Free One (The Godslayer Cycle Book 1) by Ron Glick Page B

what birds do on such days.  They frolicked, they fed on berries, and they filled the forested countryside with their intermittent warbling calls.  Below on the ground, insects and rodents scurried amidst the underbrush in search of their own purposes.  In the distance, something larger could be heard, if not seen, moving away from the foreigner who traveled through their domain.
    All seemed right with the world, at least on the surface.  All the creatures of the forest acted normal, and Nathaniel knew that if something were amiss, they would be the first ones to sense it.  And yet, in spite of this, he still felt there to be an underlying wrong somehow to it all.  It seemed that none of what he saw nor heard was real, only some facade perpetrated for him alone.  But the real truth was something else entirely, something he could not imagine at all.  Or perhaps he had just become more acutely aware of something inherently wrong within himself, and this tainted his view of everything else.
    That strange woman back at Bracken's place had certainly unnerved him.  The Wyrm's Fang had attracted its share of odd visitors in its time, for certain.  Up until four years ago, Nathaniel had actually lived in town and had witnessed quite a few oddities himself.  Only Bracken himself knew how many had come before Nathaniel had begun frequenting the tavern or since he had moved his family out of the town proper, moving into the property he had inherited from his mother.  Yet this stranger was unique upon them all.
    She was using magic , Bracken had said.  Such a foreign idea to commoners in these lands, yet not completely unknown in the world.  There were entire cities dominated by magical forces elsewhere in the world, or so it was said.  And even the citizens of Oaken Wood themselves had born witness to the occasional miraculous feat performed by a wandering priest or side-show mystic.  The New Gods restricted magic's use, but it could not abolish it.  Clergy spread the notion that magic was the holy venue of their Gods, but there were still mystics and witches who practiced the art.  And, of course, the New Order could do nothing to influence the ways of the elves, the dwarves (even though they themselves shunned magic for the most part) or any of the other non-human or magically spawned races scattered across the land.  It would have been easier to stop the sun in the sky than to abolish magic from the citizens of the world.
    Still, magic required some degree of skill for a human to use, some degree of practice and proficiency.  Or, at least, this was always what Nathaniel had been led to believe.  All the bards' tales seemed to agree upon this point, at least, if nothing else regarding magic: spells and incantations needed complicated gestures, mystic words and odd materials to draw the energies forth to accomplish even the smallest success.  A man did not simply will a thing done; it took some underlying procedure to call magical energies to accomplish it.  And this woman had shown no sign of doing anything uncommon at all.  She had only recited a...  what?  A poem?  A verse?  What would one call what she spoke?
    In spite of this rationality, some base sense told Nathaniel that the dwarf was right.  The stranger had possessed an unmistakable quality that could only have been see as magic.  Her very presence had commanded attention and belief in what was said that went far beyond charm and charisma.
    Had it been only the stranger, though, Nathaniel would only be half as troubled on his walk home.  That damnable priestess, as Bracken had called her, had shown a peculiar interest in him that seemed to defy logic, as well.  He could still feel the hot prickles upon his flesh where she had run her nails across his chest.  Had she marked him in some way by doing so?  Was that why his skin flushed when he thought of the intimacy that touch had suggested?
    You are a married man! he scolded himself.  No matter