I am seventy-three years old, and I have spent the last forty years remembering a day in October 1847 when I chose to damn myself. Not damn in the religious sense—I was never a religious man. Damn in the older sense: I bound myself to a thing I could never undo, and I have been paying for it ever since.

It began on the moor. Not the pleasant moor you see in postcards—the one with sheep and walking trails and tea rooms. The real moor. The one that eats people. It was the size of a sky with no birds, and the wind had teeth. I was twelve, and I had been running for three hours, or maybe three days. Time dissolves when Mr. Blackwood's dogs are on your trail.

I fell into a hollow behind a ridge of heather, and there they were.

They were not what you expect. Not little men with pointy ears and lanterns. They were tall—too tall—and pale in the way that stone is pale, when the cloud covers the sun and everything goes grey. There were seven of them, standing in a semicircle, and they did not move when I moved, or breathe when I breathed. They simply existed, like the rocks, like the wind, like the thing that made my chest ache.

One of them spoke. Its voice was not a voice. It was the sound of the moor itself, when the wind finds a crack in the stone and pushes through.

You are running, it said.

I nodded. I could not speak. My tongue was a piece of dried leather.

They are cruel, the voice said.

I nodded again.

We are cruel too, it said. But our cruelty is honest.

I did not understand then. I understood later, when I understood everything, and understanding was the worst thing that ever happened to me.

The one who spoke—I will call it Thomas, because it looked like a Thomas, with its sharp jaw and its sad eyes—led me to a cave behind a curtain of hanging roots. Inside, the air was warm and smelled of wet earth and something else, something sweet and old, like the inside of a book that has been closed for a hundred years.

We can help you, Thomas said.

How? I asked. My voice sounded small and human, like a mouse in a cathedral.

He held out his hand. In his palm was a thread—red, impossibly red, like a wound in the grey world. He laid it across my fingers. It was warm. It pulsed.

Tie this to one of them, Thomas said. Any one of them. And speak your wish. The moor will hear it. The moor will do it.

And if I do? I asked.

Then they will be yours, he said. And you will be theirs. Both things are true.

I took the thread. I do not know why. Perhaps because I was twelve and twelve-year-olds are fools. Perhaps because I wanted Mr. Blackwood to suffer. Perhaps because the thread was warm and my hands were cold and I wanted warmth more than I wanted wisdom.

I went back to the hall that night. I did not tie the thread to any of them—not yet. I slept in the hayloft, and I dreamed of grey faces and red thread, and when I woke, the dream was still inside my head like a splinter.

Three days later, I tied it.

I was in the barn, and Mr. Blackwood's prize bull was standing in the yard, and I hated that bull with every fibre of my being, because it was fat and beautiful and I was hungry and thin, and Mr. Blackwood loved it more than he loved me. So I crept to the barn door, where one of the moor-fairies was standing—silent, grey, unmoving—and I tied the red thread to its wrist.

I whispered: I wish it dead.

The bull fell in the yard. It did not scream. It simply collapsed, like a building whose foundations have been removed. Its eyes were open, and they were brown, and they were full of nothing.

The moor-fairy turned its head and looked at me. It did not look angry. It looked… resigned. As if it had expected this, and had expected it long ago.

That night, the farmhand in the south field died. His heart stopped. He was sixty years old. He had a wife and three children. He was picking blackberries when he fell, and the blackberries rolled away from him like blood.

I did not connect the two things at first. I am not a cruel boy. I told myself it was a coincidence. Coincidence is the first lie the guilty tell themselves.

Then the cart horse fell through the ice in January. Then Mr. Blackwood's youngest sheepdog was found with its throat torn out, though no wolf had been seen for twenty years. Each death was small. Each death was isolated. Each death was, in the cold light of morning, explainable.

But the thread grew heavier on my wrist.

I stopped counting. Or rather, I started counting, and the count was a thing I could not survive. Seven deaths in fourteen months. Seven people—or animals, or things that were alive and had names and had people who loved them—gone, because I had whispered a wish to a grey thing in a barn.

I began to watch the moor-fairies more closely. They did not gloat. They did not celebrate. They simply stood, in their places, in the grey light, and waited. They were waiting for me to wish more. Or perhaps they were waiting for me to stop. I could not tell which was worse.

In the spring, I followed Thomas to the old chapel on the northern ridge. The chapel had been abandoned since the plague of 1742, when half the village died and the surviving half left and never came back. The roof had collapsed. The pews were rotting. But Thomas stood in the centre of the ruin, and the light fell on him in a way that made him look almost human, and he spoke.

You should not have tied the thread, he said.

I know, I said. And I meant it. I knew it with every cell in my body. But knowing and undoing are different languages, and I had learned only the first.

It was not meant for you, Thomas said. It was meant for the Blackwoods. It was given to the first Blackwood three hundred years ago, when his ancestor made a pact with us. He could have anything he wanted from the moor. Anything. And in return, the moor would take what it needed from his bloodline. One soul for every wish. The thread was meant to keep him honest. To remind him that everything has a price.

And my father? I asked.

Thomas was silent for a long time. The wind moved through the ruined chapel like a voice trying to remember a word.

Your father was the seventh Blackwood, he said. He was… kind. He tried to break the pact. He tried to return what his ancestor had taken. But the moor does not accept returns. It only accepts payment.

My father died in a fire, I said.

