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Many years ago, in a village tucked far away in the cold north, there lived two brothers. Although they looked alike, they were as different in manner as the sun from the moon. The elder brother was very sensible, and whenever he passed the townsfolk said, “Ah, now there is a man who will do very well for himself.” In time he married a young woman from the next village over and had a beautiful baby girl, and he was as steady and respectable a father as any family might hope for.
But the younger brother, whose name was Evgeni, had neither wife nor child nor gainful employment. Instead, he spent his days building boats, and when he had filled his shed with them he took them all to pieces for firewood and began again. Though occasionally he could be convinced to part with one when a fisherman's old craft was too damaged to repair, the greater number remained untouched before their untimely destruction.
It was such a waste, his neighbors thought, for they were perfectly good boats even if their maker was slightly mad.
“I am practicing,” Evgeni told them, when at last they inquired as to why he would ruin his own handiwork.
“Practicing for what?” the villagers asked.
“One day,” Evgeni said, “I will sail across the endless ocean and find glory in another land, and that will require a very fine vessel indeed.”
Of course, everyone knew there was nothing at all across the ocean - why else would they call it endless? - and people laughed at his foolishness behind his back.
Still, Evgeni was a kind young man. The village children spent many an hour begging whittled toys from his clever fingers, and none visited his workshop more frequently than his beloved niece Marya.
“Uncle,” she would cry. “Make me a horse!” And for the sake of her smile, he would carve a prancing steed fine enough for any prince’s stable, yet small enough to be grasped by a child’s hand.
One day they had a rare treat, for a trader's caravan came to the village. Evgeni bought his niece spun sugar candy from a young woman with the gleaming black eyes of a doll, and in her delight Marya clung to him for the rest of the evening, filling the air with her happy chatter.
The next day, though, Marya could barely speak. She began to cough, and cough, and when she could not stop coughing Evgeni scooped her up and ran as fast as he could to the village doctor.
The doctor looked at little Marya, flushed with fever, and then he turned to Evgeni with pity in his eyes. Gravely he said, “I am afraid that she is too ill to be helped.”
“Surely there must be something you can do!” Evgeni demanded. But the doctor shook his head. “I cannot.”
With a heavy heart, Evgeni took his niece into his arms once more. He carried his dear burden to his brother’s house to relay what the doctor had told him.
“I will go to Baba Yaga,” his brother said, pale but determined. “Perhaps magic may help where medicine has failed.”
Only the very great love he held for his niece kept Evgeni from protesting. “Your family will be under my care until your safe return,” he promised. So his brother set off into the forest that same night.
Three days passed with no sign. Marya grew sicker.
On the morning of the fourth day, someone knocked at the door of his brother’s small cottage.
The weaver was on the other side. When he saw Evgeni, the man took his hat off solemnly and held it in his hands. “I’m afraid you’d better come with me.”
They had found what was left of his brother on the beach: a handful of bones and the tatters of his best jacket.
Evgeni knelt on the sand and wept until his tears ran dry. Then he declared, “I swore to take care of my brother’s family, and I shall. I am going to seek aid from Baba Yaga, just as he would have done.”
And not a word the villagers said could convince him otherwise. He bid his brother’s wife farewell, kissed Marya tenderly on the forehead, and took the path into the forest with only a slight tremble in his spine.
He wandered amongst the trees for hours, until the sun slipped low and the birds went silent. Just when Evgeni thought he would have to turn back for home in the darkness, he saw a lantern, glowing orange in the dusk.
He hurried towards it, and saw that it was not one light, but several, illuminating a wooden fence and the small hut beyond it. As he drew closer still, he realized that they were not lanterns at all. On each of the fence posts sat a single skull, blazing from the inside with unnatural flame.
“Turn back, turn back,” the skulls whispered.
“I will not,” Evgeni said, as boldly as he could.
“Turn back, turn back,” the skulls said, and their eyes burned a little brighter.
“I will not,” Evgeni said again.
“Turn back, turn back!” the skulls screamed, and their teeth clattered frightfully.
Evgeni almost fled then, but the memory of his promise drove him onwards. “I will not,” he said for the third time, voice shaking with terror, and the rickety gate swung open before him.
