The first time that we rest, Ty calls me to the river after Mel is asleep.
He sits beside the stream, lit up from below with its blue-white shine. The patterns from its movement wash over his face in waves, but his eyes are in shadow. “Let me see your leg,” he says.
I still don't quite trust the man, and I still dislike him, but he has never hurt me and he was the one who first splinted my leg, so I have little choice. I sit down and move the leg toward him.
“If you hurt me I shall scream and Mel will come to help me,” I warn him. It is all I can do; I know I cannot fend him off myself. He is stronger than I, and more capable, and a conjurer besides. I am at his mercy. But Mel hates him, and she will save me if she must, I hope.
“I shouldn't be so certain,” he says. “And even if she did, I'd be gone before she could do anything. I know how to vanish, whelp, especially from one so afraid of darkness. But for now I mean you no harm.” And he unties my leg from the splint. I feel strange without it, as though the slightest touch might hurt.
“Hang it in the water,” he tells me, “– but gently! Careful as you move it.”
I look at him. I try out words in my head, try to find a way to voice my complaint. “But – the Queen of the Dark-dust...” I start at last.
“She is known to be a healer, and she seems not to hold you in ill favor. She may heal your leg.”
I nod, and swing my leg around into the stream. The cool water soothes me as it rushes by. “Am I not defiling the river?” I ask uncertainly. “It is sacred, after all.”
“You defile nothing. If the Queen has chosen to allow you safe passage through these caves she will not object, and she may yet help you.”
“But I am dimming the water.”
“Dimming, perhaps. You do not kill it as your noble flower does. And it recovers soon after it flows by you, see.”
Indeed it feels very good – for the moment, the pain is gone. Perhaps she is indeed mending my leg. Perhaps she thinks I shall better play out my part in fate if I can walk. And I am no longer as afraid that Ty will hurt me. It seems he has done me another kindness.
“Why do you do this?” I ask him.
“I would not have you crippled,” he answers.
After that, he bids me hang my leg into the stream again every time we rest. Soon it is healed enough that I can go without the splint. I leave it lying beside the river, and beside it I leave my left boot, for I would rather walk barefoot as I usually do than with one foot shod and the other bare; and my right boot is still in the Desert, where Ty removed it when he first splinted my leg.