“Then by the Law, I must appoint one of you to be a guardian until I return. While I am here this winter, I will come often to you, and learn more of each of you, before making that appointment.” Dattur had suggested this. Arcolin thought Dattur, with his experience of the outside world, would be the best guardian, but he realized that imposing an exile on those remaining might cause trouble.

The estvin bowed.

“Now I will hear a report of the tribe,” Arcolin said. “Births and deaths, illnesses and injuries, recoveries, what stores you have of food, and so on.”

“None have died, O prince,” the estvin said. “One babe has been added to the tribe but will have no name until Midwinter, if it please the prince. It is the custom.” The estvin clapped his hands, and one of the others brought a book. “The records, O prince, and if the prince cannot read—”

“But slowly,” Arcolin said. “The symbols are still new to me.”

“Then I will assist as the prince asks,” the estvin said.

The gnomes had planted seeds from the grain he had sent with them in the spring and harvested that grain and wild grasses as well. They had snared rabbits and other small game—every one entered in the book—and begun the cultivation within the excavation of things Arcolin guessed were edible fungi of different types. Not all wore the new uniforms, the estvin explained, eyes cast down, as there had not been time to grow the … whatever it was they made cloth from. Arcolin decided he did not want to know. The women and children, and some of the men, still wore the cloth Arcolin had given them, but all who met the outside world went properly attired.

“You have done well,” Arcolin said, when the account ended.

“It is by the prince’s mercy,” the estvin said. “It is a great debt.”

“It is no debt to a prince, to have the people prosper,” Arcolin said. Once more he thought, as he had the previous winter, of what might have been … gnome children dead in the snow.

The estvin’s brow wrinkled. “It is strange—”

“For both of us,” Arcolin said. “But not a bad thing.”

“No.” The estvin sighed. “My prince … when you think of someone to be your … your hesktak … you should consider that … that one who came with you. Datturnaknitunak.”

“Advise me,” Arcolin said.

“It is hard to say. It is … he was … he was should have died, but … but his living … it is not that kapristi think luck, but favor of Law is not luck.”

That was sufficiently tangled that it took Arcolin a long moment to figure it out. “He told me he was taken away and left—”