In that instant, a old woman shrieked from inside, “I smell a stranger at my door!”
“It is Evgeni Vladimirovich from the village, grandmother,” Evgeni called. “I have come to beg your aid.”
“Thrice over you were warned, and thrice over you did not heed that warning,” said Baba Yaga, coming to the threshold. She looked him up and down with her clever, cruel eyes. “Ask your favor, boy, and if you’re lucky I won’t eat you up for your impertinence.”
“My niece is deathly ill, and no natural means will save her,” he said.
“Pah! And I suppose you would like me to give you a cure?” Baba Yaga scoffed. “All must die when it is their time, strong young men and little girls alike.”
“Please,” Evgeni said.
“Then you must do me a favor in turn,” the witch said. “I will give you the medicine you seek, but winter is upon us and my old coat has worn thin. There is a certain seal that lives off the coast which you will know by the black cap of fur on its head. Fetch me the skin of that seal - that seal, and no other! - by sunset seven days hence, or I will tear you into pieces for my supper.”
Evgeni said, “I will do as you bid, grandmother,” and so Baba Yaga agreed to make the elixir.
He could not hurry back to the village as quickly as he would have liked, for by then it was quite dark indeed, but he went as fast as he was able. Soon he was in front of his brother’s cottage. “Good news,” he cried. “Please, sister, open the door!”
The creases of worry on his sister-in-law’s face lifted the instant Evgeni told her the witch had agreed to brew a medicine for Marya. “And all I have to do is bring her a sealskin,” he announced, triumphant.
His sister-in-law went pale. “They said it was a seal that killed my husband,” she whispered. “They found the marks of its teeth on his bones.”
But Evgeni was steadfast. “I have made a promise to Baba Yaga, just as I made a promise to my brother. Besides, I shall take extra care when I go out tomorrow so that I am not felled in the same way. Surely then I cannot fail!”
So in the morning, he dragged his strongest boat down the beach and into the water, and rowed west until the shore was a mere speck on the horizon. He did not know how one went about catching a seal, but he cast his net and waited alertly for any signs of movement. To pass the time, he sang to himself all the lullabies Marya enjoyed, then the ones he himself had grown up with. He drew up the net several times, and each time it was full; fat cod and wriggling haddock, enough to feed his brother’s family for a week.
Yet at the end of the day, there had been no sign of the seal.
The following days went much the same, though he pointed his prow east on the second, and bore north on the third; by the fourth day Evgeni was no longer cheerful enough to sing. He begged the fishermen for the biggest net they had, one that might reach down to the very depths of the ocean. He threw it so many times that by the end of the fifth day, his hands were bloody and raw, but none of the strange, undulous creatures he pulled from the darkness were what he needed. Still he searched, even as his heart grew so heavy with worry that he felt he might sink his craft under the weight of it. Marya had not opened her eyes since his return from the forest, and every rasping breath she took was a struggle.
At the dawning of the seventh day he woke to a terrible silence.
“Maryusha,” he called frantically. “Maryusha!”
But she did not reply. She never would.
His sister-in-law did not scream when she found Evgeni cradling her daughter’s tiny body, but she collapsed to the floor as though struck.
She sobbed, wild in her grief, “You said she would live!” And Evgeni felt it as a blow to a downed man.
He offered her no words of consolation. How could he? Baba Yaga had warned him, and in his urgency he had not listened. All must die when it is their time. It had been a fool’s bargain. The witch had not promised his niece’s life; she had known all along what Marya’s fate would be.
Deep beneath his sorrow, a spark of anger flared and caught alight.
He would not give her the satisfaction of getting anything from his failure.
For the seventh and final time, he set his boat upon the water and rowed out into the ocean. Though he did not pay much heed to where he was going, he found himself by the same rocky shoal where he had first gone looking for the seal.
It was, he decided, as good a place to die as any. The rough waves promised an easy drowning. Marya would have shrieked with laughter at the rocking of the boat, but Marya was gone, and the thought made his chest ache in fresh misery.
He wished he had been able to say goodbye; he wished he had not needed to say goodbye at all.
The desperate hope which had sustained him over the past seven days had left in its absence a vast and cruel emptiness, and so great was his pain that he thought he might die of the heartache alone.
