The monster goes down easily enough, but as soon as she's got the kid out of the water, it begins to re-form, and rise up out of the water, something it hadn't done before.  One section of the creature, a long tangle of plants with a piece of wood on the end, rises up into the air and falls quickly towards Xena.

"Watch out! It reformed!" Alistair thinks desperately for something he could do to help in this fight, and settles on setting the main body of the monster on fire.

She retreats, a bit, yelling for the kids to keep getting away, and fends it off with her sword, analyzing its movements and darting or jumping around when needed.

The monster sinks into the water to put out the fire.  The attacking limb(?) continues to fall, but it is as easy to chop off the body as it was to free the boy, and now that she's watching, Xena can easily prevent the monster from taking back the pieces she chopped off.  When the monster rises back up from the water to strike out with another limb, it looks somewhat charred. 

Alistair lights the main body on fire again, and then closes his eyes and begins to concentrate, sometimes moving his hands around in ways that make little sense to someone watching.

She keeps fighting, fending it off from the shore - never going too far into the water - her sword's keen and she's good at this, she's already adapted to its movements -

It doesn't take her too much longer to chop it fully to bits.  It's dead before Alistair finishes whatever he's doing.

He opens his eyes, intending to check the location of the monster, before he puts the magic in place.  He notices that it's already been defeated, and sighs and closes his eyes again.  A few moments later, the river abruptly becomes still and calm again, any last blades of grass from the beast that were still twitching falling still with it.

"Think that's the end of it?" she calls to him.

"It should be! You got it before I could do what I meant to so I had to improvise a bit."

He walks towards her and lowers his voice.

"If I'd just released all the magic I was in the middle of using it would have released a ton of ambient magic at once and almost certainly gone off at once, I used it to still the water instead, but that didn't actually burn up all of it."

"Need something else to do with your magic then?" she asks, voice equally low.

"I was just gonna tie it off to the top of one of these trees, but if you have something else you need done that would be better."

"There was an injured kid, earlier, if your magic can do healing?"

"...Yeah, I can do healing, but it's complicated and tricky and is gonna take me a bit, unless it's something really minor, I've patched up enough of my own little scrapes and bruises to do that much quickly."

"The wound was deep enough I'm concerned about infection, but not bad enough I'm concerned about bleeding out."

"It'll take me a bit."

"I don't mind waiting."

He walks over to the kid and looks at the injury.  He gets a very concentrated look on his face, and occasionally gestures, and eventually, he touches his hand to the injury briefly, and it quickly heals, leaving no mark.

Xena watches, interested.

She can't tell too much of what he's doing, at this point- there's such a thing as a mage-sense, but it takes practice. 

"Now, that's a secret." Alistair says to the kid, "You can't go around telling people what happened, ok?  Just say you didn't get hurt."

The kid nods.  "I can keep it a secret! Thank you!"

Alistair walks back over to Xena.  "Well, that's taken care of now.  Hopefully they'll believe us and the kids about the monster, and pay us for killing it..."

"I'm usually good at being convincing."

"That's good!  Lets head on back, then?"  He starts to lead the way, but it's obvious he can tell she's more experienced in most areas than him, and is taking his cues from her a bit.

She heads back with him.