Chapter Eleven
TWO WEEKS PASSED.
Lucas could still smell the ashes in the wind from the cabin in which Jezebel had burned herself.
“Do trees breathe?” Tamsen asked.
It was too hot to work, so he and Tamsen were resting in the shade of a lazy elm, lying on a mattress of dead grass and leaves and staring upwards at the forest’s roof, losing themselves among the patchwork shades of green. Duvall’s hound lay close by in the dirt, nonchalantly lapping its genitals.
“I believe that they do,” Lucas answered. “I think they even talk amongst themselves.”
A bold crimson cardinal winged over like a spark passing through a dry unmown hayfield.
“Trees do not talk.” Tamsen said.
“Sure they do. Just listen.”
The wind stirred the leaves. It sounded like whispered gossip, the laughter of water, Go