The fire was an accident, Thomas said. But accidents are the moor's way of balancing books.

My mother died of the fever, I said. My voice was flat. I was speaking about other people's deaths now. It was easier.

The fever was not an accident, Thomas said.

I looked at him. The light was failing. His face was grey, and his eyes were grey, and everything was grey, and the only colour in the world was the red thread on my wrist, pulsing like a second heart.

How many? I asked.

Your father wished for wealth, Thomas said. Your grandfather wished for power. Your great-grandfather wished for… vanity. A woman. She died in childbirth. The child died. Your father wished for the fever to stop in the neighbouring village. It did not stop. It stopped in ours.

Seven wishes, I said.

Seven deaths, Thomas said. Your father was the last Blackwood who could wish. After him, the thread passed to you. But you are not Blackwood. You are Whitfield. Your mother was a Blackwood. The thread follows the blood.

I was eight when my mother died. I did not know her. I was raised by Mr. Blackwood—my mother's brother—because he was the nearest living relative and he was greedy and greed is a form of custody. He took me in, not out of kindness, but because a nephew is an argument in court. And the thread found me, because blood is a road that cannot be blocked.

I stood in the ruins of the chapel, and I felt the weight of seven deaths pressing on my chest, and I understood what Thomas meant when he said that understanding is the worst thing that ever happens to you.

What do I do? I asked.

You can wish, Thomas said. Or you can cut the thread.

And if I cut it?

The moor will be angry. And anger, on the moor, is a weather system. It will take everything you have. It will take everything you are.

And if I wish?

You will continue the balance. One soul for every wish. You will become your ancestor. You will become Mr. Blackwood. You will become the thing you hate.

I thought about the farmhand. I thought about the bull. I thought about my mother's face, which I had never seen, but which I had begun, in the last year, to imagine. I imagined her kind. I imagined her tired. I imagined her holding a baby—me—and wondering if the world would be gentler for him than it had been for her.

I took the thread off my wrist.

Thomas watched me. His grey eyes did not change.

How? I asked.

You do not cut it with a knife, he said. You cut it with a choice. Tie it to yourself.

I stared at him.

The thread follows the blood, he said. If you tie it to your own flesh, the balance closes. The moor will take from you, not from others. It will take everything. But it will stop taking from the innocent.

I tied it.

I tied the red thread to my own heart. Not literally—I am not a poet, though I sound like one now, in my old age. Poets are liars who make suffering look beautiful. I pressed the thread against my chest, where my heart was beating, and I said: I choose.

The moor screamed.

I do not know how else to describe it. It was not a sound. It was a pressure, like diving too deep, like the ocean pressing on your ribs and telling you to go down, down, down, until you cannot tell if you are breathing or drowning. The sky went black. The heather bent. The stones cracked. And I stood in the centre of it, and I did not move, because moving would have been admitting that I was afraid, and I was afraid of everything, and if I admitted it, I would have undone everything.

When it stopped, I was alone.

The moor-fairies were gone. All of them. Thomas, and the six others. They had been standing there for three hundred years, and in three seconds, they were gone. The cave behind the curtain of roots was empty. The smell of wet earth and old books was gone. The only thing left was the red thread, dissolved into my skin, like a scar that had always been there.

I walked back to the hall. Mr. Blackwood was in the garden, smoking a pipe. He looked at me, and he saw something in my face, and he did not speak. He was not kind. He was simply… uncertain. For the first time in his life, Mr. Blackwood did not know what to do with a boy.

I stayed at the hall for three more years. I worked. I ate. I slept. I did not wish for anything. I had learned the price of wishes.

When I was fifteen, I left. I walked to Leeds, and I found work in a mill, and I earned six shillings a week, and I lived in a room that smelled of other people's cooking, and I was happy. Not happy—happy is a word for children and fools. I was at peace. Peace is enough. Peace is everything.

But the peace had a cost.

The curse did not end with the moor-fairies. It passed to me. To the Whitfield bloodline. Every generation, one child remembers. Not all of them. Most forget. They grow up, they grow old, they die, and the memory dies with them. But one—always one—remembers. Remembers the moor. Remembers the thread. Remembers the weight of seven deaths.

My son did not remember. My grandson did not remember. But my great-grandson, Edward, he remembered. He was seven when he started having dreams of grey faces and red thread. He was ten when he asked me what the moor felt like. He was twelve when he asked me if I was sorry.

I told him the truth. I am sorry every day, I said. Not for what I did. For what I had to do. There is a difference.

He nodded. He was a thoughtful boy. He had my jaw. He had Thomas's eyes.

I am seventy-three now. The moor is still there. The heather still blooms. The wind still has teeth. And I sit in my chair by the fire, and I remember, and I carry the weight, and I do not wish for anything—except that someday, someone in this bloodline will forget, and forget will be their mercy, and they will live a life that is small and ordinary and blessedly, beautifully unremembering.

But that is a wish. And I know the price of wishes.

So I say nothing. I sit by the fire. I remember. And the red thread, invisible now, but always there, pulses against my heart like a second heartbeat, counting the deaths that I chose, the deaths that I prevented, the deaths that I will carry until the day I die—and even after, if the moor-fairies still exist, and if Thomas is still standing in his place on the ridge, waiting for the next Whitfield to make the next choice.

The moor remembers. I remember. And that is enough.

That is everything.