Chapter 2: The Mind Doctor

The Mind Doctor

Slade.

The house she knew. Everyone knew the house.

The register kept every house of record in one long column, and the Slades sat seventh in it. Hers sat last, and had sat last for years.

A seat was a seat only while somebody in the family was worth taking. Nobody out of House Voss had been taken into a chartered house in longer than she had been alive to watch. Every sitting, the seat went up for review. Every sitting, the council came home from the review and looked around the house for somebody to take it out on.

Because once the seat went, the clauses went with it. Every rule that had made a house of record behave like one, gone in a morning. After that there would be nothing at all standing between her and the council.

Her father first.

The register printed a small coiled serpent beside the seventh seat. Somebody in that house had gone through the animal kingdom once, chosen the snake, and never found a reason to change it.

The number over Corvin Slade’s head hung in the fog, thin and pale red.

53

She had spent ten of her own points getting him breathing again. The ten points had not come back to her, and she had not forgotten them.

Hello again, Mr. Fifty-Three.

She kept a register of her own, and it did not match the official one. Everyone who mattered got a second name, one she could say under her breath, and he had earned his before he gave her anything at all.

In her version of the world, people were appliances, and there were two kinds. The kind near the top of the column came with a dial: turn it and it runs hot, leave it and it sits quiet, and the hand on the dial is supposed to be its own. That was the story, anyway. She was the other kind — the small square box on a counter that heats one plate at a time and hums while it works. Not even a good box. The kind a house keeps because throwing it out would be a chore.

She had thought the rest of it once tonight already, when the snake on his forehead had turned its head toward her. She thought it again now.

Yours is a microwave too, then.

Somebody had inked that snake into him, and somebody’s hand sat at the far end of it, same as with hers. He had a better box, and a seat near the top of the page, and a dial that turned on the other side of a wall. She could not prove any of it. She filed it anyway.

He had given her one name and stopped, because the name was supposed to finish the sentence for him, and for most of the world it did. A Slade learned to hold a room at the age other children learned to hold a spoon.

Rain, and under it the brand on her forehead, which had been heating since morning. Her father could do that from wherever he happened to be sitting. He had never needed a reason.

“I’m Voss,” she said. “Selena Voss.”

He took the name without moving. To a man on the seventh seat, House Voss was a line near the bottom of a page he had never had to read.

“I’m a mind doctor.”

She gave him no room to make a face about it.

“You see things other people don’t. They go away when you look straight at them and come back when you don’t. You’re afraid more than you used to be, and it’s worse when there’s nobody else in the room. And you don’t sleep.”

Ordinarily she would have taken an hour to get to that. Weather first, then small talk, and let him decide she was safe before she said anything worth hearing. She did not have an hour. She skipped to the expensive part.

It landed. She was watching for it.

The corner of his mouth moved. He took a breath, and for half a second the whole man came apart into something hungry. Finally. Finally, somebody who —

Then the breeding caught up with him and put him back together, and what came down over his face instead was suspicion, cold and quick.

“A mind doctor,” he said. “I’ve never heard of such a physician. What is one. And how do you know what I’ve seen.”

“Five gates,” she said. “Sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. Everybody is born with the five. Now and then something knocks a sixth one loose, and once it’s loose it doesn’t close on its own, and you start seeing what the other five were never built to see. It isn’t a curse and it isn’t a punishment. It’s what the gate costs. The people it happens to run thin. They frighten easily. They sleep badly.”

He said nothing. She went on.

“You went into the trees last night with all six of them open. I found you like that. I closed the sixth one for you, and I did it without asking you first, and it isn’t permanent.”

The rain came down between them.

“When a gate comes open there’s scenery behind it,” she said. “I’ve seen a piece of it. There was writing in that piece — how to shut a gate that belongs to somebody else, and how to hold one shut. Not the method. One corner of it. And it comes out of me every time I use it, and I pay for that.”

He had no way to check any of it, and it fit him so exactly that he would not want to. He had woken up unable to see those things. He could see them now. She had just told him why, and the why came with a price and a doctor attached to it.

She gave him the shape along with the words, because shape was free. She let her shoulders drop. She let the rain have her face — a woman holding one broken corner of something, handing it to a stranger for no reason she could name. She had worn that shape for years, and it cost her nothing to put on.

Every word of that was true. Put nine things in front of a man that he can go and check, and he will take the tenth on faith. She had spent a whole other life on a locked ward, and that was the one thing she had carried out of it.

Somewhere in the last ten seconds it should have occurred to a man of his standing to say something about a fee.

It didn’t.

“The scenery,” he said. “Behind the gate. You said there’s a way written in it.”

There it was.

She looked at him a moment before she answered, and let him watch her decide.

“You were on the ground last night,” she said. “You were on the ground, and the gate was open, and whatever you saw behind it was bad enough to stop your heart and start it again. And now you’d like to reach into the middle of that fire and pull out the bright thing.”

The rain kept coming. He didn’t answer that.

Then some of the pressure went out of the air around him, and what came up in its place arrived in the wrong order — respect first, and fear a step behind it. Not fear of her. Fear of something he could see out of the corner of his eye and still had no name for.

“Then how,” he said, “do I control it.”

She let the question sit exactly as long as it needed, and not longer.

“What I have is a corner of a thing, and I don’t have the rest of it.” She said that plainly. It was the only honest note in the whole performance, and it was the one he heard. “I can’t teach you what I don’t own. I can shut a gate for you, for a while, when I can afford the price of it. That isn’t the same as handing you a method, and I’m not going to pretend it is.”

“Then who has it.”

“Somebody does. Somewhere. There are houses with libraries.”

She paused, and did not lean on the pause.

“I haven’t been let into one.”

That was the price, laid out flat, and she watched him hear it.

Then came the part that took nerve.

She was gambling. She knew exactly how much, and she gambled anyway — that a man raised inside the seventh seat would look at what she was offering, fragments and half a lineage and a method nobody could use, and decide it was beneath him to take by force. That the crude way, the one that leaves a hole where the mind used to be, was a thing the register had opinions about, and that a house on the seventh seat did not go against the register lightly. That he had come down this road alone tonight, with nobody standing behind him to hold her down while he worked, and that a man who did that counted the cost before he took anything.

If he wasn’t — if he was one of the ones who did as they liked and let the consequences be somebody else’s problem — then she had made a mistake with an expert, and she would find out inside the minute.

She was engaged to a man like that. She knew how the minute went.

Cold rain. Somewhere under her collar, entirely against her will, one line of sweat went down her spine.

She did not move her face.

He was still standing between her and the road down, and he had not thanked her for anything yet.

The brand on her forehead had stopped being heat a while ago. It had a shape now, a small dull point, and the point was still sharpening, which meant the man at the other end of it was still waiting, and so was the man in front of her.

She said nothing else. Naming the price would let him answer it, and she wanted the first number in this conversation to come out of his mouth.

So she watched his hands, and the brand went on burning.