best way to ensure silence is to make it that he is unable to talk at all. He pulls his hands out from under Vin’s and hooks an arm around the back of her neck and tugs her down towards him into a deep kiss.
The stars shine overhead, and though Vin can’t see them without her tin burning, there’s still so much warmth and light reflected in Elend’s eyes when she pulls back to look at him. She supposes it might be coming from her.
He leans up to press a kiss to the place where her jaw meets her neck, a corner of bone dusted with ash and dirt and now Elend’s lips. He says, “We should probably get back to camp, shouldn’t we.” He doesn’t sound very enthusiastic about it.
“We should,” Vin agrees. She doesn’t sound very enthusiastic about it either. Well, if neither of us would like to go back, then maybe we shouldn’t , she thinks, and that settles things.
Vin cups Elend’s face in her hands and kisses him softly, and then kisses him again, and then a third time, and then loses count entirely.
The mists dance around them, repelled slightly by Vin’s skin and clinging to Elend with a ferocity rivaled only by Vin herself. In the morning, they’ll have duties to attend to, wars to wage, sacrifices to make, but for a stolen moment, Vin can almost pretend that everything is okay.