He closed his eyes against the well of tears. There was no one left to sing to, but he had not been able to face Marya’s funeral. The lullabies were the only prayer he could offer. He sang her favorites, until his voice cracked and he had to pause to gasp out a sob. But he was not dead yet, and so he kept singing, slumped in the bow. “Why do you rustle as you sway, slender rowan, with your head bent to the wooden fence?” The boat tipped as the waves jostled it, but he paid it no mind.
“You’re back.”
Evgeni opened his eyes.
There was a man sitting across from him, where none had been before. He was naked save for a dark cloak draped over his legs, but he seemed unbothered by his own nudity, pale limbs unfolding out from a sturdily muscled torso.
He was, Evgeni noticed, quite beautiful. The stranger’s eyes were the shifting color of fog over the marshes, and he regarded Evgeni with calm patience, waiting for him to speak. He might have been a vision sent to a dying man, save that Evgeni could feel the way the boat had sunk even, balanced by their weights.
“I am,” Evgeni said. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Not particularly,” the man replied. “I liked that song. Will you sing the rest of it?”
“I suppose I might as well,” Evgeni said, and did so.
The man looked considering afterwards. “It’s not a very happy story.”
“No,” Evgeni said. “No, it is not. But my niece is dead in spite of my every effort to save her. I was not in the mood for a happy story.”
“I am sorry,” the man said, and the proud line of his jaw seemed to soften slightly. “It is difficult to lose one’s family. Still, I am glad you are back.”
Evgeni puzzled over that for a moment. “I confess I don’t remember that we’ve ever met.”
“Oh, we haven’t,” the man said. “But your voice carries quite well underwater.” He shrugged, and the cloak over his lap shifted just a little, sliding to reveal another inch of smooth skin.
Unbidden, Evgeni’s eyes dropped to it. And then he could not tear his eyes away, because the cloak was not a cloak at all.
It was a sealskin, and the head was capped with fur as black as night.
“Why do you have that?” he asked stupidly.
The man followed his gaze downwards. “It’s mine.”
“Yours,” Evgeni said. “You killed the seal that would have saved my niece?”
“I did no such thing,” the man said.
“Then you found the skin, or bought it, or -” He fell silent, having already exhausted all the possibilities his tired mind could provide him.
“If someone had killed a seal for this skin,” the man said, curling his lip in distaste, “I wouldn’t have said it was mine.”
“But you’re -”
The man looked at him steadily. By shape alone he could have been just another villager - albeit one far more pleasing to the eye than most - but no man Evgeni knew could have heard music beneath the waves, nor swum so far in the freezing ocean. There was no boat in sight.
Evgeni felt a shudder run through him.
“Very well,” he said.
“Sing something else?” the seal prompted.
Evgeni sang the lullaby his mother had once used to soothe her own children to sleep, and when he was finished he said, “Did you kill the last man who came looking for you?”
“Well,” the seal said. “Yes. He tried to take my skin.”
“Ah,” Evgeni said, but he was weary, and so he did not stop himself from asking, “And are you going to eat me too?”
“I’m sure you’d be delicious,” the seal said, gazing wistfully up at Evgeni through his lashes. “But I really shouldn’t. Humans are very unhealthy.”
Evgeni frowned. “Unhealthy?”
“I was hungry. It was a moment of weakness.”
“He was my brother,” Evgeni said, because it seemed important.
The seal tilted his head, thoughtful, and Evgeni caught the glimmer of salt-spray on the long line of his neck. “I didn’t know that. You aren’t going to make the same mistake that he did.”
“No,” Evgeni said. “I thought you were just - I could have killed you.”
The seal laughed, a loud, squawking bark of a noise, as though the mere notion were ridiculous. “You could have tried.”
For his faults Evgeni was not a stupid man, but he was, perhaps, one easily roused to childish fits of temper. “I could have done more than that!”
“Unarmed?” the seal asked innocently.
Evgeni had to admit that this was a valid point, but still. “It does not matter; there is no point in my taking your skin anymore. Even Baba Yaga cannot bring my family back from the dead.”
The finality of those words tore at him as he spoke, and he felt his anger subside all at once, cold resignation sweeping in to take its place.
The seal’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Baba Yaga?”
