The Current Between Us

The Glow

## Chapter 8: The Glow

The blade hovered, a sliver of steel catching torchlight and throwing it back in one thin, blinding line.

Lily bowed her tail to the stone, neck bared, eyes closed, offering herself to the moment with a stillness that looked almost peaceful from the outside, though nothing about what churned beneath it was peaceful at all. Sadness washed through her first — cold and heavy, like deep water closing over her head and pressing the air from her lungs before she'd even had the chance to hold her breath. Then fear followed close behind, though not for herself. For the daughter she'd failed to keep hidden, despite eight years of careful lies and careful silence. Vulnerability stripped her bare in that moment, her scales dulling to nothing, all color and shine draining out of her the way it had when the guards first dragged her upright. All the lies, all the years of silence, and it ended here, on this stone, because of a feeling her daughter hadn't been able to help. Because of Beatrice's love for Raft. Because of a hope neither of them had ever been sure he'd honor the way he once had, back when he was simply a boy sharing his lunch and not a prince bound by a crown's expectations.

*I kept her secret,* Lily thought, guilt tightening around her ribs like a hand closing into a fist. *I kept her close. I taught her to hide, taught her every trick I knew for surviving under a king's eye. And it still wasn't enough. Not enough to outrun a king's blade, in the end. Nothing ever is.*

The executioner's muscles flexed, drawing the blade back the final inch before the strike.

In that same heartbeat, something built inside Beatrice, sudden and enormous, too large for her body to contain. It started low in her belly, nauseous and twisting, like she'd swallowed a storm whole and it was trying to claw its way back out. Goosebumps rose along her cheeks and down the curve of her neck, prickling even beneath her scales where no wind or current could reach. Her face flushed hot, then went ice cold in the space of a single breath. Tears spilled before she could blink them back, blurring the water around her until the whole execution ground looked like broken glass, fractured and distant.

All she kept saying in her heart, in her mind, in whatever place inside her the words were coming from — not language exactly, just a pulse, a heartbeat given meaning: *Save her. Save her. Save her. She can't die for me. She can't die for my mistake. She can't die. Please, please, please.*

The blade came down.

Steel met flesh. Blood bloomed in the water, dark and sudden, spreading in ribbons that caught what little torchlight remained. Lily's head rolled once on the current, eyes still open, still filled with tears and the particular guilt of a mother who believed, in her final moment, that she hadn't shielded her daughter well enough. Her body followed a heartbeat later, drifting toward Beatrice the way the tide had always pulled them together, even now, even at the very end.

Beatrice caught her mother without thinking, arms wrapping instinctively around the shoulders, cheek pressing hard against Lily's rapidly cooling scales, refusing to let go even as the horror of what had just happened began to register somewhere distant and unreachable.

And then the world went white.

It started at her chest, a glow soft as moonlight filtering down through shallow water on a calm night. It spread down her arms, up the length of her neck, into her hair until every strand shimmered like spun pearl caught in sunlight. The glow wasn't gentle, despite its softness — it was beautiful in the way the moon is beautiful when it hangs low and impossibly full in the sky, too bright to look at directly without the light burning a lingering shape into your vision. Beatrice lifted her face without meaning to, and the light poured out of her in waves, turning the sand around them to silver, turning her mother's blood to something that looked almost like living coral, pulsing faintly with borrowed light.

She looked, in that moment, as though she stood inside the moon itself. Too beautiful to witness directly. Too powerful, suddenly, to fully comprehend or bear.

Bale, still bound to his post, jerked back hard against his ropes, the motion sharp enough to reopen the raw skin at his wrists. His mouth fell open but no sound came out, shock rooting him in place as thoroughly as the rope ever had. Even the guards forgot, for one long moment, to breathe. Tridents dipped toward the sand, forgotten. Eyes widened all around the execution ground, fixed on the impossible sight in front of them.

Everyone stared as though they'd watched a prophecy step directly out of the old songs and into the water beside them, made suddenly, terribly real.

The king went still for one full breath, his expression softening into something almost reverent, almost human, before the mask reasserted itself. Then his eyes sharpened again, calculation returning fast on the heels of awe. He saw it clearly — the danger coiled tight inside that glow, the power that answered to no one, asked permission from nothing, and could, given enough time and training, unmake thrones as easily as it had just unmade his execution. Whatever advantage he'd believed himself to hold moments ago was already slipping away from him, faster than he could follow.

He opened his mouth to give an order, some command already forming behind his teeth.

Before it could leave his lips, before the guards could lift their tridents or shift their weight into anything resembling a defensive stance, Beatrice moved.

She didn't think. She didn't know the words for what she was doing, didn't know a single gesture that might have shaped or controlled it. Only the pulse in her soul that screamed *Save her*, over and over, drowning out every other thought in her head. The glow flared once, violently, bright enough to burn stark shadows into the reef wall behind her. It wrapped around Lily's body, around Lily's severed head, around the blood still drifting loose in the water. It wrapped around Beatrice too, pulling the two of them tight together like kelp roots twisting into a single knot that no current could pull apart.

The water bent.

Not pushed, not swirled the way water normally moved around a struggling body. Bent, deliberately, as though the sea itself had decided, just this once, to fold in on itself and make room for something that shouldn't have been possible. One moment Beatrice and Lily were there, glowing and bleeding together on the execution stone, framed by guards and torchlight and a king too stunned to speak. The next, they simply weren't.

They vanished.

No splash marked their leaving. No current rushed to fill the space where they'd been. Just a sudden pulse of displaced water snapping closed behind them, like a wound sealing shut in the space of a single heartbeat. The glow was gone. The moon-bright light was gone. Only the faint smell of ozone and the ghostly afterimage of the glow remained, dancing at the edges of everyone's vision, refusing to fade all at once.

Silence followed. Thick, absolute, and utterly stunned.

The king's mouth was still open, the order he'd meant to give dying somewhere behind his teeth, unspoken and now, apparently, unnecessary. The executioner's blade hung motionless in the water, dripping. Bale sagged hard against his ropes, his chest heaving as though he'd been the one pulled through whatever tear in the world had just opened and closed again.

The guards looked at each other first. Then at the empty, blood-streaked stone where two mermaids had knelt only seconds before. Then, slowly, warily, at the king.

Fear came first among them — raw and animal, the kind that bypassed thought entirely. They'd seen magic before, plenty of it. Court magic, carefully taught and carefully controlled. Even black magic, on rare and terrible occasions, wielded by those willing to pay its price. This was different. This was wild, untaught, moon-bright and utterly without limits that anyone present could name. This was a fledgling with no master, no training, no control at all, who had somehow folded the sea itself around her like a curtain and simply stepped through to the other side.

Tridents stayed lowered. No one moved. No one dared speak first. The only sound in the entire execution ground was the current pulling softly, almost gently, at the empty water where two mermaids had been standing only a heartbeat before.