Abounding Might (The Extraordinaries Book 3) Read online

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  To Aerin,

  who might well be a Bounder herself

  In which pride goes before a very great fall

  he mud, gluey and grey, stretched to the horizon and beyond. Tufts of filthy grass dotted it, trying to hold their own against the mud that sucked at them, pulling them down into the depths. Daphne crouched helplessly with her cheek pressed into it. It was gritty beneath the superficial softness, scratching her skin like sandpaper. She dragged air suffused with wet, stinking dirt into her lungs while the spots that filled her vision went away.

  She could just see, above where her line of sight met the earth, the body of Major Branton lying where he had fallen, his chest a mass of—her vision clouded over, and she desperately sucked in air. She could still save him, if she brought him to an Extraordinary Shaper. She crawled, dragging her body through the mud, and with her eyes closed felt his mouth for breath. Nothing. It was too late. She had to rise, had to Bound away to let her commander know what had happened to the major. What she had allowed to happen.

  She pushed herself to her knees, keeping her face well averted from the bloody corpse, and staggered to her feet. The roaring in her ears was replaced by the roar of battle, the pounding of the guns and the sharper crack of the rifles, the shouting and screaming of thousands of men all bent on doing to each other what had been done to Branton. She cried out, covering her ears like a small child experiencing its first thunderstorm, but her voice was swallowed by the din. Desperate, she Bounded—

  light, a body like gauze, floating without air—

  into the tent reserved for that purpose. An angular symbol of bold red strokes painted on the back wall of the tent provided a signature for ordinary Bounders to latch onto, to give them a focus for their instantaneous travel. Daphne, an Extraordinary, needed only her inner sense of what made up the location, its essence. At the moment, her greater ability seemed pointless.

  She ducked out of the tent. Here, the noise of battle was reduced to the sound of cannons shattering the morning air. The screams of the dying were all but inaudible. Did it make it easier for the commanding officers to order their men into battle if they could not hear the screaming? Daphne felt the sound would echo in her ears forever.

  Field Marshal Hagen stood a few yards away, conversing with one of his officers as if the battle were not raging around them. Daphne stumbled toward them. “Field Marshal, I am—Major Branton is dead.”

  Hagen turned his attention on her. “You were to convey him here. What happened?”

  Daphne swallowed hard and tasted mud. “He was in the thick of the fight, and—Field Marshal, it is all entirely my fault, the major took rifle fire and I was overcome, I could not retrieve him—”

  “Overcome?” It was an inquiry, but the hard, cold look on Hagen’s face told Daphne he already knew the answer.

  She stiffened her spine. “I lost consciousness. But it will not happen again.”

  “No,” said Hagen, “it will not.” He turned his attention back to the battlefield. “Report to General Omberlis immediately.”

  A sick feeling started in the pit of Daphne’s stomach. “Yes, sir,” she said in a voice quiet enough she was certain Hagen did not hear. Next to him, the officer tilted his head back in the attitude of someone Speaking to another, someone far distant. Likely someone in the War Office in Lisbon. Daphne could be anywhere she wanted in the space of a breath, but her shameful story would outrun her. She wiped mud from her face and Bounded.

  The Bounding chamber in the War Office building was a tiny, cramped thing barely big enough for one person. Daphne had never Bounded there with a passenger and could not imagine ever doing so. She exited the chamber and trudged down the long hall to the marble stairs. It felt like a gallows march, all those people stopping what they were doing to stare at her, covered in mud and shame. She knew the latter was not visible on her skin, but it burned her nevertheless.

  The marble stairs were far too grand for this rickety old building, one that had seen generations of inhabitants before the War Office had set up its headquarters there. Daphne stopped at the landing to look out over the city of Lisbon, its sea of rust-red roofs extending all the way to the banks of the Tagus River. She had Skipped to its shore the first day she had arrived in the city, four months before, and breathed in the smell of salt-tinged water, so different from the sour-sweet odor of the Thames. How eager she had been. How unspeakably foolish.

  She continued up the stairs and down a second interminable hallway to General Omberlis’s antechamber. Two armchairs stood unoccupied in the center of the space despite the men and women thronging it. They stood in groups of three or four, talking in low voices, and ignored Daphne in a way that told her they all were conscious of her presence, though they could not know of her shame. She stood alone among them, longing to sit but aware it would look like weakness, and she could not bear to be thought weaker than she was.

  Three doors led off the antechamber. One of them, Daphne knew, was the door to the Seers’ chamber, where the Extraordinary Seers attached to the War Office had Visions of the battles. Daphne’s cousin Sophia had been one of these once. Another door led to the hall that ended in a larger room for the Speaker corps. The third was General Omberlis’s office. Daphne watched this door warily. Perhaps she was wrong, and Hagen had not sent word ahead. Perhaps she was not doomed yet.

  The door opened. A slim young man dressed in the black-on-black of the War Office uniform stepped out and surveyed the room. His gaze stopped on Daphne. “Lady Daphne,” he said, “the general will see you now.”

