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  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR FAWKES

  “Fawkes is the perfect mix of history and magic. I was up late in the night reading, waiting to get to the fifth of November to see how the plot would actually unfold, and it did not disappoint. An imaginative, colorful tale about choosing for yourself between what’s right and what others insist is the truth.”

  —CYNTHIA HAND, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF MY LADY JANE

  “Hold on to your heart as this slow-burning adventure quickly escalates into an explosion of magic, love, and the truth about loyalty.”

  —MARY WEBER, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE STORM SIREN TRILOGY

  “A magical retelling of the seventeenth century’s famous Gunpowder Plot that will sweep you back in time—to a divided England where plagues can turn you to stone and magic has a voice. Deft and clever, Fawkes is a vibrant story about the search for truth and issues relevant to us, still, today.”

  —TOSCA LEE, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

  “Fawkes is a tale full of spiritual depth, tragedy, and hope. A beautifully written allegory for the magic of faith, with an achingly relatable hero who pulls you into his world heart and soul. A must-read for all fantasy fans!”

  —LORIE LANGDON, AUTHOR OF OLIVIA TWIST

  “A brilliant book that fulfills every expectation. Brandes turns seventeenth century London into a magical place. I was captivated by the allegory of her magic system and how she blended that fantasy with history. I highly recommend this gripping and beautifully crafted book to all. It will leave you both entertained and pondering matters raised in the storyline long after you’ve finished reading.”

  —JILL WILLIAMSON, CHRISTY AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF BY DARKNESS HID AND CAPTIVES

  Fawkes

  © 2018 by Nadine Brandes

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.

  Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fund-raising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].

  Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Brandes, Nadine, 1986- author.

  Title: Fawkes : a novel / Nadine Brandes.

  Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Thomas Nelson, [2018] | Summary:

  “Thomas Fawkes is turning to stone, and the only cure to the Stone Plague is to join his father’s plot to assassinate the king of England.”-- Provided by publisher.

  Epub Edition May 2018 9780785217350

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017059943 | ISBN 9780785217145 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fawkes, Guy, 1570-1606--Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Fawkes, Guy, 1570-1606--Fiction. | Gunpowder Plot, 1605--Fiction. | Plague--Fiction. | Christian life--Fiction. | Fantasy. | Historical fiction. lcgft

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.B75146 Faw 2018 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017059943

  Printed in the United States of America

  18 19 20 21 22 LSC 5 4 3 2 1

  For Daddy,

  who has been everything God designed a father to be—and who bought me the fountain pen with which I wrote this book.

  Remember, remember, the fifth of November,

  The Gunpowder treason and plot;

  I know of no reason why the Gunpowder treason

  Should ever be forgot!

  Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, ’twas his intent

  To blow up the king and Parliament;

  Threescore barrels of powder below,

  Poor old England to overthrow.

  By God’s providence he was catch’d,

  With a dark lantern and burning match.

  Contents

  Advance Praise for Fawkes

  Grey One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Black Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Brown Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  White Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Author’s Note

  Discussion Questions

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Grey

  One

  York, England

  Late spring, 1604

  I wasn’t ready to turn to stone.

  I leaned so close to the small wall mirror that my nose left a grease spot on the glass, but I held still. Or tried to. I couldn’t control the trembling. The grease spot smeared.

  My right eye reflected a bright-blue iris, but it was the left side of my face that held me a whisper away from the mirror. Cracked stone blossomed from the chiseled marble that should have been an eye. The ball didn’t move; the lid didn’t blink. I lifted shaking fingers to my face. Petrification tickled the hairline of my eyebrow. A single infected hair protruded like a stone needle.

  The plague was spreading.

  I broke off the hair, as though that would help, but I knew better.

  “Come sit, Thomas.”

  I stumbled backward before facing the apothecary, Benedict Norwood. Norwood stood at his dented and stained herb table, the backdrop of his curio cabinet displaying rows of green-hued bottles and jars, most of which held some sort of powder, paste, or plant.

  He bent over my leather eye patch, picking at the seam threads with a small knife. Norwood wore his color mask—deep Green with gold laurels on the crown. Though no expression painted its face beyond two eye holes and a carved nose, it emitted a sense of calm. I imagined Norwood’s hidden expression as one of care and kindness, like his voice—a balm I’d come to rely on.

  I felt naked without the patch covering my plagued eye. If any of the other students at St. Peter’s Color School saw me . . .

  “Norwood, it’s spreading.” My voice was weak and childish—the opposite of what I needed on the day I was to be declared a man.

  “Barely.” Norwood poked a series of eyelet holes in the new edge.

