Excerpted Inspirations #206Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz KufsNov 17, 20250 min readUpdated: Nov 17, 2025
![[The people of Aramanth have been captured and enslaved, and after a particularly cruel episode seven-year-old Pinto seeks comfort from her older brother, who is beginning to show special powers.]
Pinto crept her arms round her brother, and crawled onto his lap, wanting to feel him close.
“When will it end?” she asked. “When will the hurting end?”
Bowman held her in his arms, and remembered how she had been when she was little, so round and happy, and how she had looked up at him with her sunny face and said, “Love Bo.” He was filled with a desire to make her happy again, so he rocked her in his arms, and told her his own dearest hopes.
“One day,” he said, “we’ll get to the homeland, which is our own country, and we’ll not go wandering any more. We’ll build a town for our people, by a river that leads to a sea. We’ll work hard all day, and at the end of the day we’ll sit round a big table and eat our own good food and tell stories about how it used to be. You’ll grow up, and maybe have children of your own, and they’ll hear the stories too, about how we used to live in a great city, and then how we were slaves, and then how we searched and searched for our homeland. But to your children they’ll only be stories, because they’ll be so safe and happy sitting round that big table they won’t be able to believe such frightening things could really have happened. They’ll sit on your lap like you’re sitting on my lap right now and they’ll say, ‘Weren’t you terribly afraid, Mama?” And you’ll say, ‘I expect I was, my darling, but it was all long ago, and I’ve almost forgotten.’”
Hanno and Ira listened to him, and saw how he stroked his little sister and calmed her wounded spirit, and they were prouder of the love in him than of all the powers of Sirene.
“Thank you, Bo,” whispered Pinto.
“Thank you, Bo,” said his father.
William Nicholson, Slaves of the Mastery (2002), pp. 317-319](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/6feacf_b62c3a517d494fd89010bdbc6f17baf2~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_1423,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/6feacf_b62c3a517d494fd89010bdbc6f17baf2~mv2.jpg)
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