Book excerpt: The night Claire Tanith’s small village is attacked, her mother sends her alone into the cursed forest, the one she’d been forbidden to enter all her life with these mysterious words: ‘They will protect you.’ On the run from her attackers, she soon finds the forest is not as abandoned as she’d once thought. Beautiful and elegant, the elves seem to be everything the legends said they would be. But legends sometimes forget the true history of things and Claire’s eyes are soon opened to a world she never knew. One that has been kept from her for most of her life. All Claire wants to do is return home and start looking for her mother, the only family she ever had. But the elves have different plans. The mysterious mark that appeared on her arm isn’t a curse, at least not to them anyway, and before she knows it, she is whisked away on a mission she never agreed to, unless they help her in return. Now she is stuck on an adventure with the perverted elf, Aeron, and one with an attitude, Farron. But there is more to this adventure than she’d ever hoped for.