  My breath quickened. “It’s stayed contained within my eye socket the entire past year since I caught the plague. Why would it spread? And now?” Why on the day of my Color Test?

  “Thomas Fawkes, come sit.” With a single whisper, he sent a thick olive-green thread through the eyelets
and tied it off in a perfect knot. Norwood muttered another color command and mixed a green paste in a wood bowl beside him. Then he removed his mask and leveled me with a stare so commanding, it left no room for panic.

  When he took off the mask, we switched from student and professor to friends. I wiped my sweating palms on my doublet, straightened my cuffs, and sat on the three-legged stool before the counter. He lowered himself onto his own stool, across from me.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the closed door. Then to the window leading out to the garden. “Shall we put the eye patch back on?”

  “In a moment. The paste needs to set a little longer.” He placed a black cowhide bag on the table and withdrew seven wooden spheres, each painted a different color and none larger than a chess pawn. “Focus on the colors, not the plague. Your Color Test is tonight.”

  “Norwood, if I don’t bond with Grey, then the plague will spread to my brain. If I’m blind, I can’t bond with any color—”

  “You worry like a woman!” He tossed me the Brown sphere. I caught it with one hand by reflex. “Help me polish these.”

  I halfheartedly snagged a spare rag and rubbed the cloth over the wood. It looked plenty polished to me. Besides, I didn’t want to become a Brown. My gaze strayed to the Grey sphere. It sat there. Still. Dull. Mocking me. What if, when I put on my new color mask, Grey didn’t bond with me?

  “I was nervous for my Color Test too.” Norwood spit on the Green sphere and rubbed it in practiced circles. “When my father handed me my mask for the first time and I put it on, all fear fled. I looked through the mask at the spheres and, clear as the sun in the sky, Green glowed like a beacon. The moment I spoke its language, it bonded to my mask.” His smile grew and I found myself smiling with him. “It was magnificent. You’ll understand after tonight.”

  My hands stilled. Would that be my story? I pictured myself wearing my new mask in a few hours . . . and none of the colors glowing. Everyone watching. Father watching. What would I become without a mask? Without color power?

  The plague would spread and I would be consumed by the stone.

  “Even if Grey does glow brightest when you call, you need to be ready to speak the other languages.” Norwood rolled the Blue sphere to me. “Go on.”

  I gave a final polish to Brown. “Brown obeys warmth and smooth authority.” My voice sounded bored. I set aside the Brown sphere and picked up the Blue. “Blue speech is like poetry—rhythmic and flowing.”

  “And Green?” Norwood rested a hand on his mask at his belt.

  “Requires a calm and pleasant voice. It can sense your emotions.” Reciting the color languages was like reciting a nursery rhyme. “Is this really—”

  “What about Red?”

  I reached for the Red sphere, but then my hand bypassed it, almost of its own accord. I picked up the Grey sphere, my fingers sliding across its textured surface. “Grey.”

  Grey obeyed a firm voice. A command, not a request. Confidence. Authority.

  I clenched my fist around it so tightly a knuckle popped. “It has to be Grey. That is all I want.” Once I had my mask, I would spend the rest of my life commanding the Stone Plague to recede from my body.

  “There is no cure, Thomas, even if you bond with Grey.” He sounded resigned.

  “There has to be.”

  “Others have tried Grey speech—”

  “I am not others!” I slammed the Grey sphere onto the table. “I am the son of Guy Fawkes. The blood in my veins is the blood of color warriors.” I wanted to say more, but the walls of St. Peter’s Color School were thin. And even in the heat of the moment, I dared not say what type of warriors my family was.

  I barely dared to think the word.

  Keepers.

  Even though Norwood was a Keeper, too, an agreed silence always hung between us. The war between Keepers and Igniters was too real—even at St. Peter’s, an Igniter school. That was why I needed to live. To find a cure for my plague—so I could join the fight.

  “No matter whose son you are, this is your Color Test. You must be adequately prepared. All masks take on the color with which the bound person is strongest.” He picked up his mask and tied the cords to hold it in place. Then, with barely a whisper, he spoke to the green paste in the bowl and a thick stream of it spread itself on the inner edges of my eye patch.

  I never tired of watching color power.

  A knock on the door. “Benedict?”

  I startled, knocking the Brown sphere off the table with my elbow. It rolled into the folds of a cream-and-green gown. Emma Areben stood in the doorway—her oak-Brown mask firmly attached to her face with a white rose covering one eye.

  I clapped a hand over my plagued eye, but the stiff silence was confession enough of my secret.

  She’d seen.

  The girl who hung on the arm of my greatest enemy knew about my plague.