“Yes,” Evgeni said after a moment. “She promised me a cure for my niece’s illness in exchange for -”
“Oh,” the seal breathed. “Of course it was the witch who sent you.”
Evgeni blinked.
“She’s wanted my skin for a long time, but her magic has no hold here,” the seal said with a sniff. “You are not the first human she’s ensnared into helping her. Perhaps she hoped in your anguish you might be able to do what the others could not.”
Evgeni drooped a little further. “But I couldn’t. I have failed in my task, and if I do not drown here then Baba Yaga will eat me up.” He sighed, for although he had surrendered himself to his fate, he did not truly wish for it.
“That would be a terrible waste,” the seal said regretfully, and then his eyes lit. “Or perhaps I may offer you my help.”
“Your help?”
The seal smiled, slow and easy. “Yes. Let me explain.”
In the end, Evgeni made the long, sobering journey back to the village alone. He beached his craft on the pebbled shore, high enough that the tide would not take it, and then he drew from its bottom a seal’s skin of grey and black.
The sun was low on the horizon as he walked the path to Baba Yaga’s. He felt as though he could have been dreaming, but the weight in his hands was real. If he rubbed the fur between his fingers, he could feel each bristle. He would have sworn, before this morning, that he knew what manner of animal it came from.
He was no longer so sure.
This time, he did not have to search to find the hut with its gruesome pickets. It was simply there before him, as though it had always been so near. Evgeni approached it with the skin held before him, sleek and smelling of brine, and as he did the sun flashed once through the trees and vanished. The skulls glowed with sudden flame.
The door to the hut sprang open, and Baba Yaga cried, “Evgeni Vladimirovich, your time is up! Give me what you promised, or you’ll not live to see another morning.”
“I have done as you asked, grandmother,” Evgeni said. The witch thrust her long nose towards him and sniffed the air.
“So you have,” she said, and though her voice was disapproving, her eyes gleamed. She stretched out bony fingers towards the skin. “Give it here, then, and be quick!”
“Allow me,” Evgeni said, and in one move he threw the sealskin over her shoulders.
The scent of brine grew stronger, and Baba Yaga blinked. Two salty tears ran down her cheeks, and then two more, until twin streams of water wept from her eyes. “You!” she raged, and Evgeni tripped backwards, eyes wide in his horror. “What have you done -” But more saltwater poured from her open mouth. She reached for Evgeni, then, but her hands were swollen and could not grasp him. The fur across her back blackened with rot. Underneath it the witch’s body seemed to distort, no longer quite human, and she howled her fury into the night.
Still the water flooded from her, and when it finally slowed to a trickle all that remained was scraps of sealskin and the dank, lingering odor of tide pools.
This was what the seal had told him to do. The only way to preserve the magic of a sealskin was to kill the seal it belonged to. If a seal died of old age then the magic went with it, and the skin would take, and take, and take, trying to make up for that loss.
It was a monstrous thing to suggest, but Evgeni wondered if it did not make him a little monstrous himself, that he looked at what was left of Baba Yaga and did not feel guilty at all.
He went back to the village, but the door of his brother’s house was barred. The poor widow, the miller said stiffly, had left for her parents’ home as soon as Marya had been laid in the ground. He supposed the house was Evgeni’s now, though what need one man could have for such a well-appointed place he didn’t know.
Evgeni thanked him quietly and unlocked the door. However cold the rooms felt without no one else to occupy them, he could not go back to his workshop. All the pleasant memories of hours whiled away there were painted with grief. Besides, what use were his boats when the ocean could not promise the escape that it once had?
In time he might have learned to find a measure of happiness in the familiar faces of the townspeople, for they had always treated him with an amiable tolerance, but it was not to be. Those who had once greeted him as a neighbor now averted their eyes as he walked down the street. The baker seemed always to have sold all of her loaves whenever he stopped by, and the butcher had only scraps fit for the dogs.
So it was, until one morning Evgeni woke to find his chicken coop had been mysteriously opened in the night, the hens nowhere to be found and all the eggs smashed to pieces against his doorstep, and that was when he knew he could not stay.
He had not told anyone of his encounter with the seal. The villagers were a hard, pragmatic folk, and none would have believed it. Far easier to lay blame on the wastrel brother come unexpectedly into fortune than on witches and seals and magic. They would run him out of town soon enough, and Evgeni didn’t see much purpose in waiting.
