“It doesn’t matter if it’s right. It just needs to—” He didn’t finish, but Ephyra got what he was trying to say.

“Trust me,” Ephyra said, meeting his furious gaze. “It matters.”

Pushing down her own fear and panic she got up to rummage through the infirmary’s stores of dried plant cuttings until she found a few jars of macerated leaves and cactus flesh. Ephyra was not well versed in the different kinds of cuttings healers employed for different purposes, but esha was esha, and any kind of plant had at least some that she could use.

She worked quickly, silently, pressing the dried cuttings to Jude’s bare skin. She didn’t know the patterns of binding that the other healers used to guide esha, so she just put the paste on Jude’s pulse points—wrists, throat, heart.

Closing her eyes, she focused on Jude’s pulse as it pumped blood through his body. She tried pushing the esha from the cuttings into Jude, but she couldn’t grasp it. It was like water running through her hands.

Anton glared at her as she struggled, and Ephyra could practically taste the anxious energy coming off him.

“Can you possibly go loom somewhere else?” she asked irritably.

“If this doesn’t work—” Anton said.

Jude would die. She could feel his esha seeping out of him, helpless to staunch it.

She met Anton’s gaze and could see in his exhausted eyes what it would do to him. She knew that kind of grief. She had lived it.

“She can do it,” Illya’s voice spoke quietly from the doorway. “Let her.”

Ephyra and Anton both whirled to face him.

“What are you doing here?” Anton demanded.

Illya lifted one shoulder in a lazy shrug. “You were so worried about your swordsman earlier. I just wanted to make sure he was all right.”

“Liar,” Anton spat. “Get out.”

Illya held up his hands and started to back out the door.

“Wait,” Ephyra said. “Don’t—don’t go.”

Only after the words left her lips was she able to look at him. His face was a facade of calm, but there was a glimmer of curiosity in his golden eyes. He tilted his head slightly, and she could almost see him thinking, solving the puzzle of why she wanted him to stay.

“I need your help,” Ephyra said in a low voice, gaze dropping to her own hands, clutched in the bloody sheets. “Like you did at the Red Gate.”

He looked, for one brief moment, earnestly surprised. Then he smirked. “I had no idea my encouragement meant so much to you. You should’ve said.”

Irritation crackled under Ephyra’s skin, but before she could answer, Anton pushed away from Jude’s bedside, prowling toward Illya. “Help her, or I will throw you off this ship. Understand?”