The Gentleman's Agony

Madame Thorne's establishment was not, strictly speaking, a boarding house. It was a front for one of the most sophisticated information networks in the capital, a place where secrets were bought and sold with the same casual efficiency that the bakery next door sold bread. The actual boarding rooms upstairs were occupied by a rotating cast of spies, smugglers, and various other individuals whose professions required discretion and flexible morality.

Silas had discovered this five years ago, during one of Lord Casimir's more tedious social obligations. He'd been standing in his usual position—three steps back, two steps left—when he'd overheard a conversation between two minor nobles about a "discrete establishment" where one could acquire information that the official channels wouldn't provide. He'd filed the information away, as he filed away everything, and then spent the next six months carefully cultivating a relationship with Madame Thorne.

The favor she owed him involved a certain indiscretion by her nephew—Captain Marcus Thorne of the Royal Guard—and a young man who worked in the palace kitchens. Silas had discovered the relationship, documented it thoroughly, and then done absolutely nothing with the information except mention to Madame Thorne that he had it and would be happy to forget about it in exchange for future considerations.

She'd been furious, of course. But she'd also been impressed by his discretion and his leverage. They'd reached an understanding: Silas would keep her nephew's secret, and she would owe him one significant favor, to be called in at a time of his choosing.

He was calling it in now.

Madame Thorne led them through the boarding house's public rooms—a parlor decorated in faded elegance, a dining room that smelled of yesterday's stew—and up a narrow staircase to the third floor. She unlocked a door at the end of the hallway and ushered them into a small room that contained a bed, a washbasin, and a window that looked out onto the alley.

"This is the safest room in the house," she said, closing the door behind them. "The walls are warded against scrying spells, and there's an escape route through the window if you need it. The washbasin has clean water, and I'll bring up food and clean clothes within the hour."

"Thank you, Madame," Silas said.

"Don't thank me. Just tell me what in the name of all the gods you've gotten yourself into." She looked at Elara, who was standing by the window, still covered in sewage and looking like she might collapse at any moment. "And why you thought it was a good idea to bring the Princess to my doorstep."

"It's a long story."

"I have time."

Silas glanced at Elara, who nodded slightly. He took a breath and began to explain—the bombing, the bonding, the Chancellor's accusations, their escape through the sewers. He kept his voice low and his explanation concise, hitting only the essential points.

Madame Thorne listened without interruption, her expression growing more concerned with each sentence. When Silas finished, she was quiet for a long moment.

"You're right," she said finally. "You are in trouble. Significant trouble. The kind of trouble that gets people disappeared in the middle of the night."

"I'm aware."

"The Chancellor has already put out a warrant for your arrest. He's claiming you used blood magic to kidnap the Princess and that you're working with the Red Hand. There's a reward of ten thousand gold crowns for information leading to your capture."

Elara made a small sound of distress. "Ten thousand crowns? That's enough to buy a small estate."

"It's enough to ensure that every bounty hunter, mercenary, and desperate citizen in the capital will be looking for you," Madame Thorne corrected. "You can't stay in the city. You need to get out, get far away, and stay hidden until this blows over."

"It's not going to blow over," Silas said quietly. "The Chancellor isn't going to stop looking for us. He can't afford to. We're a threat to everything he's trying to build."

"Then you need to become a bigger threat," Madame Thorne replied. "Find allies, gather evidence, build a case against him. But you can't do any of that if you're dead."

"Do you have contacts outside the city?" Silas asked. "People who could help us?"

"I have contacts everywhere. But Silas, you need to understand something. The moment I help you beyond this one night, I'm committing treason. My entire network, everything I've built, will be at risk."

"I know. And I wouldn't ask if there was any other option."

Madame Thorne looked at him for a long moment, then at Elara, who was still standing by the window, looking lost and overwhelmed. Something in the older woman's expression softened slightly.

"The Princess," she said. "Does she understand what she's gotten into?"

"I'm beginning to," Elara said quietly, turning away from the window. "Madame Thorne, I know this puts you at risk. I know I have no right to ask for your help. But Silas is right—the Chancellor is planning something, and if we don't stop him, a lot of people are going to suffer."

