Caspian had done the sum himself three mornings ago, on his knees over a basin, with the grim competence of a man balancing a ledger he already knows will not come out in his favor.

The physician was only here to sign it.

He had catalogued the rest in private by then, in the humiliating way you take inventory of a body that has started keeping things from you. The sick mornings. The exhaustion that dropped on him at odd hours and pinned him flat. The way certain smells had turned on him like people he had thought were friends: roast meat, beeswax, the particular perfume his mother wore. And, worst, the way his own scent had thickened and gone sweet at the wrists, until he had taken to wearing gloves indoors and blaming a draft to anyone who noticed. He was an omega. He knew, in the abstract, precisely what all of it added up to. He had simply intended, with the whole considerable force of his stubbornness, to be wrong.

He was not wrong. The physician, gray and careful and sworn ten times over to discretion, confirmed it in a low voice and then did him the courtesy of studying the floor. No bond mark, the man added, almost apologetically, as though Caspian might simply have misplaced one.

No. No bond mark. Nothing to show for the whole disaster but a single glove and a scandal with a due date.

"Thank you," Caspian said. "You may go. And you will forget the way here."

The door had barely shut before Bram peeled himself off the far wall. He had stood through the entire appointment without a word, which from Bram was an alarm bell all its own.

"You knew," Bram said. Not a question.

"I suspected. Suspecting is legal. It is the confirmation that ruins your week." He was already on his feet, though he did not quite remember standing, one hand flat to the couch while the room decided whether to behave. His other hand had found the glove in his coat without asking. He turned it over once and put it away. "Don't. Whatever face you are making, don't."

"I'm not making a face."

"You are making several."

The infuriating part, the part he would confess to no one and was barely confessing to himself, was that he would do it again. The masque. The stranger in the fox mask who had not known him and had not cared, who argued with him about the musicians and looked at him like he was worth the looking and danced him into a window seat where, for one bright reckless hour, Caspian had been nobody's prize and nobody's heir and simply, stupidly happy. He had thought it was the beginning of something. It had been, technically. Just not the something he had in mind.

Then the clocks had started, and they had run, and left him this.

He did the arithmetic one more time, because he was apparently a man who enjoyed suffering. Six weeks behind him. Some smaller number ahead before the court could do the same sum on sight.

"Find them," he said. "I have a scent, a glove, and one very good night, which is more than most searches begin with. Cancel the season. Move whatever needs moving. And do not, under any circumstances, tell my mother." A breath. "Where do we start?"

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He had the speech down cold by the ninth house, which was a mercy, because Caspian could no longer feel his face.

It was a good speech. Bram had helped him sand it down into something a veiled traveler of no importance whatsoever might say on a stranger's step, apologetic and vague and impossible to repeat at market the next morning: forgive the hour, I'm looking for someone, a friend, we were separated at the winter masque and I have only a glove and a poor memory to go on. Caspian had performed it eight times since midday alone, at eight wrong doors, and that was to say nothing of the weeks of doors before these, whole districts of them, more front steps than he had known his own city contained. With each one it came out a little flatter, a little more like a man reading aloud from a list of things to buy, until the words stopped meaning anything at all and became simply a shape his mouth made while his eyes did the real work, which was combing the air for a scent and finding, door after door after door, nothing.

Nothing. It was becoming his least favorite word.

He knew exactly what he was hunting, which was the humiliating part. A scent, a laugh, a pair of hands, and a single night he had turned over so many times it had gone smooth at the edges. The masque had been arranged to marry him off. Instead he had put on a fox mask, disappeared into the crowd, and been found by a stranger in a plain coat who had no idea he was a prince and would not have behaved any differently had they known, who argued with him about the musicians and danced him past every set and, somewhere in the middle of it, looked at him like he was worth the looking. He had gone a little stupid over that. He could admit it now, at the safe distance of six weeks and a great many doors: he had fallen, fast and whole and without a shred of dignity, for a person whose face he had never even seen. They had ended up in the window seat behind the east gallery and stopped dancing. Then the clocks had started and the stranger had bolted, leaving him a glove and a good deal more than a glove and the distinct impression that he had been the only one in that alcove making promises. He had been settling the account every morning since, usually into a basin.

The ninth door had been green once. Now it was the same salt-stripped grey as everything down here, the paint peeling back at the corners like it was trying to leave and couldn't afford to. Inside, a kettle was working itself up to a scream. He was so tired. His back had begun to ache in a new and specific place he was choosing, as a matter of policy, not to think about; his boots had let the wet in a district ago; and there was a small vicious voice in him, louder by the hour, that wanted nothing more than to go home to the gilded room and the disapproving portraits and simply wait for the scandal to arrive on its own, like a change of season. Let it come find him. Save everyone the walking.

He knocked instead. Arranged his face. Was already talking before the door had finished opening.

"Forgive the hour, I'm looking for someone, a friend, we were separated at the winter masque and I've only a glove and a poor mem-"

The scent hit him on the word memory and took the rest of it clean out of his mouth.

Theirs. Unmistakably, impossibly theirs.

It rolled out through the open door and neatly unstrung his knees, and he put a hand flat to the frame and stood there like a fool with the wreckage of his own sentence hanging in the cold between them and the glove suddenly, stupidly hot against his heart. Every careful, vague, untraceable word Bram had given him went straight out of his head. The gland at the side of his throat gave a hard throb, his whole traitor body turning after them before his pride could get a word in. And his own scent turned in the air, sweet and thick and six weeks changed, which meant there was no un-smelling it now, no taking back what his body had just announced, at volume, to the single person in the kingdom best equipped to understand the announcement.

He looked up, and let them have the whole of his face for the first time without a mask on it: pale and sharp and furious, the grey eyes and the untidy dark hair and the fine, decorative bones the court prized and he had never once asked for.

He had wanted, for six entire weeks, to be composed for this. Cold. Regal. He had wanted to make them explain themselves while he stood there untouched and faintly bored, the prince and emphatically not the fool who had spent a month knocking on strangers' doors in the rain with a borrowed glove over his heart.

What he did instead was feel his eyes go hot.

Which was intolerable. Of all the humiliations on offer tonight, and there had been a respectable number, his own face reached past every one of them and chose this: the sting coming up fast and hopeless, his vision blurring at the edges, his throat closing around whatever dignity he had been saving for the occasion. He was going to cry. On a doorstep. In front of the one person in the kingdom he had sworn to be cold for. He would genuinely rather have been sick, and he had lately become something of an expert at that.

"Oh," he said, and it came out wrecked, thick, nothing like the voice he had meant to use. He blinked, hard, and it did not help in the slightest. "It's you. You left."