  So short a phrase to convey her doom. She held her head high and walked at a stately pace through the door, which the functionary shut behind her, leaving himself outside. Daphne was alone with the general.

  General Omberlis was a stocky man of no more than middle height. His keen eye and bushy grey eyebrows gave him the appearance of a wolf, one that centuries before might have preyed on a village during a lean winter. He sat with his back to the great windows that let in the golden light of Lisbon’s late summer as if soaking it up.

  “Pray, have a seat, Lady Daphne,” he said in his unexpectedly high tenor. Daphne sat, perching on the edge of the chair.

  “Well,” the general said. “What excuse have you?”

  Daphne touched her face, and drying mud flaked off. “I have none, sir,” she said. “I lost consciousness and Major Branton is dead because of it.”

  “You assured me your predisposition to faint at the sight of blood would not interfere with the performance of your duties. I gave you an opportunity because I believed your dedication and desire to serve this Office were deserving of it. And now a good man is dead. Which of us, do you believe, is more to blame?”

  Daphne said nothing. It was not the kind of question she had an answer for. General Omberlis continued, “By law you are obligated
to give the government four years of service with the War Office. I cannot send you back to the battlefield. What, then, am I to do with you?”

  That, too, seemed a question he did not expect an answer to, but Daphne said, “I can still be a courier—if I stay well away from the fighting—”

  “You know the couriers go everywhere. I cannot predict where a route will take you. Lady Daphne, your desire is laudable, but you would be a liability to any officer I sent you to.”

  “What of the War Office itself? I might work here. Or an advance scout—”

  “We have more Bounders than I have employment for. You might as well remain at home. No, Lady Daphne, it’s out of the question.”

  Daphne bowed her head and willed the tears away. “I understand, sir.”

  She heard the general shift position. “I have a request from Lord Moira,” he said.

  That brought Daphne’s head up and dried her incipient tears. “Lord Moira?” she said. “India?”

  “He requests a Bounder to convey his lady wife and children to and from their home in England. The climate, as I’m sure you’re aware, is hard on those not accustomed to it and doubly hard on children. I am inclined to send you.”

  “But—” Daphne’s head whirled once again, and she smelled mud. “But, General, to be little more than a human chaise—”

  “You are in no position to be proud, Lady Daphne,” the general said in a low, cutting voice. “Your pride has cost a man his life. What I am offering is an opportunity to redeem yourself, as you cannot redeem him. The alternative is that I send you home in disgrace. Which will it be?”

  His voice seemed to be coming from very far away. “I accept,” she said, her own voice as faint as his. “When shall I leave?”

  “Clean yourself up and pack your things. I give you leave to return home; you will likely need a different wardrobe, as your new duties will include social activities. Return here in three hours to be Bounded to Government House in Calcutta.” His fierce expression softened, and he added, “This is not the end. It is still valiant service.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Daphne said. Her heart was in turmoil, anger and despair and self-loathing all tumbled together. She hoped none of it was visible on her face.

  She Bounded to her own bedroom in her parents’ house, Marvell Hall, and wearily stripped off her uniform, crusted with drying mud. Should she bother having it cleaned? She no longer felt deserving to wear it. She left it piled on the floor and washed herself thoroughly, standing by habit in front of the fireplace, which on this first day of September was empty. She rinsed mud out of her blonde hair and squeezed the dirty water out onto the mat. Then she donned her other Bounder uniform, the one she had worn when she worked for the public Bounding company Standiford’s. That, at least, was one she had not disgraced.

  India. The British Army had barely any presence there; it was controlled by the Honourable East India Company, traders with the remit from the British government to act on their behalf and an army of its own to defend itself. Merchants. She raked her fingers through her hair, straightening her tangled locks. One moment’s weakness and she was to be packed off to the far side of the globe, never to have a chance to prove herself. She knew her talent to be powerful, knew herself to be the most skilled Bounder of her generation, but thanks to her weakness, no one else would ever know the truth.

  You are too proud, she told herself as she pinned up her hair again. Do you imagine your fame means anything when a man is dead because of you? But it did matter. Three-year-old memories thronged her inner vision, of reasoning and arguing and pleading with the War Office to take her on early, and she burned with fury. The officials at the War Office had mocked her when they had not simply dismissed her because she was barely five feet tall and a woman, and all the greatest Bounders, Extraordinary and otherwise, were tall and strapping men, capable of carrying men twice their size. She meant to make them eat those words by becoming the most famous Bounder ever. And she could not do that in India.

  She let out a deep breath, willing her anger to evaporate with it. There was no point being angry with General Omberlis or resentful of her fate, not when it was entirely her fault. She would go to India, and she would serve the Governor-General’s wife, Lady Loudoun, who was a countess in her own right and by all reports a generous, kind-hearted woman. Perhaps if she were obedient and diligent enough, she would prove herself worthy of a second chance. That was an optimistic thought. She might even come to believe it, in time.

