My guards were still hovering around, waiting for orders. I gestured to one of them. “Go find the Lady Jasmine and bring her here.” When he was gone, I turned back to Roland and Dorian. “There must be some mistake. Pagiel wouldn’t do this.”

“He did it before,” pointed out Roland.

“Yeah, when the land was blighted and his people were starving,” I countered. “Everything’s fixed now.”

“Well,” said Dorian reasonably, “not everything. None of us are in quite the same shape with food as we were before. My people will be eating leanly for a while, and I assume the same is true with yours.”

Roland glanced between us. “Leanly enough that the boy might get it into his head to do a little supplementing from the human world?”

I started to deny it but reconsidered. As Roland had said, Pagiel had done all this before. Maybe the Oak Land wasn’t in the same dire situation, but those Pagiel cared about were still suffering. Pagiel had made it perfectly clear he thought humans were overweight and had too much—which was true to a certain extent. Really, his feelings on the matter had never changed. He’d only stopped his actions because I’d brought him with me to the Yew Land.

Jasmine joined us shortly thereafter, not looking thrilled that she’d been summoned by a guard. Her face brightened when she saw Roland since he usually brought her little luxuries from the human world.

“Jasmine, when was the last time you talked to Pagiel?”

She looked startled by my harsh tone. “Uh, I don’t know. Not since we all got back. He was supposed to get in touch but never did.”

“You mean that?” I demanded. “You’re telling the truth?”

Hurt shone on her face, and a bit of that old dark temperament leaked through. As our relationship had grown, we’d established a lot of trust, and me asking a question like that was insulting.

“I’m sorry,” I said before she could answer. “I don’t mean to accuse you of lying. I just need to be sure you don’t know anything that’s going on with him.”

“I’m sure,” she said, looking slightly pacified. A note of bitterness laced her next words. “I wish I had heard from him. I don’t know what his problem is.”

“From the sounds of it,” I said, “he may actually have a few problems.”

We told her what had happened, and I studied her face carefully as she listened. Her shock was genuine; she’d been telling the truth. Unlike me, however, her initial response wasn’t a denial or insistence that there was a mistake.