Someone, it seems, has developed a taste for pastries-and I do not mean the sweet desserts for which our district has come to be known. The daughters of the merchants are dying. Panic has spread, and they are more than content to let their children be taken by this investigator from the mountains, for they think it to be a hemorrhagic fever from the south, and they are afraid of what might be brought into their doily parlors if vigil for the dead should be held in their homes. It is not a fever, as I am given to understand, thought he burns them anyway, as is the mountain custom, which we can all agree is a more poetic end. Someone has taken to poisoning the pastries. Isolated in a crumbling world that has long forgotten magic, Elsie's life is inexorably altered when she meets Fletcher, an elf with the penchant for the fantastical. But as she unravels the compounding lies of her reality, a dark and deeply contorted picture is painted. Teddy is unwilling to admit he's more than he appears, and Sam remains tangled in a web of sordid secrets. And atop it all, the Commissioner has promised her power beyond reckoning. When they all become embroiled in illicit magic connected to a string of murders in the Valley, Elsie's life hangs in the balance after she becomes the target of political and personal ploys for power.