I was only a man standing in the sunlight beside the water, holding on to the single fortune that had ever been worth anything at all, which was the family I had almost been too late to find.

I was thirty-four years old, standing beside a lake, beside a grave, beside a sister.

I had no empire and no title and no army, and for the first time since I was a boy I was not afraid of anything, because there was no longer anything I was holding that someone might take.

My father had spent his life accumulating a fortune and teaching me to guard it, and he had died inside it, alone, and left me a letter trying to warn me not to do the same.

I had come within one burned document of ignoring him.

I did not.

And whatever years I have left, I intend to spend them exactly here, in the sunlight, with the only thing that ever turned out to be worth the holding.