Jacqueline and Jillian walked across the moorland hand in hand. They didn’t talk, because they didn’t know what there was to talk about: the easy conversation of sisters had stopped coming easily to them almost as soon as they had learned to speak. But they took comfort in being together, in the knowledge that neither one of them was making this journey alone. They took comfort in proximity. After their semi-shared childhood, that was the closest they could come to enjoying one another’s company.

The ground was uneven, as rocky heaths and moorlands often are. They had been climbing for a little while, coming to the end of the flat plain. At the crest of the hill Jacqueline’s foot hit a dip in the soil, and she fell, tumbling down the other side of the hill with a speed as surprising as it was bruising. Jillian shouted her sister’s name, lunging for her hand, and found herself falling as well, two little girls rolling end over end, like stars tumbling out of an overcrowded sky.

In places like the Moors, when the red moon is looking down from the sky and making choices about the story, when the travelers have made their decisions about which way to go, distance is sometimes more of an idea than an enforceable law. The girls tumbled to a stop, Jacqueline landing on her front and Jillian landing on her back, both with queasy stomachs and heads full of spangles. They sat up, reaching for each other, brushing the heath out of their eyes, and gaped in open-mouthed amazement at the wall that had suddenly appeared in front of them.

A word must be said, about the wall.

Those of us who make our homes in the modern world, where there are very few monsters roaming the fens, very few werewolves howling in the night, think we understand the nature of walls. They are dividing lines between one room and another, more of a courtesy than anything else. Some people have chosen to do away with them altogether, living life in what they call an “open floor plan.” Privacy and protection are ideas, not necessities, and a wall outside is better called a fence.

This was no fence. This was a wall, in the oldest, truest sense of the word. Entire trees had been cut down, sharpened into stakes and driven into the ground. They were bound together with iron and with hand-woven ropes, the spaces between them sealed with concrete that glittered oddly in the moonlight, like it was made of something more than simply stone. An army could have run aground against that wall, unable to go any farther.