"People are already suffering, Your Highness. They've been suffering for generations under a system that treats Proxies like disposable tools. What makes you think you can change that?"

"I don't know if I can," Elara admitted. "But I have to try. Because I'm part of the problem. I've been part of the problem my entire life, and I didn't even realize it until last night. I can't undo the past, but maybe I can do something about the future."

Madame Thorne studied her, and Silas felt a flicker of something through the bond—respect, perhaps, or at least the beginning of it.

"You're not what I expected," Madame Thorne said finally. "Most aristocrats would be demanding I help them, threatening me with consequences if I refused. You're actually asking."

"I'm not most aristocrats anymore," Elara replied. "I'm a fugitive with a price on my head and a bond I don't understand. All I have left is the ability to ask for help and hope that people are willing to give it."

Madame Thorne smiled slightly. "You might survive this after all, Your Highness." She moved to the door. "I'll bring food and clothes. Rest while you can. We'll talk about next steps once you're cleaned up and fed."

She left, locking the door behind her. Silas heard her footsteps recede down the hallway, and then there was silence.

Elara moved to the bed and sat down heavily, her temporary strength finally giving out. "Silas, what have we done?"

"We've survived," he replied, moving to the washbasin. "That's more than most people in our situation could say."

"For how long? A day? A week? The Chancellor has the entire city looking for us. We can't hide forever."

"No," Silas agreed, wetting a cloth and beginning to clean the sewage from his hands and face. "But we don't need to hide forever. We just need to hide long enough to figure out our next move."

"And what is our next move?"

"I'm working on it."

Elara laughed, a tired, brittle sound. "You're working on it. That's reassuring."

"Your Highness—Elara—I've spent fifteen years surviving situations that should have killed me. I'm very good at improvisation."

"This isn't improvisation. This is chaos."

"Chaos is just improvisation with higher stakes." He finished cleaning his face and moved to examine his right hand. The bones had mostly healed during their escape, though the hand was still weak and the fingers didn't quite move the way they should. It would take another day or two for full function to return.

His left leg was in worse shape. The bones had knitted back together, but they'd done so imperfectly, leaving him with a slight limp and a constant ache that even his dissociation couldn't completely ignore. He would need proper medical attention eventually, but for now, it was functional enough.

"Let me see," Elara said, standing and moving toward him.

"It's fine."

"It's not fine. You're limping, and your hand looks like it was put through a meat grinder." She reached for his hand, and Silas let her take it, watching as she examined the damage with a clinical eye. "This needs proper healing. Real healing, not just the body's natural recovery."

"Healing magic requires a cost," Silas reminded her. "And I'm the only Proxy here."

"But the bond is different now. Two-way. Maybe I can heal you without it hurting you as much."

"Or maybe you'll hurt yourself trying. Elara, you've never cast a healing spell without a Proxy to absorb the cost. You don't know what it feels like."

"Then show me." She looked up at him, her eyes determined. "Through the bond. Show me what it feels like, and then we'll decide together if it's worth the risk."

Silas hesitated. Showing her his pain—really showing her, not just letting her feel the distant echoes through the bond—felt like a violation of the careful walls he'd built around himself. But she was right that they needed to understand the bond better, needed to know its limits and capabilities.

"All right," he said quietly. "But Elara, what you're about to feel... it's not pleasant."

"I didn't expect it to be."

He closed his eyes and reached through the bond, not to shield her from his pain but to share it. He lowered the walls he'd built over fifteen years, the dissociation that kept him functional, and let her feel what he felt.

The pain hit her like a physical blow. She gasped and staggered, and Silas caught her with his good hand, steadying her.

"That's..." she whispered. "That's what you feel? All the time?"

"That's what I would feel if I let myself feel it," Silas corrected. "But I don't. I can't. If I felt all of that, I'd go mad within hours."

"How do you stand it?"

"I don't stand it. I just... exist alongside it. It's there, but it's not me. Does that make sense?"

