Saving the Sammi by Frank Tuttle Read Free Book Online

SAVING THE SAMMI by Frank Tuttle
     
     
    "I tell you I can fly."
"Well of course you can fly," replied Mug, rolling fifteen of his twenty-nine eyes as he spoke.
"You can fly. I can fly. Anyone who can afford a ten-crown airship ticket and is fool
enough to board one of the ungainly things can fly. That's my point, Mistress -- why bother
with these flapping coils of yours, when the skies are filled with amusingly-named airships
ready and waiting to bear you to an early grave?"
    "You know very well they're called flying coils and not flapping coils," said Meralda.
    "Slip of the tongue, Mistress."
    Meralda bit back a retort and switched Mug's bird-cage from her right hand to her left.
Mug might be an enchanted dandyleaf plant, and thus devoid of a tongue, but Meralda knew
only too well he was adept at prolonging pointless arguments merely because it amused him to do so.
    Count to ten, said Meralda, silently. He's just cranky because the storm kept him awake. Do not rise to his bait. One, two...
    Voices sounded ahead. Meralda rounded the corner onto Hubert Lane.
    She halted and put Mug's bird-cage down carefully on the sidewalk.
    Hubert Lane was choked with gawkers and Royal Roadworks engineers and what appeared
to be half the King Street Fire Brigade. Men pointed and nodded and shrugged and stared.
Two of the enormous old oaks that lined the lane were down, torn up at the roots, their
fallen bulks leaving the street filled two stories high with broken boughs that still dripped with the leavings of the storm.
Even the sidewalks on both sides of the street were blocked.
    "Best go on back to Holt and take Longstrike," shouted a blue-capped Watch sergeant, who doffed his hat at Meralda.
"Quite a storm, eh, Sorceress?"
    "Indeed," said Meralda, with a smile and wave.
    Mug's leaves shivered. "Are you sure the storm has passed, Mistress?"
He turned a dozen eyes toward the face of the sky, which showed thin patches of
blue between ragged, rushing banks of ominous black clouds. "I thought the wind was going to knock our building over, more than once."
    A sudden damp rush of wind swept down the street, rustling dropping leaves and prying
a few long locks of dark red hair from beneath Meralda's hat. She lifted Mug's cage. "Don't exaggerate, Mug. It wasn't that bad."
    "I'm a plant, Mistress. If I tell you I felt the walls shake deep down in my roots, you can be assured that was no ordinary wind."
    "Even so, the storm is passed."
    Mug's eyes followed the rush of clouds above. "If you say so."
    Meralda made her way quickly to the corner of Holt and Longstrike, skipping over fallen
limbs and debris as she went. She paused long enough to take a child's soggy doll
out of a puddle and rest it atop a mailbox so that it might be found when the neighborhood awoke.
    Mug might have been right about the storm, she thought, as she rounded the corner at
Longstrike and was confronted by a wagon sitting perfectly upright in the crook
of a four-hundred-year-old oak. The wagon's signage cheerfully proclaimed the freshness
and flavor of Turnage's Pastries, of Turnage Street, which Meralda recalled as being on the other side of Tirlin, some sixteen miles distant.
    As she watched, a crate of donuts fell from the back of the wagon, striking the wet
ground with a solid thunk before breaking open and sending dozens of donuts rolling across the grass.
    "I told you that was no ordinary wind," said Mug, his leaves curling.
"And no more talk of flying! Cloth, if you please. All this bobbing and swaying is making me quite ill."
    Meralda draped Mug's bird-cage in a clean white cloth before she hurried under
the wagon. Across the lawn, a man in his nightclothes popped out of his front door,
caught sight of the wagon resting in his tree, and hurried out to collect donuts by the handful.
    "You may have been right about the storm, Mug," said Meralda, as Watch whistles sounded
down the street, and an enormous creak followed by a thunderous thud