Mistborn Trilogy - Brandon Sanderson [245]
“No,” Elend said. “Call your men back, and tell no one of what you’ve seen this night.”
“Yes, m’lord,” Felt said, climbing out of the coach.
“Lord Ruler!” Jastes said as the carriage door closed. “No wonder she didn’t seem like a regular noblewoman. It wasn’t her rural upbringing—she’s just a thief!”
Elend nodded, thoughtful, not certain what to think.
“You owe me an apology,” Jastes said. “I was right about her, eh?”
“Perhaps,” Elend said. “But…in a way, you were wrong about her too. She wasn’t trying to spy on me—she was just trying to rob me.”
“So?”
“I…need to think about this,” Elend said, reaching out and knocking for the carriage to start moving. He sat back as the coach began to roll back toward Keep Venture.
Valette wasn’t the person that she’d said she was. However, he’d already prepared himself for that news. Not only had Jastes’s words about her made him suspicious, Valette herself hadn’t denied Elend’s accusations earlier in the night. It was obvious; she had been lying to him. Playing a part.
He should have been furious. He realized this, logically, and a piece of him did ache of betrayal. But, oddly, the primary emotion he felt was one of…relief.
“What?” Jastes asked, studying Elend with a frown.
Elend shook his head. “You’ve had me worrying over this for days, Jastes. I felt so sick that I could barely function—all because I thought that Valette was a traitor.”
“But she is. Elend, she’s probably trying to scam you!”
“Yes,” Elend said, “but at least she probably isn’t a spy for another house. In the face of all the intrigue, politics, and backbiting that has been going on lately, something as simple as a robbery feels slightly refreshing.”
“But…”
“It’s only money, Jastes.”
“Money is kind of important to some of us, Elend.”
“Not as important as Valette. That poor girl…all this time, she must have been worrying about the scam she would have to pull on me!”
Jastes sat for a moment, then he finally shook his head. “Elend, only you would be relieved to find out that someone was trying to steal from you. Need I remind you that the girl has been lying this entire time? You might have grown attached to her, but I doubt her own feelings are genuine.”
“You may be right,” Elend admitted. “But…I don’t know, Jastes. I feel like I know this girl. Her emotions…they just seem too real, too honest, to be false.”
“Doubtful,” Jastes said.
Elend shook his head. “We don’t have enough information to judge her yet. Felt thinks she’s a thief, but there have to be other reasons a group like that would send someone to balls. Maybe she’s just an informant. Or, maybe she is a thief—but not one who ever intended to rob me. She spent an awful lot of time mixing with the other nobility—why would she do that if I was her target? In fact, she spent relatively little time with me, and she never plied me for gifts.”
He paused—imagining his meeting Valette as a pleasant accident, an event that had thrown a terrible twist into both of their lives. He smiled, then shook his head. “No, Jastes. There’s more here than we’re seeing. Something about her still doesn’t make sense.”
“I…suppose, El,” Jastes said, frowning.
Elend sat upright, a sudden thought occurring to him—a thought that made his speculations about Valette’s motivation seem far less important. “Jastes,” he said. “She’s skaa!”
“And?”
“And she fooled me—fooled us both. She acted the part of an aristocrat almost perfectly.”
“An inexperienced aristocrat, perhaps.”
“I had a real skaa thief with me!” Elend said. “Think of the questions I could have asked her.”
“Questions? What kind of questions?”
“Questions about being skaa,” Elend said. “That’s not the point. Jastes, she fooled us. If we can’t tell the difference between a skaa and a noblewoman, that means that the skaa can’t be very different from us. And, if they’re not that different from us, what right do we have treating them as we do?”
Jastes shrugged. “Elend, I don’t think you’re looking at this in perspective. We’re in the middle of a house war.”
Elend nodded distractedly. I was so hard