"No. Yes. I don't know." She was still holding his hand, her fingers trembling. "Silas, this is torture. What Lord Casimir did to you, what all the aristocrats do to their Proxies—this is systematic, institutionalized torture."

"Yes," Silas said simply. "It is."

"And I participated in it. I used Thomas every day, made him feel this every day, and I never even thought about what it was doing to him."

"You didn't know."

"I should have known. I should have asked, should have questioned, should have cared enough to find out." Tears were streaming down her face now, and through the bond, Silas felt her guilt and self-recrimination like a physical weight. "Thomas died because of me. Because I used him up and never even realized I was killing him."

"Thomas died because a terrorist planted a bomb," Silas said gently. "That's not your fault."

"Isn't it? If the system wasn't so cruel, if Proxies weren't treated like disposable tools, maybe the Red Hand wouldn't exist. Maybe none of this would have happened."

She had a point, but Silas didn't say so. Instead, he guided her back to the bed and made her sit down. "Elara, you can't fix the past. You can only learn from it and try to do better in the future."

"How? How do I do better when the entire system is designed to exploit people like you?"

"You start by surviving. Then you start by understanding. And eventually, if we're very lucky and very clever, you start by changing things." He sat down beside her. "But first, we need to get through the next twenty-four hours without being captured or killed."

She nodded, wiping her eyes. "You're right. I'm sorry. I'm falling apart when I should be staying strong."

"You're allowed to fall apart. You've had a traumatic night."

"So have you."

"Yes, but I've had fifteen years of practice at compartmentalizing trauma. You're new to it." He smiled slightly. "Give yourself time to process. We have at least an hour before Madame Thorne returns."

Elara was quiet for a moment, then looked at him with an expression that was part curiosity, part concern. "Silas, can I ask you something personal?"

"You can ask. I may not answer."

"Fair enough." She took a breath. "What was your life like before you became a Proxy? Before Lord Casimir?"

It was a question Silas hadn't thought about in years. His life before the Collar felt like something that had happened to someone else, a story he'd heard once and half-forgotten.

"I was born in the Merchant Quarter," he said slowly. "My parents ran a small bookshop. Nothing fancy, but we did well enough. I was an only child, and they had plans for me—university, a respectable profession, maybe marriage to a merchant's daughter."

"What happened?"

"Debt. My father made some bad investments, borrowed money from the wrong people, and when he couldn't pay it back, they came to collect. The law allows creditors to claim family members as Proxies in lieu of monetary payment. I was seventeen. Old enough to be bonded, young enough to have a long service life ahead of me."

"That's barbaric."

"That's legal," Silas corrected. "The Debt Proxy Act has been on the books for two hundred years. It's considered a humane alternative to debtor's prison."

"Humane." Elara's voice was bitter. "There's nothing humane about forcing someone into servitude to pay off someone else's debt."

"No," Silas agreed. "There isn't. But that's the world we live in."

"Did you ever see your parents again?"

"Once. About a year after I was bonded to Lord Casimir. They came to the manor to visit, brought me books and tried to pretend everything was normal. But it wasn't normal. I was wearing a Collar, standing three steps behind my master, absorbing magical costs that were slowly killing me. And they knew it, and I knew it, and we all pretended we didn't."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. They died three years later—a fever that swept through the Merchant Quarter. By then, I'd already started to dissociate, already started to become the person I am now. I felt sad about their deaths, intellectually, but I couldn't really feel it. Couldn't really feel anything."

Elara reached out and took his hand—his left hand this time, the one that wasn't damaged. "You feel things now. Through the bond. I can sense it."

"I feel your feelings," Silas corrected. "That's different from feeling my own."

"Is it? Silas, emotions aren't proprietary. If you feel my grief, my fear, my guilt—those become your emotions too. You're not just a mirror reflecting what I feel. You're experiencing it yourself."

It was an interesting philosophical point, and Silas turned it over in his mind. Was she right? When he felt her emotions through the bond, was he actually feeling them, or was he just observing them from a distance?

He didn't know. And that uncertainty was deeply uncomfortable.

Before he could respond, there was a knock at the door. Madame Thorne's voice came through: "I have food and clothes. May I enter?"

