Free The Palace (Bell Mountain Series #6) by Lee Duigon

watched the boy and the dog for a moment, then dipped its massive hooked beak—
     
    And sipped the water.
     
    This bird, unlike all the others of its kind, had a name: Baby. It had that name because Perkin the wanderer had raised it from a tiny, fuzzy chick that could sit in the palm of one hand. Perkin and Baby protected Ryons on his journey from Obann to the forest, and now they lived with him at Carbonek.
     
    “This bird would give his life for me,” Perkin said, “and he’ll learn to feel the same about you, if you give him time.” So Perkin and Helki had decided that Ryons ought to make friends with Baby and spend time with him alone in the forest. Baby slept at night in a corral, but it was now safe to let him out during the day: he never threatened any of the settlers.
     
    “A king can’t have too much protection,” Helki said. “This forest is your home now, and you have to learn to be at home in it. Who knows? There may come a time when I won’t be able to watch over you. Maybe your Ghols won’t be there, either.”
     
    “Not while any of us live!” said Chagadai, the Ghols’ captain. “Where our father goes, we go.” He said nothing about Ryons having slipped away from them on two separate occasions. Chagadai himself was old enough to be the boy’s grandfather, but it was the custom of the Ghols to call Ryons their father.
     
    “It won’t hurt your father to learn how to be on his own in the woods,” Helki said. Chagadai admitted that this was good sense. From then on, it was decided, Ryons should spend a certain amount of time in the forest by himself, learning the lessons Helki taught him.
     
    They were many lessons—what you could eat, and what you couldn’t, and how to find it; how to move silently and leave no trail to follow, and how to leave a trail your friends could follow; and how to understand what the birds and beasts were saying when they called. The Ghols taught him horsemanship and archery and the art of knife-throwing, and Obst and Perkin taught him how to read and write, using Obst’s book of Scripture as the text. Most importantly, Obst taught him the meaning of the Scriptures.
     
    “In these books,” Obst said, “God speaks to us. To know Him, you must know the Scriptures.”
     
    It was a lot to take in, for a boy—especially for a former slave who hadn’t even had a name until Obst had given him one. But Ryons applied himself to learning, because he knew it would all be useful to him—and besides, he found it interesting. The more he learned, the easier it was to learn still more.
     
    “You have the spirit of a king,” Obst said, “but you’ll need to have the mind of a king, too. You won’t always have advisers you can count on, but God’s word never changes. Remember that.”
     
    As much as he had come to love his teachers and protectors, Ryons also came to love his time alone in the woods. He loved the quiet and the feast that God’s creation laid out daily for his eyes and ears. You could never, however hard you tried, see or hear any more than a tiny fraction of it at a time, and it was different every day. He loved this little pool, with its lush growth of ferns around it and the nearby patch of blackberries; turtles ate there, Helki said, until they got too fat for their shells. He loved being able, now, to find his way there and back alone. Cavall’s quiet companionship delighted him, and he’d long since lost all fear of Baby.
     
    “There are animals in this forest who can hurt you,” Helki said, “but with both Cavall and Baby around, they’ll stay out of your way.”
     
    Above the pool rose an old oak tree, and on it perched Ryons’ hawk, Angel. The Ghols were great hawkers, and they’d taught him how to hunt with Angel, and how to restrain her from hunting except at his command. Helki taught him how to stroke her feathers in the way that she liked best, and Ryons knew the hawk loved him, in her savage little way.
     
    When he