For Borvo, the bonds of family and friendship are the unbreakable ties that bring him back to his home, ten years after he left, and it is his families’ needs and his own sense of wanting to keep his family and friends safe and well that spurs him on to become the respected and revered healer within his community.

Friendship can weather many storms, and as the Lebanese-American poet, artist and writer, Kahlil Gibran, writes in his poem ‘Friendship:Ixx’:

“And a youth said, “Speak to us of Friendship.”

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the “nay” in your own mind, nor do you withhold the “ay.”

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”

Despite Borvo’s friendship with Seofen being terribly strained when they were in Wales as Denny Bradbury writes in Chapter Twenty Three – Mercy – of Borvo II, their friendship “was only now regaining some of its camaraderie and, more importantly, its trust…..Their friendship had endured through the disagreement and the partings”.