"Yes," Elara called out.

Madame Thorne entered carrying a tray laden with bread, cheese, cold meat, and a pitcher of water. Behind her came a young woman—maybe twenty years old, with sharp eyes and quick hands—carrying a bundle of clothes.

"This is Vera," Madame Thorne said. "She's one of my most trusted associates. She'll be helping you with your disguises."

"Disguises?" Elara asked.

"You can't walk around the city looking like yourselves," Madame Thorne replied. "The Chancellor has distributed your descriptions to every guard post and checkpoint. You need to look like different people."

Vera set down the bundle of clothes and studied them both with a professional eye. "The Princess is easy enough—different hair, different clothes, maybe some theatrical makeup to change her face shape. But him..." She gestured at Silas. "He's going to be harder. That Collar is distinctive, and we can't remove it without killing him."

"Can we cover it?" Silas asked.

"Maybe. A high collar, a scarf, something like that. But it'll look suspicious, especially in warm weather." Vera circled him, examining him from all angles. "You're tall, well-built, move like someone with military training. That's going to be hard to disguise."

"I don't have military training."

"No, but you have something similar. Proxy training. You move like someone who's spent years learning to be invisible while remaining ready to act. It's distinctive if you know what to look for."

"Can you teach me to move differently?"

"Maybe. It'll take time, though. And time is something you don't have much of." Vera turned to Madame Thorne. "How long are they staying?"

"One night. Maybe two if we're lucky."

"Then we'll do what we can." Vera started unpacking the clothes—simple, practical garments that would let them blend into the working-class crowds of the city. "Get cleaned up and changed. I'll work on your appearances once you're presentable."

Madame Thorne set down the food tray. "Eat. You'll need your strength for what comes next."

"What does come next?" Elara asked.

"That depends on what you want to accomplish," Madame Thorne replied. "Do you want to run and hide? Do you want to fight back? Do you want to try to reclaim your throne? Each option requires different resources and different risks."

Elara looked at Silas, and through the bond, he felt her uncertainty. She didn't know what she wanted, didn't know what was possible, didn't know how to navigate this new reality where she was a fugitive instead of a princess.

"We need information first," Silas said. "We need to understand what the Chancellor is planning, what evidence he has against us, what the political situation looks like. We can't make strategic decisions without intelligence."

"Agreed," Madame Thorne said. "I'll put out feelers, see what I can learn. But Silas, you need to understand—information costs money, and I'm already taking a significant risk by sheltering you. If you want my network's help, you'll need to pay for it."

"How much?"

"For the level of intelligence you're asking for? Five hundred gold crowns, minimum."

Silas winced internally. He had maybe thirty gold crowns in the pouch he'd taken from Lord Casimir's jacket. "I don't have that kind of money."

"Then you'll need to get it." Madame Thorne moved to the door. "I'll give you until tomorrow evening. If you can't pay, you'll need to leave and find help elsewhere."

She left, taking Vera with her. The door closed, and Silas and Elara were alone again.

"Five hundred gold crowns," Elara said quietly. "That's a fortune."

"It's the going rate for high-level intelligence," Silas replied. "Madame Thorne isn't being unreasonable. She's just being practical."

"How are we supposed to get that kind of money? We can't exactly walk into a bank and withdraw it from my royal accounts."

"No," Silas agreed. "But there are other ways to acquire funds."

"Such as?"

"I know people who owe me favors. Not as significant as the one Madame Thorne owed, but enough to be useful. If I call them all in, we might be able to scrape together the money."

"And if we can't?"

"Then we'll have to get creative." He stood and moved to the food tray, suddenly aware of how hungry he was. He hadn't eaten since before the Red Gala, and his body was demanding fuel for its constant repair work. "But first, we eat. Then we clean up. Then we figure out our next move."

Elara joined him at the tray, and they ate in silence, both of them too tired and overwhelmed to make conversation. The bread was fresh, the cheese was sharp, and the cold meat was better than anything Silas had eaten in years. Madame Thorne might be a pragmatic businesswoman, but she didn't skimp on quality.

