Let me begin with Chapter One . . .

When May died, Ob came back to the trailor, got out of his good suit and into his regular clothes, then went and sat in the Chevy for the rest of the night. A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but gray. The boy Jody watched it, speculating. The three of them were hidden in the dark. Enclosed in the forgotten basement room of the school, they were out of our time. Among Lep, his mother, and his sister Clara, the name Uzziah Botkin had always been uttered with a hush of reverence reserved, elsewhere in Danfield, for President Washington, selected saints, and Almighty God himself. The galaxy is an awfully big place so I don't expect you to know about my home world, Harmony; but my ancestors came from Earth. Here is James Henry Trotter when he was about four years old. Up until this time, he had had a happy life, living peacefully with his mother and father in a beautiful house beside the sea. My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire. I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emmanuel College in Cambridge at fourteen years of age; where I resided three years, and applied myself to my studies. Mrs. Frisby, the head of a family of field mice, lived in an underground house in the vegetable garden of a farmer named Mr. Fitzgibbon. It seems I had always woken up in the morning with leaves and bits of grass in my toes and under my sheets as if I'd been a ghost wandering the countryside at night. But maybe not. It was Old Bess, the Wise Woman of the village, who first suspected that the baby at her daughter's house was a changeling. One by one my stepfather took the chicken bones out of the bag and laid them on the kitchen table. He laid them down real neat. In a row. Five of them. Two leg bones, two wing bones, one thigh bone. Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le Coeur-Hardy was among the least promising.