  She had one trunk, a small leather-bound thing that was stiff and shiny with newness. She rarely traveled anywhere she could not Bound home from at night. She packed her favorite gowns, clean shifts and nightgowns, the stays she had learned to get into without assistance, assorted shoes, her toiletries, and shut the lid and strapped it closed. Then she sat on her bed and stared at it. Her parents were likely home, but she could not bear to see them, to tell them what had happened. They had supported her in her attempts to join the War Office early, had given her every assistance, everything she had ever asked for, and to be banished to India felt like a betrayal of them as well. In a day or so she would write to them, and perhaps find the words that failed her now.

  She picked up her trunk easily—and that was another unfairness. She had spent years practicing lifting increasingly heavy weights until she could carry a man twice her size with ease. Lady Loudoun could not possibly challenge her strength. She stifled the unworthy thought. Her pride had got her into this mess, and she needed to subordinate it.

  In a breath, she was back at the War Office. She managed to maneuver herself and her trunk out of the narrow space and trudge up the stairs to the Bounder nexus, where the War Office’s Bounders stood ready to convey people all over the globe. She entered the room without knocking and set her trunk on the floor, facing down the three men and one woman who turned to look at her, all of them wearing the uniform she had so longed for.

  “I am Lady Daphne St. Clair,” she said wearily, “and I am ready to go to Calcutta.”

  In which Daphne resolves to enjoy herself

  aphne clasped the infant Lady Adelaide close to her breast and—

  light, breathless, floating though there is no air—

  the cool air of Donington Hall’s Bounding chamber, small and white, surrounded her. The all-too-familiar symbol of green and black painted on the wall facing her was by now completely unnecessary. She had made the Bound between Government House and Donington Hall, the Governor-General’s English residence, so often in the last week she knew its essence far better than she did its signature. Bounding there was second nature now.

  She pushed the door open and handed the child off to her nurse. The rest of the Governor-General’s children had already dispersed, which irritated Daphne. It made her feel like a particularly talented servant, valued for her little tricks but otherwise of no use. And to think someday she would outrank Lady Loudoun!

  Rather than Bound immediately back to Government House, or to her bedroom, she stepped into the Bounding chamber and breathed in the cool, damp air. She had never seen the Hall from the outside, but imagined it to be a great pile of stone and glass, catching the coolness of a September evening and storing it against the heat of the day. Not that England knew such heat as obtained in India. And now she was stalling.

  With a sigh, she Bounded back to her bedchamber in Lindsey House, her home in India, and immediately felt sweat prickle under her arms and at the nape of her neck. It had been early evening in England; here in India it was well past sunset, and the black sky was dusted with a million stars, like crystal shattered and strewn across the horizon. The air was muggy and warm even now that the sun had set. Dampness from the constant rains seeped into everything, her clothing, her few books; even the wood of the window frame felt uncomfortably mushy.

  Her bedchamber, small and plainly appointed, smelled of the teak the furniture was made of and the distant scent of the boiled mutton that had been served for supper. She longe
d to taste the foods of India, but Miss Donnelly, the gentle tyrant who ruled the women of Lindsey House, declared such a thing was Not Done. Daphne had no idea how she managed to pronounce capital letters. It was Miss Donnelly’s response to everything Daphne had proposed that might bring her closer to the real India, as she thought of it. Walking in Calcutta. Dining on Indian food. Learning to speak Hindoostani. “Better they learn to speak English, Lady Daphne, it will benefit them in the long run,” Miss Donnelly had said, and Daphne, frustrated, had given up. For the moment. She might not be in India of her own accord, but that did not mean she could not make the best of it.

  Her eye fell on her pocket watch, an expensive gift from her parents that told seconds as well as minutes. She was running behind the time and could not find it in herself to care. But Miss Donnelly, or one of the other residents, would no doubt knock on her door shortly, wanting to know if she was properly gowned for that evening’s ball. Daphne had no desire to attend a ball, but Lady Loudoun was not to be refused, and it was not as if Daphne had anything better to do with her time. She filled her days, when she was not Bounding, with pursuing her exercise regimen, lifting the weights she had brought with her from home, and avoiding Miss Donnelly, who felt compelled to pry into Daphne’s affairs. Since her idea of proper employment for the daughter of a marquess was fancy sewing, avoiding her had a certain urgency to it. Sewing made Daphne fidget.

  She wearily removed her day gown and folded it away into the clothespress, then took out her second-best ball gown and wriggled into it. It was white muslin with a gauzy overdress embroidered with violets. As an Extraordinary, she was entitled to wear any color or fabric she wished, despite her age and marital status, but she liked white, even though it made her appear younger than she was. It suited her to be underestimated sometimes, particularly in social settings where she might have to fend off fortune-hunters or those interested in becoming attached to the Marquess of Claresby’s only daughter and heir. She briefly touched her ear-drops, teardrop-shaped topazes dependent from round diamonds, and thought of her parents. They believed her posting to India was an honor. She could not bear to disillusion them.