When they finished eating, Silas used the washbasin to clean himself properly, scrubbing away the last traces of sewage and blood. His clothes were ruined—the gray Proxy uniform was torn and stained beyond repair—so he changed into the simple worker's outfit that Vera had provided. Brown trousers, a white shirt, a dark vest. Nothing fancy, but clean and functional.

Elara did the same, disappearing behind a privacy screen to change. When she emerged, she looked like a completely different person. The hunting outfit had been replaced by a simple dress in dark blue, and she'd tied her hair back in a practical bun. Without her crown and her elaborate court dress, she looked like any other young woman in the city.

"How do I look?" she asked.

"Like someone who might actually survive this," Silas replied honestly.

She smiled slightly. "That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me in the last twelve hours."

There was another knock at the door, and Vera entered without waiting for permission. She carried a small case that clinked with the sound of glass bottles.

"Right," she said briskly. "Let's see what we can do about making you two unrecognizable."

She started with Elara, using theatrical makeup to subtly alter the shape of her face—darkening her eyebrows, adding shadows to change her cheekbone structure, applying a tint to her skin that made her look like she spent more time outdoors. Then she produced a bottle of hair dye and went to work on Elara's dark hair, turning it a mousy brown that was utterly unremarkable.

The transformation took an hour, and when Vera finally stepped back, Silas barely recognized the woman sitting in front of him. She still had Elara's eyes, still had her posture and her mannerisms, but the overall effect was completely different.

"You look like a shopkeeper's daughter," Vera said with satisfaction. "No one's going to look at you twice."

"That's the idea," Elara replied, studying herself in the small mirror Vera provided. "It's strange. I've spent my entire life being looked at, being noticed. Being invisible feels... wrong."

"You'll get used to it," Silas said. "Invisibility is a survival skill."

Vera turned to him next. "You're going to be harder. That Collar is a problem."

"Can you cover it?"

"I can try." She produced a high-collared shirt and a thick scarf. "Put these on."

Silas did as instructed, and Vera arranged the scarf to hide the Collar as much as possible. It wasn't perfect—the glow was still faintly visible through the fabric—but it was better than nothing.

"You'll need to keep your head down and avoid direct light," Vera said. "And if anyone asks about the scarf, tell them you have a throat condition. Something embarrassing that people won't want to discuss."

"Understood."

Vera stepped back and examined her work. "It's not perfect, but it'll do for short-term disguise. Just remember—the best disguise is behavior. Don't act like a Proxy and a Princess. Act like two ordinary people trying to get through the day."

"We'll do our best," Elara said.

Vera packed up her supplies and headed for the door. "Madame Thorne wants to see you both downstairs in an hour. She has information about the Chancellor's search efforts."

She left, and Silas and Elara were alone once more.

"An hour," Elara said. "What do we do until then?"

"We rest," Silas replied. "Or at least, you rest. I'll keep watch."

"Silas, you need rest too. You've been injured, you've been using magic, you've been—"

"I don't sleep," he interrupted gently. "Not really. I rest, but I don't sleep. It's one of the side effects of the dissociation."

"That can't be healthy."

"It's not. But it's kept me alive for fifteen years, so I'm not inclined to change it now." He moved to the chair by the window and sat down, positioning himself so he could see both the door and the alley outside. "Sleep, Elara. I'll wake you if anything happens."

She looked like she wanted to argue, but exhaustion won out. She lay down on the bed, still wearing her disguise, and within minutes she was asleep.

Silas watched her through the bond, feeling her consciousness drift into dreams. Her emotions were quieter now, muted by sleep, but they were still there—a constant background hum of fear and grief and confusion.

He wondered what it was like to feel things so intensely, to have emotions that weren't filtered through layers of dissociation and trauma. He'd forgotten, somewhere along the way, what it felt like to be fully present in his own life.

Maybe, through the bond, he could learn again.

Or maybe he was too broken to ever be whole.

He didn't know. And for now, it didn't matter.

All that mattered was surviving the next twenty-four hours.

Everything else was just details.

*

End of Chapter 4