  “I’ll be finished in a moment, Emma.” Norwood’s usually collected voice was stripped of all warmth.

  Emma stared a moment longer, then whispered something. The Brown sphere soared through the air and back onto the table. Then Emma backed out of the room, closing the door behind her.

  Norwood and I sat in silence. Doom had come in the form of an elegant masked lady, all of sixteen.

  My hand drifted down from my eye. “She saw—”

  “I know.”

  “It’s over.” I would be expelled on the day of my Color Test. In front of Father and my peers.

  Norwood picked up my eye patch. “She won’t tell.”

  “She’s an Igniter. She’s with Henry Parker. One slip—”

  “She won’t tell.”

  I leaned forward and he affixed it to my face. The green sealant paste hardened and I adjusted to the stickiness. I tapped the eye patch. Nothing in my sight changed—I was half-blind already—but I breathed in the safety that came from a hidden secret.

  “As you say.” I didn’t see how Norwood could know what Emma would do, but I trusted Norwood. And worrying would do nothing to help me survive this terrible day. Too much was happening—the spread of my plague, the Color Test, the arrival of Father, who would present me with my mask.

  Only with my mask could I bond with a color.

  It had been a year since his last letter . . . and thirteen years since he last saw me. A mere babe then, I didn’t know his face—or his mask. He had spent most of my life away, fighting in battles, saving lives, upholding a cause. He stopped writing when I told him I was plagued. But until today it hadn’t spread. It hadn’t infected others. I wasn’t endangering anyone.

  Perhaps Father was ashamed. After tonight, I hoped he would be proud.

  Norwood scooped the spheres into their pouch. I rose from the table, but hovered—not quite ready to reenter the drama of St. Peter’s Color School, where I would dress for the supper and endure Henry Parker’s insults and possibly be expelled for my plague.

  “I expect Father will be ashamed to see my infection.”

  Norwood’s eyes crinkled in the shadows of his mask eye holes. “The great Guy Fawkes is traveling across all of England to bring you the mask he carved.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “He ought to be nothing but proud of you.”

  The great Guy Fawkes. The mighty solider. How could I live up to such a legacy?

  “Thank you.” I strode to the door, then looked over my shoulder. Norwood still watched me. I grinned and raised my good eyebrow. “Get a firm look at my face, sir. For after tonight you shall not see it again.”

  I tied the final ribbon from my doublet to my breeches—both of which were newly fitted for my coming-of-age day by York’s not-quite-finest tailor. I combed my brown hair away from my face as best I could.

  In a few minutes I would descend the steps of St. Peter’s Color School for the last time as a maskless. Father would be waiting. If Norwood was right and Emma kept her mouth shut, I would start my final year of training, complete with color power and mask.

  I forced a deep breath.
Confident. Commanding.

  “Mr. Fawkes.” Headmaster Canon entered my room. He wore a Blue mask with two painted keys of sky blue crisscrossed in the center. I tried not to let my nerves show. I couldn’t read his face behind his mask.

  Was he here to confront me about my plague?

  “You should be downstairs already, boy. Guests are arriving.” His voice was as smooth and singsong as the Blue language he commanded. My fear fled, replaced by relief and then irritation.

  Boy. Even today, on my coming-of-age day, the headmaster called me boy? I would not stoop to remind him that I was the son of Europe’s mightiest color solider—or that I would receive my mask today and then be his equal.

  I perfected my posture and strode past the headmaster to the stairs with a curt, “Sir.” Halfway down, my steps slowed. I was about to see Father. My knuckles whitened against the banister. What would he say about my eye?

  I recalled Norwood’s words. I must go into this ceremony confident. Commanding. I didn’t need Father’s—or anyone else’s—approval.

  I entered the sitting room. Dark carved oak paneling covered all four walls, interrupted by a white stone hearth. A fire blazed inside it, draping a blanket of warmth over me as I entered. My throat tightened, urged to whisper a command to the flame and see if it obeyed.

  Of course it wouldn’t. Yellow speech was extremely complex and required the crown’s permission.

  Other hues hummed around me, as though begging me to speak to them. Brown wood beneath my feet. Grey from the candle brackets lining the wall. Woad Blue from a fellow’s doublet.

  Oh, to control them all! But I would command only one—that was the Keeper way. My family’s way. To lust after multiple colors was shameless. Greedy. The way of Igniters.

  After tonight, one color—I prayed it was Grey—would obey my voice.

  I am the one you want.

  I stumbled and glanced around.

  Which one are you? A color had never spoken to me before. That made it the most alluring of all. Could it be Grey?