After all, he had nothing left to stay for.
One by one, he took his boats down to the beach, and one by one he took them apart, saving only the very smallest. With their timber he built himself a cottage just out of range of the tide, that the ceaseless crashing of the waves might soothe him.
And if some nights he thought he could hear the sound of a lullaby threading through the rumble of the ocean, uncertain and achingly familiar, he did not say so out loud.
Indeed, there was no one he could speak to even if he wished it. It was a long walk to the next village from his humble shack, and as the nights grew longer and the days grew colder, Evgeni knew that all his scrimping and saving had not been enough. When the snows came, he would starve.
But on the very morning flakes began to drift from the sky, Evgeni found an unexpected gift at his doorstep. First there were two white seashells, pale as the moon, and he took them inside and carved from them matching hooks as sharp as needles. The next day he woke to find five perfect feathers from one of the circling gray gulls that haunted the shoreline, and from these he made lures with which to bait the hooks. Finally he received a length of tough gray-green kelp which he cut into ribbons, and when he was finished knotting the pieces together for a line, Evgeni went fishing.
The only boat which remained had been too little to be of much use in building his new home, and it was this he took out onto the winter sea. He had barely cast his line when its wooden hull bobbled.
“What took you so long?” the seal asked petulantly. “I was calling you for ever.”
“I am sorry,” Evgeni said. “I’m here now.”
“Yes,” the seal said, though he looked only somewhat mollified. “You are. So it worked, I suppose?”
“Baba Yaga is dead,” Evgeni informed him, and was rewarded when the seal’s pretty mouth stretched wide in a self-satisfied smile.
“Good.”
“Whose skin was it?” Evgeni asked impulsively, for he had wondered since that fateful meeting. “That you gave me that day?”
The seal’s expression darkened. “My grandfather’s,” he said. “The last of my kin not slaughtered for our magic.”
“Have you no other family?”
The seal shrugged, and for the first time Evgeni saw how awfully lonely he was. It was not a feeling he had known how to recognize, before.
“I do,” the seal said, “But they live a great distance from here, on the other side of the ocean. I cannot make the journey by myself.”
Evgeni thought about that, and then he said, “You gave me the two white seashells.”
“I did,” the seal said, and he agreed just as easily that he had also given Evgeni the feathers and the length of kelp.
“Why?”
“You didn’t listen when I tried it your way,” the seal told him. “You’d have wasted away to nothing.” Though he was as seemingly unaffected by the cold as before, his cheeks were slightly pink. Evgeni tried not to notice how far the flush spread down his neck and chest, and failed completely.
“I am sorry for causing you trouble,” Evgeni said once more. “I didn’t know. Next time, call my name and I will come.”
“Your name?”
“Evgeni Vladimirovich,” he said.
The seal grimaced, but he tried gamely to repeat it back, even as Evgeni began to grin at his efforts.
“Hm,” the seal said grumpily, and then chirruped, low in his throat. “A name for a name.”
“Let’s have it, then,” Evgeni said.
Blank-faced, the seal chirruped again.
Evgeni was so startled by the sound of his own laugh that at first he did not recognize it. “Oh, very well,” he said. “To you, I will be Zhenya.”
“Zhenya,” the seal said, and the name was sweet on his upturned lips. “And you may call me Sidney.”
“Sidney,” Evgeni said.
Sidney cleared his throat. “But I am afraid it seems to me that the balance between us remains uneven.”
“Indeed,” Evgeni said. “As you have given me three tokens, I owe you the same number. One,” and he leaned forward to kiss the seal’s right cheek. “Two,” and he kissed the other cheek, hot beneath his lips. “Three,” Evgeni said, and this time Sidney leaned forward to meet Evgeni’s mouth with his own.
When they finally parted, Evgeni took the seal’s hands. He felt the delicate tendons of Sidney’s wrists quiver under his fingertips, then settle. “Stay with me,” Evgeni said. “Just for the winter, and when the ice melts I will build the finest boat in any land so we can go find your family.”
“Together?” Sidney said.
“Together,” Evgeni promised.
And that was exactly what they did.