“They parted,” her uncle says with a shrug. “Before the first night was over, the noble lady was back on a ship. She continued to travel and returned to the Saracen king’s court to serve, for a time, as a courtier to him. She wanted to mend his barbaric ways and to free the other captured slaves. The knight, I am told, fell into a life of dissipation. He abused his tenants, gambled away his money, and had affairs with his tenants’ pretty wives, so the husbands soon rose up against him and tore him apart, like wild dogs on a carcass.”

Joan nods. She likes stories with just endings. Then she thinks, considering the moral of the tale. “Are you saying you will be torn apart by angry husbands?” she asks.

He laughs. His hand finds her cheek in the dark and pats it. “Let them catch me first,” he says.

She thinks she understands the purpose of the story. This must be what happens when you leave your home, travel, and see the world. Little by little, you begin to change, even if you are not aware of it. What was once alien becomes familiar: foreign tongues, the music of strange instruments, the vagaries of the sea. Slowly you alter until the very stars that spin in the heavens are as familiar to you as the lines of your own hand. But first you must step out your front door. You must leave behind what you know and possibly what you love. You must be willing to lose every inch of yourself, for the next time you look into a stream or a mirror, which may be weeks, years, or half a lifetime from now, you will not recognize your reflection. You must risk this much in order to gain what the world is ready to offer.

They stand, brush themselves, and begin the long walk back to the village. It is another way of saying, No, you can’t come. Another way of telling her, You must make your own map of the world. Search out your own piece of sky and patch of earth, your own awning to sleep under when it is raining and it feels the sun may never shine again, for there will certainly be such days. No one can walk this path for you. You cannot simply follow in another’s footsteps, as though life were a complicated dance, every turn and twist memorized and prepared for ahead of time. There are many things in the world one can inherit: money, land, power, a crown. But an adventure is not one of them; you must make your own journey.