Hadrian pauses his account to explain the period after recovering his ring and learning that the Eurynasir was gone. He compares his awakening to the legend of Cid Arthur, realizing that knowing poverty exists is vastly different from living among the poor and diseased.

In Borosevo, Hadrian witnesses the Rot ravaging the city. Beggars plead outside Chantry spaces, bodies are piled and burned by prefects, and Hadrian's palatine blood protects him from infection but not from horror. His father's face, the masks of his ancestors, the imagined screams of prisoners, and nightmares of his mother being punished haunt his sleep.

Hadrian thinks often of Gibson and concludes bitterly that Gibson suffered exile for nothing, because Hadrian is stranded in misery far from Teukros. Even so, Hadrian forces himself to survive by eating raw fish from canals, raiding compost, accepting rare kindness from vendors, and learning to beg despite his former aristocratic pride.

Hadrian admits he could have surrendered to the count's authority by revealing his blood and signet ring, allowing his father to retrieve him, and he is strongly tempted during the first weeks. Instead, he remains hidden, and as the years pass in squalor he discovers a strange happiness: for the first time, he is free from his father, his rank, and every expectation placed upon him.

That freedom proves insufficient because Hadrian remains trapped beneath even serf status. He longs to leave Emesh and find a lawless merchanter willing to hire him without papers, but armed security keeps him far from the landing field. As hunger, thirst, and hopelessness reduce his ambitions to dreams of food and water, Hadrian accepts that he is not going to Teukros and may never leave Borosevo at all.